Epistemologies – a record of our discussion on 10/15/2018

By Text:

“Sp’ijilal O’tan: Knowledges and Epistemologies of the Heart” by Juan López Intzín (Xuno)
“Systems of care and healing that include midwifery, dreams…”
Systems of knowing differently, and knowing different things. Different systems of knowledge
The creation of knowledge through translation
Having a “child eye” again through connecting language with the visual – Luisa
Finding his own knowledge, his own path outside of the university
The grammar, the construction, the vocabulary of Tseltal gives us a different understanding of how things connect
Performance is about practice, as long as people are speaking the language, the language will stay alive
The fetish of keeping a language or culture alive (“saving” it) without considering the destruction of the environment around the language or culture
What happens when you start taking performance/practice as evidence?
What happens when populations are put into “zones of nonbeing?” In what ways do university disciplines create “zones of nonbeing”?
The importance of going back to your own words
The use of “they say… that is what is said that they said…” by the Zapatistas (p. 8).
The question of who are the experts
Different manners of transmission: the digital, the visual, DNA, bacteria
Diversity of epistemic systems
We may have national diversity in a room, but that may not translate to epistemic diversity if everyone is “trained” in the U.S. or Germany or whatever
The insurgent heart of Zapatismo
Trickster tactics: “When they are expected to speak, they are silent. When they are expected to be silent, they speak…” p. 9
How to be disruptive and how to de-authorize as a way of changing the dynamic through “the aside” rather than the frontal interaction with power
Misfires, infelicities as tactics of resistance
Sabotage through side paths
Can epistemologies of the heart be violent?
Heart as a verb – “Hearting” or “Heartening”
Can “heartening” be a form of dispossesing oneself – a possession which presumes a dispossession of oneself in order to incorporate oneself into the heterogeneous we? The de-centering of the individual
Ch’ulel as the recognition of the life of other forms. One is never talking subject-to-object, but always subject-to-subject
“Ch’ixinakax utxiwa: A Reflection on the Practices and Discourses of Decolonization” by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui
“The south-south connection”
“Anticipatory consciousness” – the impossible is just challenge. If it were possible we would have done it already.
Often things we imagine as impossible are already being done by people whose epistemologies aren’t recognized
What does it mean to imagine otherwise, and to act on it in the way the Zapatistas do, refusing the government’s manure
Citizenship that does not look for homogeneity but looks for difference… working towards a “heterogeneous we”
A parallel co-existence
“The Structure of Knowledge in Westernized Universities: Epistemically Racism/Sexism and the Four Genocides/Epistemicides of the Long 16th Century” by Ramón Grosfoguel
Deconstruction of the “Cartesian I”
The pluri-verse
Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples by Linda Tuhiwai Smith
Deconstruction of “Cartesian I” and working towards the collection of the “we” while understanding who often left out of the “we”
Intellectually, we never think alone but we don’t always recognize the people we are speaking with or are in conversation with
Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide by Boaventura de Sousa Santos
The difficulty of imagining the end of capitalism and colonialism is matched by the difficulty of imagining that capitalism and colonialism won’t end
The people de Sousa Santos writes his book for will not be the ones who reads his book
Radical co-presence
“Our knowledge flies at low altitude…it’s stuck to the body”
“Delinking: the Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of De-Coloniality” by Walter D. Mignolo

Overall Themes:
The critique of the disconnect and departmentalization, such as “think-feel”
These separations have been fundamental in disconnecting different ways of knowing and doing
Diversity in terms of the canon
Inter-epistemic conversations
New definitions, more words for various conceptualizations. Invention of new words
Use of non-English words in otherwise English texts – multilingualism
Different theories of subjectivity – how do we expand from where we are and who we are, what the possibilities are?
The problem of the “I”
“Good living” what would this look like, what does “the good life” look like, and how do we get from here to there?
Rearguard theory instead of Vanguard theory – what kind of a practice would being part of the Rearguard entail?
“Our knowledge flies at low altitude…it’s stuck to the body” – de Sousa Santos. Questions of knowledge and access
A willingness to be “taken by surprise”
Process rather than product

Notes on the Academy
The Zapatistas, when they sent out a “call” for the first social forum, about 5,000 people came from all over the world and the Zapatistas said “you have to be quiet for ten minutes” before we can start and people couldn’t do it.
The Zapatistas said “you fight your fight where you are located”
The sense of urgency comes when we can locate our fights here and figure out what we might be able to do about them
How do we define in one sentence the oppression we are struggling with
Noxious transphobia, strict enforcement of colonial gender, gravity, the need to ask for permission, the need to speak in English, the idea of division in general, disconnection with nature, the actions of Cambridge Analytica in Brazilian politics, the unwillingness to see/recognize subtle violence, oppression against sex workers and migrant workers, factories as a site of major oppression/capitalism, lack of intersectionality in discourse, already written western epistemologies on ethics, the difficulty of finding and expressing one’s one voice/the colonization of the voice, the colonization of canons, conformismo/conformity, lesser-evilism, feeling like you’re never enough, the compulsion to cram life-worlds into categories/taxonomies/hierarchies and effacing of difference, constant effacing of in-betweenness, constant feeling of in-betweenness, discomfort here as it relates to discomfort in teaching practice at home, insistence on originality/the model of the lone genius as knowledge production
What can we do differently in the context of the university?
We have to learn to live with contradiction. If we can’t, we can’t live
The long table, so anyone can request a seat at the table (Lois Weaver’s long table)
If you don’t like the show, make your own show
We have to find ways to do the work we think is important to us within the structures that are available to us, while trying to change those structures. Our systems are very capacious
Bringing embodied practice through allowing space for the use of one’s mother-tongue
Having the possibility to go back to one’s home country and bring the conversations you had abroad home, to have more voices heard
Let’s occupy! Occupying a space that wasn’t designated for “people like me”
Critiquing where you are so that you can do your own things from within. Doing a lot of damage, in a good way, by taking advantage of the resources we have access to
Taking “one more step” beyond comfortable
Naming what is our struggle, what is your struggle, and asking what we can do about them
Creating “rules/challenges” for oneself about, for example, who one decides to cite in one’s writing
Creating contexts when we have opportunities to teach – expanding beyond the textbook versions of knowledge
Thinking about how you can embody the theories we read about in our daily acts – like practicing listening in order to best connect to others
Making use of other platforms outside of the university to use decolonial theories and practices
Using the access we are privileged with to help other voices be heard – for example, translate and circulate voices that aren’t being translated and circulated. Facilitating an exchange of ideas