Social movement intercultural pedagogy and the making of revolutionary subjectivities: lessons from southwest Colombia

ABSTRACT

Based on a case study from southwest Colombia, this paper provides hopeful example of an intercultural social movement popular education initiative which brings together social movements across territorial, political and cultural borders in order to generate unity and collaboration between these counter-hegemonic forces in the southwest of Colombia. It examines the learning and knowledge which have emerged from this initiative, led by a small, radical human rights organisation called Nomadesc, which over the course of two decades has brought together activists from diverse movements and territories across southwest Colombia in order to empower them to deal with the violent context, reimagine alternatives, and strengthen and interweave their struggles.

KEYWORDS:

• Social movements
• social movement learning
• popular education
• intercultural
• popular university
• Colombia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The author can be contacted at [email protected].

2 Santos proposes an ‘ecology of knowledges’ as a way of overcoming the historical epistemological injustices of Modernity. For him, such an ecology would be an initiative through which ‘alternatives of knowledge and of action must be searched for, either where they have been most obviously suppressed or have survived in marginalised/discredited form. In either case, they have to be searched for in the South … the South being my metaphor for human suffering under capitalism’ (Santos 1999, 38).

3 The Colombian sociologist Orlando Fals Borda employed the term ‘sentipensante’, which he attributed to peasant communities in the Colombian Caribbean. It refers to the need to bring together thought and feeling in order to think and live with the heart and the head. The term has been widely used within Latin American literature, and is posited as a remedy to the tendency within modernist thinking to separate these two realms, which Fals Borda argues is a false, damaging separation (Fals Borda 1984).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Economic and Social Research Council: [Grant Number ES/R00403X/1].