Starting a Conversation with IFES and Epistemologies of the South

Considering the crisis of legitimacy undergone by the academy regarding the production of knowledge (Castro 2004; Sousa Santos 2018a), it is necessary to think about other possibilities of knowing the world beyond the hegemonic paradigm of modern science. These other knowledges that have been erased (Sousa Santos 2007) are in circulation in society, and many of them constitute the epistemologies of the South,¹ that is, the knowledge produced by subjects who have historically suffered the oppressions of patriarchy, colonialism and capitalism (Sousa Santos & Meneses 2010; Sousa Santos 2018a; Sousa Santos 2018b; Sousa Santos 2021). In this sense, this study sought to investigate the role of the Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology of Espirito Santo (IFES), a Brazilian public educational institution, in the production of knowledge with its local community of fishermen in Piúma, a city located on the southern coast of the state of Espirito Santo (ES), Brazil (Figure 1). With that aim, we bring excerpts of a larger research endeavor (Piccin 2021) focusing on the discussion of the data generated with the subjects of that institute with a community deeply marked by the coloniality of power (Quijano 2005; Quijano 2009), namely, the shellfish gatherers and the fishermen from the city of Piúma where IFES opened a campus in 2010.

Despite being the smallest ‘capixaba’ –that is, from the state of ES– city in the state, Piúma is very popular with tourists, due to its eight kilometers of beaches, natural pools and ecological trails. Piúma is also known as the “City of Shells” because of the abundance of mussels, collected by shellfish gatherers who carry them in buckets on their heads (Basilio et al 2015). Fishing is thus a main activity in the city though it generally uses few technological resources for its production (ibidem). According to the Capixaba Institute of Research, Technical Assistance and Rural Extension, despite the growth of Piúma’s Gross Domestic Product in terms of agriculture and livestock raising, fishing is still one of its main activities (Espírito Santo 2020).

As we hope to make evident in the following sections, the fishing community of indigenous origin in Piúma is marked by the coloniality of power. By revealing the coloniality prints and legacy (Chiappa and Finardi 2021) still at play in this community, we accept Diniz de Figueiro e Martinez’ (2021) invitation to expose our loci of enunciation as a way to confront epistemological racism, decolonizing scholarly knowledge by localizing knowledges produced by people located in the periphery of the other side of the abyssal line. In doing so, we hope to confront universalistic/Eurocentric views, emphasizing the importance of increasing the visibility of indigenous knowledge, establishing practices of intercultural translation (Sousa Santos 2008) between the academia and local communities.

In what follows we discuss the methodological paths undertaken in the study as well as some of the contributions of the Modernity/Coloniality (M/C) group that supported the analysis and interpretation of the data. In doing so, we offer some examples of the production of knowledge of IFES with the community of fishermen in Piúma, problematizing the institute’s difficulties in approaching and dialoguing with these local residents. In the narratives of the IFES meetings with this community, we analyze some of the practices involved in critical literacy inspired by Paulo Freire (2005; 2017). Finally, we discuss the dissemination of local knowledge in the intersection between local and global tensions embodied in language policies and internationalization policies at play in Brazil.

Locating the Bodies

In order to investigate the role of IFES in the production of epistemologies of the South, two online focus group conversation meetings were carried out with IFES staff participants from campus Piúma, following a semi-structured interview format. The analysis of the data generated in these focus group meetings is based on the narratives and loci of enunciation of the participants in these focus group meetings whose audios were recorded and transcribed for research purposes after obtaining clearance from the ethics board as well as individual consents from participants.² Document analysis of legal texts and other publications mentioned by the subjects during the focus group meetings were also carried out.

This work is grounded in decolonial theory with a special focus on the contributions of the Latin American Modernity/Coloniality (M/C)³ group thus the option to use narrative techniques (Barcelos 2020) based on autobiographical reports (Pavlenko 2007) and the subjects’ bodies (Najmanovich 2001; Grosfoguel 2008; Grosfoguel 2010; Sousa Santos 2018b), in this case, the loci of enunciation of the IFES staff participants. The option to focus on the bodies is justified considering that those who produce knowledge have been excluded by the scientific method (Castro-Gómez 2005), that is, their body-politics of knowledge or body-political location (Grosfoguel 2008). According to Maldonado-Torres (2007), the hegemonic paradigm is based on the Cartesian ontology “ego cogito, ergo sum” (“I think, therefore I am”), which was only possible because of the “ego I conquer” (“I conquer”), anticipated by more than a century by Portuguese and Spanish colonizers in the invasion of the Americas (Dussel 2000). Argentinean Najmanovich (2001) demonstrated how the conception of the Cartesian method –foundation of modern science– transformed the understanding of the cosmos into a machinery whose laws were eternal, invariable and universal, operating according to the metaphor of a predictable clock-world. According to Castro-Gómez (2005), in such a perception, the world would be unveiled by a so-called neutral, non-located subject who was above any particular perspective, in a zero point, or in his own words, la hybris del punto cero. Grosfoguel (2008) considers that such zero point gives the subject the perspective of god, hiding its location, in favor of an abstract universalism. For this reason, decolonial studies have defended the relevance and revelation of the subjects’ locus of enunciation (e.g., Menezes de Souza, Martinez & Diniz Figueiredo 2021), or in Grosfoguel’s view (2010), the geopolitical place and body of that who speaks.

The focus group meetings provided opportunities for the production of the subjects’ narratives, as well as the emphasis on their loci of enunciation. Moura and Lima (2014) consider that conversation circles as the ones that inspired the focus group meetings have gained attention in research due to their potential to generate collaborative data production. Indeed, the narratives produced in this study were possible because of the dynamics afforded by the conversation circles/focus groups meetings. The prompt materials used in the focus group meetings were based on Paulo Freire’s literacy method (Brandão 2017), adapted for each group incorporating contributions made by participants in a truly collaborative way. Due to the need for social distancing measures during the covid-19 pandemic, two conversation circles/focus group meetings were held online between February and March 2021, with a total of nine participants who were either teachers or staff from IFES. Each focus group meeting lasted an average of two hours and had about four or five participants/IFES staff. The analysis proposed here refers to a selection of data from the narratives of three male participants who were professors in the Fisheries Engineering and/or Aquaculture courses at IFES. This choice was made considering the narratives of these three participants regarding their engagement in the production of epistemologies of the South with the fishing community of Piúma.

Before presenting the discussion and analysis of the narratives about the role of IFES in the production of knowledge with the community of shellfish gatherers and fishermen in the city of Piúma, it is necessary to briefly discuss the theoretical framework that guided the interpretation of the data. Thus, the following section brings some of the contributions of the M/C group that support the analysis and discussion.

Interrogating Modern Dichotomies: Decolonial Proposals

Walter Mignolo (2020), one of the main exponents of the M/C group, proposes that we analyze the dichotomies established by coloniality/modernity rather than organizing the world through them. This decolonial movement becomes more urgent once the violence originating from the colonial/modern binary classifications continues to deepen the inequalities inaugurated by colonization, even though this system ended with the independence of the former colonies. The concept of coloniality of power (Quijano 2005) is a central tenet of the M/C group and concerns the world hierarchical classification based on the idea of race, indicating the intersubjective relations of domination, at the intersection between race and work. These dichotomous classifications are based on the encoding of the difference between colonizer and colonized, transforming such differences into values (Mignolo 2020). As such, the coloniality of power fixes the colonizer and the colonized in two antagonistic and excluding poles in the global imaginary, namely: modern vs. primitive; rational vs. irrational; human vs. animal; classic vs. exotic; to name but a few.

Two other notions that relate to coloniality of power are the coloniality of being and the coloniality of knowledge (Maldonado-Torres 2007; Mignolo 2020), the former refers to the assimilation of the supposed submission of the colonized in the hierarchical classification of the coloniality of power, while the latter refers to the devaluation of the languages, histories and knowledge of the colonized. Maldonado-Torres (2007) sees the coloniality of power as referring to the interrelation of modern forms of exploitation and domination (power) and the coloniality of knowledge as referring to the impact of colonization on the different areas of knowledge production whereas the coloniality of being would be linked to the lived experience of colonization and its impact on language (Maldonado-Torres 2007).

Mignolo (2017; 2020) argues that coloniality with its invisible face is a constitutive part of modernity, hiding the violence produced by it. Indeed, the aforementioned author (2017) argues that coloniality/modernity/decoloniality are three words that evoke the same concept. Coloniality is the constitutive part of modernity hiding its promises of progress and technology, decoloniality is the response of the Third World to the fallacies that accompany such modern promises (Mignolo 2017). Unlike modernity, decoloniality does not present itself as a new ‘universal’ theory but rather as local options and projects related to the contexts where they are produced and as such, not subject to mere transfer to other contexts. Thus, decolonial thinking is interested in local and creative responses that are presented as alternatives for the construction of possible futures. In other words, decoloniality is about the epistemologies that, according to Sousa Santos (2002; 2018b; 2021), refer to the sociology of absences and the sociology of emergences bringing to the present the experiences that already exist and those that can be invented. In this sense, the epistemologies of the South are alternative possibilities for understanding the world from and with the subjects oppressed by the colonial/modern world system. As such, they are decolonial proposals of knowledge that are already in circulation in society (Sousa Santos 2018b), in addition to being the decolonial/counter-hegemonic responses that oppose modern universalism. According to Sousa Santos (2018b),

the epistemologies of the South concerns the production and validation of knowledges anchored in the experiences of resistance of all those social groups that have suffered injustice, oppression, and destruction caused by capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy. The vast and vastly diversified field of such experiences I designate as the anti-imperial South. It is an epistemological, nongeographic South, composed of many epistemological souths having in common the fact that they are all knowledges born in struggles against capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy. They are produced wherever struggles occur, in both the geographical North and the geographical South. The objective of the epistemologies of the South is to allow the oppressed social groups to represent the world as their own and in their own terms, for only thus will they be able to change it according to their own aspirations. (Sousa Santos 2018b: 1).

It is important to emphasize that the epistemologies of the South suffer from a process of erasure. According to Sousa Santos (2007), colonialism established abyssal lines that separate the colonizer and the colonized, excluding the latter ontologically and epistemologically. Thus, abyssal lines make the other (the colonized) unknowable, exotic, primitive, and, in many cases, invisible to modernity. Sousa Santos (2007) also explains that the thought of modern science is an abyssal thought because on the side of the abyssal line where the colonizer is invisible, their epistemologies are incomprehensible to the logic of modern epistemology, causing the waste of knowledge of the colonized (Sousa Santos 2009). For this reason, Grosfoguel (2008) emphasizes the difficulty for modern/colonial epistemologies to think with the South³ rather than about the South. Candau (2016) argues that modern science has perceived subjects from the global South and their knowledge as mere objects of study.

By contrast, post-abyssal thinking entails thinking with and from the South (2018b). Sousa Santos (2007: 53) states that “the struggle for global social justice must, therefore, be a struggle for global cognitive justice as well. In order to succeed, this struggle requires a new kind of thinking, a postabyssal thinking”. This prerogative is related to the notion of ecology of knowledges (Sousa Santos 2008) that recognizes the plurality of knowledges in the world. As Sousa Santos (2007) points out, without this paradigm shift towards post-abyssal thinking, it is not possible to envision social justice for there is no social justice without cognitive justice.

In this sense, the contributions of the M/C group are understood as a decolonial turn (Ballestrin 2013; Maldonado-Torres & Cavooris 2017). For Mignolo (2020), the decolonization of thought implies a certain epistemic disobedience. Moreover, his notion of border thinking makes visible the knowledge that modernity makes invisible thus focusing on the colonial difference. Sousa Santos’s (2007) concept of post-abyssal thinking and Mignolo’s (2020) notion of border thinking seek to transform the rigid boundaries imposed by coloniality/modernity from the colonial difference detached from abstract universalism. Border thinking requires a double critique and consciousness that come from both sides of the border and, at the same time, from neither of these places to reinvent modern terms, thus offering a multiplicity of responses to modernity, in what Dussel (1998) calls transmodernity.

However, it is important to emphasize that the recognition of other knowledges, in this case, the epistemologies of the South, does not imply the denial of modern science or thought (Mignolo 2020). It is not a question of excluding the epistemic logic of the colonizer, since the double critique presupposes thinking from the side of both the colonizer and the colonized. Thus, it requires not only questioning the logic of modern thinking but also how it has guided and structured Southern thinking. For Grosfoguel (2010), this double movement takes into account both ideological and symbolic strategies and the colonial culture of the colonial/modern world system. As non-universal, border thinking implies thinking with the other (Mignolo 2020) and as such, decolonial critique does not exclude modern or postmodern thought –as in the contributions of Foucault or Derrida–, but resists the invisibility and exclusion promoted by modernity. Mignolo (2020) proposes that the alliance with modern thought is possible as long as it does not exclude other ontological and epistemic possibilities, which Sousa Santos (e.g. 2018b) calls epistemologies of the South.

Sousa Santos (2008) defines ecology of knowledges as the recognition of the plurality of epistemologies available –and expanding– in the world. To epistemological difference can be approached in two ways: assuming an asymmetry between knowledges, causing epistemicide (Sousa Santos 2008; Sousa Santos & Meneses 2010); or minimizing this asymmetry through the recognition of the epistemological difference through dialogue with it. This last approach is what he calls ecology of knowledges (Sousa Santos 2008).

In order to recognize the epistemological difference, it is necessary to make use of intercultural translation (Sousa Santos 2008). Intercultural translation interrogates the modern dichotomies between knowledge (for example, scientific knowledge vs. indigenous knowledge), enabling us to deal with diversity and the conflicts of the encounter with difference (Sousa Santos 2018a). Sousa Santos (2018a) considers that translation occurs in the expansion of the present time, through the sociology of absences, and the contraction of the future, through the sociology of emergences. This is because modernity colonized time by placing the colonizer’s epistemologies as a synonymous with technological and human progress, to the detriment of the knowledge of the colonized which would be taken as primitive (Mignolo 2020). To remove this knowledge from the past, Sousa Santos (2002) proposes the sociology of absences, which seeks to bring existing experiences and knowledge into visibility, but which are in the condition of absence due to abyssal lines. In turn, the sociology of emergences contracts the future by bringing to the present projects that have been displaced to a distant future (Sousa Santos 2002). In short, the sociology of absences focuses on experiences wasted by the indolent reason of modernity, while the sociology of emergences interrogates the present, inserting alternatives of the future in it (Sousa Santos & Chaui 2014). Sousa Santos (2008) considers that the notions of sociology of absences and of emergences, the ecology of knowledges and intercultural translation are the key to epistemologies of the South.

Walsh, Oliveira and Candau (2018) point out that decolonial thinking only makes sense if it is based on social struggles against coloniality. Thus, a decolonial pedagogy project is a political-pedagogical intervention that seeks to reinvent the world through its reading (Walsh, Oliveira & Candau 2018), aligned with Freire’s proposal of education as praxis (Freire 1987; 2005; 2011; 2017). Oliveira and Candau (2010) argue that decolonial pedagogies require both the overcoming of the hegemonic epistemological patterns that have guided the academy and the recognition of other loci of enunciation in the production of knowledge, in addition to those legitimated by modernity.

In order to illustrate the dialogue and intercultural translation in the recognition of these other knowledges, the following section discusses data related to the insertion of IFES in the production of epistemologies of the South with the community of fishermen from Piúma, in the state of Espirito Santo, Brazil.

The Knowledge Produced at the Meeting between IFES and the Piúma Community

The creation of the IFES is considered by Frigotto (2018a) the broadest and most significant policy in the field of public education in Brazil. However, the author, in another text (Frigotto 2018b), highlights that the policies around the Federal Institutes have taken place in the field of ideological disputes between different educational projects. Considering this tension between the different discourses that make up the IFES, we emphasize that, among them, it is notorious that the institute is discursively constructed as a representative of the promises of the hegemonic discourse of modernity about technological progress and development. As such, at times, the IFES has had difficulties to produce knowledge that is not guided by the scientific method legitimized by modern science, which can cause the waste of knowledge (Sousa Santos 2009) due to the abyssal lines (Sousa Santos 2007) between IFES and non-hegemonic local knowledges.

Notwithstanding this caveat, most participants in this study showed engagement with the production of knowledge with local communities. To illustrate our discussion, we selected the narratives of three IFES teachers regarding their participation in the production of knowledge with the fishing community in Piúma. These participants will be referred to as “Participant 1”, “Participant 2” and “Participant 3”. Although these three participants come from different states in Brazil and have developed their academic training in different higher education institutions, they have in common the engagement with social movements and/or Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) as educational practices complementary to their formal education.

As previously suggested, the fishing community with whom the participants produced knowledge is deeply marked by the coloniality of power. The inequality in the distribution of goods and resources among its residents is quite noticeable: even though the city has the 14th best Human Development Index (HDI)⁴ in the state, a survey carried out by Basilio (2015) showed that the Piúma shellfish gatherers and fishermen community represent 2.4% of the population, descend from indigenous peoples and have low incomes. This fishing community was formed by Tupi, Puris and Botocudos ethnic groups (Basilio 2015; Basilio 2016). According to an official government document (Espírito Santo 2020),

Piúma was originally occupied by the Tupi-Guarani, more specifically by Puris and Botocudos. The former lived closer to the coast, while the latter inhabited the countryside. The colonization of the Puris and Botocudos who lived in Piúma –more specifically in the Orobó Valley– was marked by a major clash with the colonizers. In Piúma, the colonization process happened at the same time as the catechization of the native peoples. The foundation of the first catechized village took place in Anchieta [a city nearby], whose first name was Reritiba (in Tupi, “place of many oysters”). (Espírito Santo 2020: 6).

Regarding their language, Peres, Finardi and Calazans (2020) describe the tensions and losses involved in the contact between the Guaranis and Portuguese colonizers ultimately causing the minoritization, erasure and loss of the Guarani language in those indigenous communities. Furthermore, there are historical records of the mixture of indigenous and black groups scaping slavery to form quilombo communities that inhabited the region (Bodart et al 2014). Thus, the village emerged from the union of indigenous and runaway enslaved black people, who basically lived off agriculture and fishing. The intensification of colonization also intensified the discrimination against these people who were excluded from the benefits and shares of development (Bodart et al 2014; Espírito Santo 2020).

Before the arrival of immigrant groups from Italy, Lebanon and England in Piúma (Espírito Santo 2020), the local communities of shellfish gatherers and fishermen who occupied the Brazilian coast had already suffered the violence of the encounter with the European colonizer (Silva 1993; Fernandes 2007) as we see in their loss of identities, traditions and languages (Peres, Finardi & Calazans 2020). In this meeting, there was the dispossession of indigenous lands, while they were tutored by Jesuit priests (Medeiros 2011) who were in charge of ‘civilizing’ them. After the Jesuits’ expulsion from Brazil, the native peoples were massacred by the Portuguese Crown which benefitted legal immigrants with land leaving the forced ‘immigrants’ from Africa orphans and slaves and the indigenous peoples dispossessed (Medeiros 2011).

Thus, it is possible to understand Participant 1’s claim that the Piúma community in general and the shellfish gatherers and fishermen in particular are suspicious of the recent presence of IFES in the area. The campus Piúma IFES was created in 2010 where the School of Elementary Education and Fishing (Escopesca), an institution created in the 1980s was before. In the narratives of Participant 1, Participant 2 and Participant 3, not all IFES staff are aware of the context surrounding the IFES, which makes it difficult to bring IFES staff and the community members closer together. That can be seen in the discourses permeated by the coloniality of power mentioned by Participant 2, such as political-pedagogical projects aimed to transform the artisanal knowledge of fishermen through the innovation of modernity, in a so-called “Industry 4.0”. Sousa Santos (2018b) argues that epistemologies of the South do not intend to replace the epistemologies of the North, but to end the hierarchy between knowledge. The blindness in using any knowledge validation criteria guided by the terms and norms of the global North – that is, modern science– lies in the fact of ignoring the oral culture necessary for the ecology of knowledges (Sousa Santos 2018b). This is due to the fact that the artisanal knowledge of the fishing community descending from the native peoples of Piúma is transmitted orally, from one generation to another. Because they are unwritten and artisanal, they tend to be incomprehensible to modern logic.

On the other hand, the three participants said they had an increasingly closer relationship with the fishermen from the surrounding community in afternoons of conversation in backyards and bars, trips to the islands where these people work, as well as working with the elementary schools where their children study thus creating border spaces for the elaboration of other knowledges (Mignolo 2020). In one of these dialogic spaces, Participant 3 reported having learned something that is not found in any book or academic thesis, and that only with the help of the Piúma fishermen he was able to develop a scientific experiment to study mussels. Participant 3’s study of this bivalve mollusk that has great importance for the local cuisine, economy and culture was enriched when a local fisherman explained to him that the way he intended to set up the scientific experiment offshore would be vulnerable to storms and the tide, which could damage the experiment. The Piúma fisherman proposed another solution for Participant 3 to study mussels in what became a collaborative construction of knowledge on the border between academia and the local indigenous culture.

In another narrative, Participant 3 questioned Piúma fishermen if they had any problems that IFES could contribute to in a joint solution. Piúma fishermen said they were struggling economically due to the increasingly cheaper price of mussels, as Brazil was importing mussels from Chile. Participant 3developed a cultural fair at IFES with typical dishes of the local traditional cuisine where IFES students developed the recipes and brought the raw material, the mussels, from home. The fair was a success with was a line of people waiting to try the typical dishes and with the presence of politicians from the city and neighboring cities, making the event repeat itself in upcoming years. This narrative is aligned with Sousa Santos’ proposal of sociology of absences (2002; 2008), as it brings to the present time the culture and knowledge of this indigenous community, giving them visibility and prominence.

Participant 3 also narrated situations of conflict in the negotiation between academic knowledge and this fishing community knowledge. Luckily, the negotiation was possible because of intercultural translation (Sousa Santos 2018a), recognizing the existence of a plurality of knowledges in an ecology of knowledges (Sousa Santos 2008). As such, these practices are close to decolonial pedagogies (Walsh, Oliveira & Candau 2018; Walsh 2019), as they establish intercultural translation and have the potential to create alternatives, in a transformative education, as proposed by Paulo Freire.

The contributions of the patron of Brazilian education are also notorious in the narratives about literacy practices developed with this community. Participant 2 and Participant 3 reported that when they found out that most of the fishermen in Piúma were illiterate they helped to design a project at IFES to teach this community how to read and write. The need for literacy is urgent given that this part of the community is excluded from a series of rights and resources, not least the possibility to have a professional fisherman’s license from the Port Authority. There are many abyssal lines that make the Piúma indigenous fishing community and their knowledges invisible and illiteracy is another form of oppression of the coloniality of power. As such, a decolonial pedagogy project aimed at teaching these fishermen to read and write can contribute to the social transformation of this community.

Finally, Participant 1 reported that the Environmental Education Center (NEA for the acronym in Portuguese) of this campus has sought to develop materials that can also be “read” by illiterate people like the fishermen. One such publication was prepared by several NEA/IFES collaborators (Basilio 2020) containing images of the Piúma islands enabling people from that community to recognize themselves building meanings and knowledge about the vast biodiversity of the islands. The book was conceived from an environmental monitoring project involving representatives of the community and IFES. The objective was to produce knowledge so that it could be used in schools in the region as a textbook, offering students local information aimed at greater involvement in social and environmental conservation actions. The proposal also aimed to provide visual information so that the community, especially fishermen and shellfish gatherers, could understand the issues covered in the book, despite not knowing how to read written words.

The subtitles in the images use colors, symbols to refer to local fauna and flora’s habitat, distribution in the environment, their conservation status of species and economic importance. For example, the colors that indicate the conservation status of species range from green to red, with the former meaning “less concern” and the latter meaning “critically endangered”. Thus, in Figure 2, the color used in the conservation status subtitle of the ray (Gymnura altavela) is yellow, indicating its “vulnerability”. In turn, the fish in Figure 3 (Lutjanus synagris) has a light green color that would be at a higher conservation scale compared to the aforementioned species (Gymnura altavela). This project is in line with Paulo Freire’s (2005) notion that reading takes place in a particular context and that reading the world precedes the reading of words. In that sense, we can say that the fishermen in Piúma could read their world even though they could not read (written) words. According to Participant 1, the fishing community recognizes themselves in the pictures of the contexts surrounding them. Such contexts are part of these people’s repertoires, although, according to Jordão and Fogaça (2012), individual repertoires vary from person to person.

In another text, Paulo Freire (2017) considers that it is necessary to respect the students’ repertoire based on common sense instigating curiosity to give greater critical awareness to knowledge. For Paulo Freire (2017), awareness is the critical effort aimed at developing an understanding of the world, in a movement to transform reading into a critical reading of the world. In a critical literacy project (Menezes de Souza 2011; Jordão & Fogaça 2012) and decolonial pedagogy (Walsh, Oliveira & Candau 2018; Walsh 2019), the local community could develop not only the understanding of written words or scientific knowledge about the biodiversity of the contexts in which it operates, but also a critical thought regarding the ways that the coloniality of power has operated to keep it in a situation of oppression and inequality of access to goods, rights and resources available to only a small portion of the population. For Paulo Freire (2005), the reading of the word empowers popular groups who often face injustice, towards a different understanding of their indigence (Freire 2005).

The distribution of the aforementioned publication (Basilio 2020) was interrupted by the emergence of security protocols to contain the proliferation of the covid-19 pandemic, as well as the suspension of other actions for the production of knowledge in the border area of dialogue between IFES and the local community. Participants in this study said that the pandemic impacted their participation in the production of local knowledge, since, among the many consequences of social distancing, it is not possible, under current conditions, to meet in person with members of the community.

Regarding the dissemination of the knowledge produced with the community of Piúma, Participant 1 and Participant 3 said they have already published in different international journals, in English, while Participant 2 said he does not publish very much and usually in Portuguese and in the form of abstracts to events. For Proença (2004), these types of publications receive little visibility and produce little or no impact, according to the evaluation criteria and academic rankings that according to Finardi and Guimarães (2017) are produced by and for the global North, being imported in an uncritical and harmful way in non-hegemonic contexts.

Even in relation to the first type of publication mentioned by the participants, that is, in English and in international journals, Céspedes (2021) brings data from the production of the Scopus and Web of Science (WoS) databases in 2020 to discuss the presence of Latin American productions. The results of her study show that despite Brazil having by far the largest production of articles in the region, the use of Portuguese is unmatched as it was not the most used language in those publications, with English displacing the two most used languages in Latin America, namely Spanish and the Portuguese.

According to Guzmán-Valenzuela and Gómez (2019), the attempt by Latin American researchers to ensure local recognition and relevance (producing in local languages) and international recognition (producing in English) brings a double burden to the production, circulation and validation of knowledge produced in the region. In addition to this double burden, the effort to publish in English does not guarantee the visibility of local production since, according to Hamel (2013), it is not only the language of publication that matters but also the place where knowledge is produced since articles produced in/by Anglophone countries are much more likely to be accepted and published than those produced in non-hegemonic contexts.

This colonial bias revealed in languages and places of knowledge production is also observed in translation flows as suggested by Heilbron (2014), who shows that more than half of all translations are made from English, a flow that is inverted in relation to other languages. Heilbron (2001) also suggests that the flow in translation practices reflects and reproduces center-periphery asymmetries in citations, which, ultimately, are used as bibliometric evidence of the impact that a certain scientific production has.

It is worth remembering that the notion of abyssal lines (Sousa Santos 2007) assumes that some knowledge is visible and constituted by the non-visible part in a symbiosis that makes invisible, excludes and erases the epistemologies of the South and its subjects, as well as their places and languages. Thus, the internationalization of knowledge bears the marks and digitals of coloniality (Chiappa & Finardi 2021). Thus, the intersection between language policies and internationalization policies in Piúma showed that some of the subjects have sought visibility by publishing in English even though this dissemination still remains invisible by the modes of classification and evaluation of ‘local’ production, made, as we said, by and for the global North, thus devaluing both other knowledges and means of dissemination, simply because they are produced on the ‘right side’ of the abyssal lines.

Finally, Participant 1 said that, although he is concerned about publishing in indexed journals with prominent positions according to the academic ranking, his priority is to publish locally, so that the community can have access to it. So while some choose ‘social impact’ and local relevance over possible international recognition, others keep trying to keep their heads above the water in the neoliberal race of ‘Publish or Perish’ which translates into ‘publish in English and be read’ or ‘publish in Portuguese and have local relevance at the expense of not existing internationally’.

By way of Provisional Conclusions

In this work, we sought to bring data on the role of the IFES in the production of epistemologies of the South with the Piúma indigenous fishing community to illustrate our discussion and reflection on the possibility of decolonizing local knowledges. The indigenous community is deeply marked by the coloniality of power (Silva 1993; Fernandes 2007; Medeiros 2011) and so the presence of the IFES is still perceived with distrust by this community, despite the efforts of members of that institution to get closer to the surrounding community. As a counterpoint to this distrust, we see that the production of knowledge between IFES staff with this indigenous community is made possible by the creation of border spaces (Mignolo 2020) for dialogue and intercultural translation (Sousa Santos 2008; Sousa Santos 2018a), in practices that approach the proposal of decolonial pedagogies (Walsh, Oliveira & Candau 2018; Walsh 2019), establishing an ecology of knowledges (Sousa Santos 2008), though such dialogue is not free from tensions.

Literacy practices developed with the community took into account the subjects’ prior knowledge, in dialogue with Paulo Freire’s proposal for reading the world (2005; 2017). Finally, we discussed the dissemination of knowledge produced in the border spaces between IFES and the local community in relation to the location and language of this production/circulation of knowledge highlighting the dual-burden of trying to be visible locally or internationally.

We conclude that Sousa Santos’s (2007) notion of abyssal lines and democratization of knowledge are ultimately related to the notion of social justice that begins with cognitive justice. In this sense, we understand that cognitive justice can only be achieved in an ecology of knowledges, places and languages that presupposes the construction and dialogue with the knowledge and epistemologies of the South.