O IFES NA PRODUÇÃO DE EPISTEMOLOGIAS DO SUL

Abstract

Drawing on the notions of epistemologies of the South (e.g. SOUSA SANTOS, 2021), border thinking (MIGNOLO, 2020a), intercultural translation (SOUSA SANTOS, 2018), decolonial pedagogies (WALSH; OLIVEIRA; CANDAU, 2018), and ecology of knowledges (SOUSA SANTOS, 2008a), I analyze the role of the Federal Institute of Espirito Santo (IFES) in the production of knowledges with its local communities. In line with the bakhtinian conception of language, I employed narrative research techniques (PAVLENKO, 2007; BARCELOS, 2020) to analyze the data produced in online focus group conversation meetings inspired by the Paulo Freire method (BRANDÃO, 2017). The empirical material and the theoretical framework suggest that the IFES is discursively constructed as a representative of the promises of scientific and technological progress of modernity. Most of the participants involved with the production of epistemologies of the South declared to develop outreach activities and to have engagement with social movements, in line with Sousa Santos’ argument (2019) regarding the prominence of social movements in the epistemologies of the South. Thus, the narratives indicated outreach as a means that favored the insertion of IFES in the production of epistemologies with social movements, environmental educators, sea people from an indigenous community, peripherical inventors, deaf people and rural subjects. The analysis indicates that such epistemological production occurs when there is intercultural translation (SOUSA SANTOS, 2018) in dialogical-border spaces between IFES and local communities. The analysis also emphasizes the need to decolonize language, curricular and internationalization policies. Finally, I discuss the implications of the pandemic for the epistemological production of these subjects from IFES with their communities, in an exercise of thinking about a utopian IFES for a world otherwise.