Call for paper: Academic Cimarronages: a Decolonial Approach from SIRA
This Call for Papers is edited by Julia Borst, Odome Angone, Lissell Quiroz, Nelson Sindze, and Mame-Fatou Niang, and centers on the concept of Academic Cimarronages: a decolonial approach developed within the framework of SIRA.
With the expression academic cimarronages, we invoke the figures of resistance of enslaved peoples, extending them to the field of knowledge. In the contemporary academic space — where intellectual extractivism, epistemic hierarchy, and the coloniality of gender profoundly structure the conditions of knowledge production and legitimation — SIRA’s approach resembles an act of creative and emancipatory flight: fleeing from centres to inhabit the margins, fleeing from verticality to weave horizontality, fleeing from the hegemony of a single regime of truth to allow a plurality of knowledges to coexist.
Academic cimarronages are not a withdrawal, but rather the invention of creative and resistant scenarios grounded in the knowledges and experiences that inhabit and traverse us. The circulation that departs from the academy and arrives in marginalized spaces — laden with the history of knowledges in resistance — is a way of condensing the questions raised by SIRA: What does it mean to decolonize? What are the pedagogical implications? And to what extent can the university itself assert itself as a maroon space?
We look forward to receiving your article proposals (in French, English, German, Spanish, and Portuguese) by April 20th at: [siraecoledecoloniale@gmail.com].