Epistemology is us by us:

counter-colonial feminist practices in education

Abstract

This essay starts from the idea that we should produce exercises of counter-colonization so that we can inhabit more comfortably our practices of knowledge production inside the university. Starting from the understanding that it is necessary that knowledge feed from life, we will work here with the thought of Nego Bispo, who asserts the importance of the production of knowledges that can be organic as opposed to the synthetic ones, brought from outside, not experienced by whom should make use of them. Our proposal is to enlarge the grammars that define what the epistemologies are, peeling the skin of this concept in order to contemplate its porosity and its opening to feminist epistemic projects. In them, the rescue of memory and of our ancestries figures as possibilities of re-enchanting our surveys and denouncing the way normative programs of masculinist and colonial science try to erase the tracks we leave in the world. We finish bringing the inscriptions of a survey with elderly female embroiderers, contemplating the embroideries that their words drew in our bodies. Assuming that knowledge is self-knowledge, unfinished path and collective toil, we conclude the text sitting on the backless stools of tiny memories planted somewhere inside us by women masters of teachings wrought on the edges.