Tensions between local knowledge production and global cognitive dependencies. Decolonial Action as a starting point.

Abstract

Decolonial practice proposes moving away from epistemologies that privilege the subject-object relationship and configuring a philosophy that focuses on the subject-subject relationship, that is, between one self and another. Therefore, this approach is not simply about reconfiguring the social sciences and creating a new paradigm, but rather about decolonizing them. To this end, it is crucial to highlight the perspective from which knowledge is constructed (Ortiz Ocaña and Arias López, 2019). Writing this article allowed us to reflect on decolonial practice in the three interconnected activities of the geographical discipline in particular and the social sciences in general: teaching, research, and outreach. For this journal’s call for papers, we seek to share the debates and reflective processes of this decolonial practice within the framework of a geopolitics of knowledge, at the intersection with the local scale and its capacity to construct resistance and knowledge. Exploring Walsh’s (2003) assertion that the geopolitics of knowledge displaced “Latin America” from “modernity,” weare talking about a displacement that Latin American intellectuals and statesmen also embraced, striving to become “modern” as if “modernity” were an end point rather than a justification for the coloniality of power.