21st Century Emancipation: Pedagogies in and from the Margins

Abstract

South American social movements are re-inventing a new emancipatory politics of knowledge in which those invisibilised and excluded by neoliberal globalisation, are emerging as the emancipatory subjects of our times. These subjects develop social relations which disrupt the power of capital in their everyday lives through practices which reconnect people and communities with their own creative capacities and with each other. In this article I conceptualise and reflect on the role of the pedagogical in this reinvention through the development of a theoretical dialogue between Gramsci’s Marxian framework, and Black and Decolonial feminisms. I argue that pedagogical practices are central to the geopolitics of neoliberal globalisation and thus, more importantly, to emancipatory epistemologies, as these practices enable the unlearning of dominant social relationships, subjectivities and ways of life, and the learning of new ones. I explore this through engagement with the politics of knowledge of the Brazilian Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (Landless Rural Workers’ Movement [MST]), and La Máscara, a feminist theatre collective in Colombia.