Author: Paola Minoia

Posted on

Special Issue: Education and socio-environmental justice in the pluriverse: decolonial perspectives

Globalizations Volume 21, 2024 – Issue 2

A growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship underscores the imperative to explore and advance pluriversal education – an educational approach that embraces the diversity of ways of being, knowing, and acting, rooted in historical contexts and ecological interconnectedness. Central to this exploration is a pressing need to consider education as a means of promoting epistemic pluralism within spaces of settler colonialism. By contesting a Westernized geopolitics of knowledge, a pluriversal education advocates for the revalorization of subaltern knowledges, Indigenous cosmovisions, activism, and socio-environmental justice grounded in human, cultural, and land rights. The paper first debates fundamental divergences between the concept of pluriversal education, based on principles of decolonial interculturality, and the principles of global sustainable education announced by international mainstream institutions. Then, it refers to concrete experimentations of activism in pluriversal education in various locations illustrated by the contributions of the special issue.

Minoia, P., & Castro-Sotomayor, J. (2024). Education and socio-environmental justice in the pluriverse: decolonial perspectives. Globalizations, 21(2), 303–312.

El Masri, Y. (2024). Decolonizing education in Bourj Albarajenah: cosmologies of a Palestinian refugee camp. Globalizations, 21(2), 313–330.

Minoia, P., Tapia, A., & Kaukonen Lindholm, R. E. (2024). Epistemic territories of kawsak sacha (living forest): cosmopolitics and cosmoeducation. Globalizations, 21(2), 331–348.

Hohenthal, J., & Veintie, T. (2024). Fostering Indigenous young people’s socio-environmental consciousness through place-based learning in Ecuadorian Amazonia. Globalizations, 21(2), 349–369.

Korsant, C. (2024). A Freirean ecopedagogy or an imposition of values? The pluriverse and the politics of environmental education. Globalizations, 21(2), 370–387.

Audley, S., & D’Souza, A. B. (2024). Creating third spaces in K-12 socio-environmental education through indigenous languages: a case study. Globalizations, 21(2), 388–403.

Durazzo, L. (2024). A cosmopolitical education: Indigenous language revitalization among Tuxá people from Bahia, Brazil. Globalizations, 21(2), 404–420.

Cadaval Narezo, M., Méndez Torres, G., Hernández Vásquez, A., & Castro-Sotomayor, J. (2023). Contributions to the pluriverse from indigenous women professors of intercultural universities. Globalizations, 20(7), 1144–1162.

 

 

Posted on

The project has formally ended, but the work continues!

We published the book Plurinacionalidad y Justicia Epistémica, with Abya Yala (edited by Ruth Arias-Gutiérrez and Paola Minoia), and a Special Issue titled “Education and socio-environmental justice in the pluriverse” (edited by Paola Minoia and José Castro-Sotomayor) is forthcoming in the journal Globalizations.

Moreover, here are some articles and a book chapter that have been published, with the links to read them online:

– Arias-Gutiérrez, R. I., & Minoia, P. (2023). Decoloniality and critical interculturality in higher education: experiences and challenges in Ecuadorian Amazonia. Forum for Development Studies, 50(1), 11-34. https://doi.org/10.1080/08039410.2023.2177562

– Castro-Sotomayor, J., & Minoia, P. (2023). Cultivating postdevelopment from pluriversal transitions and radical spaces of engagement. In H. Melber, U. Kothari, L. Camfield, & K. Biekart (Eds.), Challenging global development: towards decoloniality and justice (pp. 95-116). (EADI Global Development Series ). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30308-1_6

– Minoia, P., Tapia, A., & Kaukonen Lindholm, R. E. (2024). Epistemic territories of kawsak sacha (living forest): cosmopolitics and cosmoeducation. Globalizations. https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2024.2308332



Posted on

Book release: “Plurinacionalidad y justicia epistémica. Retos de la educación intercultural en la Amazonía ecuatoriana”

En Ecuador, con el fin de empoderar a las diferentes nacionalidades y pueblos que forman el Estado Plurinacional, se estableció el programa de Educación Intercultural Bilingüe (EIB). El objetivo: integrar diversos idiomas locales, conocimientos y prácticas pedagógicas en la educación, basada en la filosofía de sumak kawsay centrada en la comunidad, ecológicamente equilibrada y culturalmente sensible. La implementación del programa ha experimentado restricciones en la última década que han debilitado el programa omitiendo realidades culturales y saberes ancestrales.

Este libro aborda la implementación de la interculturalidad en la educación, con enfoque en la región amazónica y en los ciclos curriculares superiores. Ha confrontado situaciones educativas en la provincia de Pastaza, observando la aplicación de la EIB en unidades educativas de las zonas kichwa, shuar y sapara, con especial atención en el bachillerato y educación universitaria, es decir, aquellas instancias que preparan a los jóvenes para la vida adulta.

The book narrates how the great political and cultural project of educational interculturality, instrumental for recognizing the ancestral knowledge of the various Ecuadorian peoples as valid knowledge for all within the plurinational state, is applied to the Amazon region.

Arias-Gutiérrez, R., & Minoia, P. (Eds.) (2023). Plurinacionalidad y justicia epistemica. Retos de la educación intercultural en la Amazonía Ecuatoriana. Ediciones Abya Yala

Índice

Introducción: La educación como revitalización cultural y ecológica para las nacionalidades amazónicas (Paola Minoia y Ruth Arias-Gutiérrez)

Capítulo I: Políticas públicas educativas y lucha del movimiento indígena por una interculturalidad decolonial (Paola Minoia y Andrés Tapia)

Capítulo II: Características de la inserción de los pueblos y nacionalidades
indígenas en el sistema escolar (Tito Madrid y Ruth Arias-Gutiérrez)

Capítulo III: Del discurso hacia la estructura: interculturalidad en las universidades amazónicas (Ruth Arias-Gutiérrez, Manuel Pérez y Paola Pozo)

Capítulo IV: Educación intercultural y agencia de comunidades indígenas:
una mirada desde el territorio sapara (Riikka Kaukonen Lindholm y Mariano Ushigua)

Capítulo V: Acceso de jóvenes indígenas a los colegios en la provincia de Pastaza (Johanna Hohenthal y Ruth Arias-Gutiérrez)

Capítulo VI: Calendarios vivenciales: creando vínculos entre las comunidades
indígenas y el bachillerato (Tuija Veintie, Anders Sirén y Paola Minoia)

Capítulo VII: Interculturalidad en el aula: experiencias de acompañamiento
a los estudiantes de culturas minoritarias en Pastaza (Rosaura Gutiérrez Valerio, Juan J. Leiva Olivencia e Itaya Corina Andy Malaver)

Capítulo VIII: Intervenciones de diseño participativo: apoyando redes
de cuidado universitarias en tiempos de Covid (Nathaly Pinto, Xavier Barriga-Abril, Katy Machoa y Paola Minoia)

 

Posted on

Video of the Seminar “Pluri­verse, Education and Ter­rit­orial Justice”

HELSUS Global South Encounters has just released the video of our presentation (October 2021)

Abstract – The comprehensive development project manifested in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) proposes an overall engagement on “quality education for all” and supports social justice by promoting equal access to education for the most deprived groups. However, the SDG4 on quality education does not acknowledge diversity in ways of being (ontologies) and knowing (epistemologies) around the world and the need to support alternative ways to learn and produce knowledge. The role of education to achieve social and environmental justice is not new. At the institutional and international level, the debate around education has become central in the post-2015 development agenda, and within the territorial turn, education engenders and sustains projects with the potential to resist structural socio-environmental injustices and move toward more regenerative futures.

In this seminar, the panelists discuss how territorial justice and education offer paths toward the pluriverse by touching upon knowledge, politics and pedagogical visions, ecocultural identities, humilocene, socio-environmental consciousness, place-based education and community experiential calendars. The seminar connects with the Academy of Finland’s DEVELOP programme project “Goal 4+: Including Eco-cultural Pluralism in Quality Education in Ecuadorian Amazonia“.

Speak­ers

Paola Minoia is a Senior Lecturer in Global Development Studies at the University of Helsinki, and an Associate Professor in Political and Economic Geography at the University of Turin. Her research interests intersect the fields of political ecology and development studies with a focus on territoriality, state- and minoritized groups relations, socio-environmental justice, eco-cultural knowledges and the pluriverse. She is the Principal Investigator in the project Ecocultural pluralism in the Ecuadorian Amazonia (funded by the Academy of Finland 2018-2022) and a WG leader in the EU/COST Network Decolonising Development: Research, Teaching and Practice (2020-2024).

José Castro-Sotomayor PhD. is an Assistant Professor at California State University Channel Islands, U.S.A. He investigates ecocultural modes of human and more-than-human communication and how they influence our relationships with the Earth’s vitality. His work focuses on transversal forms of communication, agency, and dissent that inform participatory models for environmental peacebuilding and decision and policymaking. He is co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity (2020), a transdisciplinary volume seeking to foster a radical epistemology by investigating ways ecocultural identities are being, and can be, thought, felt, performed, and experienced within wider sociopolitical structures in ways relevant to regenerative Earth futures. Originally from Ecuador, he worked as an independent consultant for environmental NGOs in Ecuador and Colombia.

Tuija Veintie is a postdoctoral researcher in Global Development Studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki, Finland. Her current research focuses on the integration of ecological and Indigenous knowledge in intercultural bilingual upper secondary education in Ecuador. Her study is part of a research project ‘Goal 4+: Including Eco-cultural Pluralism in Quality Education in Ecuadorian Amazonia’. Veintie has a multidisciplinary background in education, anthropology, and Latin American studies. She received her PhD degree in Educational Sciences from the University of Helsinki in 2018. Her research interests include social justice and diversity issues, epistemic power hierarchies, intercultural and Indigenous education as well as minority and Indigenous peoples’ rights.

Johanna Hohenthal is a postdoctoral researcher in Global Development Studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki. She has worked in a research project ‘Goal 4+: Including Eco-cultural Pluralism in Quality Education in Ecuadorian Amazonia’ that studies intercultural bilingual education and eco-cultural knowledges of the Amazonian Indigenous groups. Her interests focus on the accessibility of intercultural bilingual education and its relation to Indigenous territoriality and place-based learning as well as on participatory research methods. She received a PhD degree in Geography in 2018. Her doctoral research focused on water resource governance and local ecological knowledge in the Taita Hills, Kenya.

Chaitawat Boonjubun, chair of the event, is a postdoctoral researcher at Global Development Studies, the Faculty of Social Sciences, the University of Helsinki, Finland. His research interests focus on understanding the social, political, economic, and cultural determinants of sustainable urban land use, the discourses and practices of urban regeneration, the politics of public lands, urban informality, religious land, and inequalities in cities.

Posted on

Academy of Finland’s Programme for Development Research: Webinar on Tuesday 14 December at 10.00–15.30

We have participated in the Webinar organized by the Academy of Finland in cooperation with the Finnish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. We have presented our team and project location, and then the research focus, methodology and preliminary findings. Here below I report some excerpts from the presentation, but first of all, I have acknowledged all research collaborators. Their names are in the following slide.

“The theme of our research project is located at the intersection between the accomplishment of the right to education for all, as stated by the SDG4, and the right to pertinent education, as stated by the United Nations Declaration on the Rights for Indigenous Peoples of 2007. In a country that is Plurinational by Constitution, Education contributes significantly to reinforcing political emancipation and territorial self-determination of indigenous peoples. This intersection has been articulated through programmes of Intercultural Bilingual Education (IBE). For indigenous students, IBE means to support emancipatory pathways via revitalization of traditional languages, land-based knowledges, and philosophies of life that respect humans and non-humans in nature. These components form a whole that can maintain their identities against rural-urban migration and assimilation into the urban-Hispanic hegemonic culture. Intercultural education is an education that can represent a way for young indigenous people to exit marginalization and poverty, not as individuals but within their own communities and indigenous nationalities. The preservation of indigenous communities on their lands can guarantee protection of ecological diversity against land use changes, and especially deforestation and extractive mining that cause environmental and climate changes.

In methodological terms, we looked at different policies of education and their contingent impacts in terms of access, pedagogies and results, through different tools. The research methodology has been mainly qualitative and we have used interviews, walking interviews, focus groups, mapping, and projects of caring through design in times of Covid-19.

Some of the research foci have been:

  1. Analysis of policies, conflicts and negotiations on education between State ministries and indigenous organizations; considering that in some cases, they were not alone but closely linked to negotiations for territorial rights and environmental planning. Examples are Planes de Vida (life plans) of the kichwas that see students as important agents.
  2. Analysis with statistics on schooling of indigenous and rural peoples in Pastaza; and statistics of students of the Universidad Estatal Amazonica (UEA) that self-identify as members of indigenous nationalities. There has been an increase of students who identify as Indigenous at the national level and in the UEA in the past years. The work has also provided an analysis of the problems in the transition between secondary and tertiary education, and between school and work related to the acquired education.
  3. Analysis of school topics and their reference to environmental sustainability; and of educational materials and pedagogies that have been used with the aim to revitalize indigenous knowledge, onto-epistemic plurality and inter-generational learning.
  4. Analysis of home-school mobility and school accessibility, especially considering some recent turbulences (or challenges) posed by the Organic Law on Education, by strikes, and by Covid-19: showing the importance to integrate socio-cultural, territorial and mobility justice perspectives into the global agenda of quality education, and also looking at the importance of the envirionmental and territorial engagement of students who attend schooling in their communities. .
  5. Accessibility has also been studied in terms of digital divide especially during the Covid-19 that has exacerbated educational inequalities, to which the state response has been weak. The UEA has self-organised distribution of laptops and gigabites thanks to other private funding. A subproject has build networks of information and care between the UEA and student of the Pontificia Universidad Catholica del Ecuador.

Until 30.12.21 you can watch the replay from the webinar here. The presentation of our project starts at the 1:45′.

Posted on

Three chapters in the book: Situating Sustainability: Handbook of Contexts and Concepts

Our Helsinki-based team has participated in the book Situating Sustainability: Handbook of Contexts and Concepts edited by C. Parker Krieg and Reetta Toivanen, published in November 2021, with three conceptual chapters that refer to our research within the project “Goal 4+ Eco-cultural Pluralism in Ecuadorian Amazonia”. The three chapters deal with the concepts of: Anthropocene from the indigenous perspective of the Kawsak Sacha (living forest); Intercultural Bilingual Education experiences in Ecuador; and Politics of Scales informing territorial strategies of indigenous peoples.

Chapter 3: Anthropocene Conjunctures: The Anthropocene is the proposed name for a new geologic era in which humans are held to be a defining agent of planetary history, largely by the effect of fossil fuel use in industrial societies. This chapter contextualizes the rise of Anthropocene discourse across academic disciplines and provides critical examples from an ‘ecomodernist’ institute located in California, and from the indigenous Kichwa people of Ecuador and their strategies of political ecology based on the kawsak sacha (living forest) principle. The chapter illustrates the pitfalls and potential offered by this new periodization of anthropogenic change and the definition of the anthropos that the term calls into question. Drawing on posthumanist geography and cultural studies, it also challenges the centrality of the human agency.

Krieg, C. P., & Minoia, P. (2021). Anthropocene Conjunctures. In R. Toivanen, & C. P. Krieg (Eds.), Situating Sustainability: A Handbook of Contexts and Concepts (pp. 39-50). Helsinki University Press. https://doi.org/10.33134/HUP-14-3

Chapter 5: Education: This chapter illustrates the transformative role that national education systems can play in working toward Sustainable Development Goals. Offering comparative examples from the ‘plurinational state’ of Ecuador and the ‘Northern European welfare state’ of Finland, the chapter discusses diverse approaches to sustainability through education within global discourses and national education policies in two different contexts. The chapter highlights the potential of teaching languages, critical thinking and global consciousness, and cultural alternatives to high-consumption lifestyles. In the first example, it examines the buen vivir (good living) principle in the context of Intercultural Bilingual Education in the Latin American plurina­tional, pluricultural, and multiethnic state of Ecuador.

Veintie, T., & Hohenthal, J. (2021). Education. In C. P. Krieg, & R. Toivanen (Eds.), Situating Sustainability: A Handbook of Contexts and Concepts (pp. 63-77). Helsinki University Press. https://doi.org/10.33134 /HUP-14-5

Chapter 7: Scales: This chapter rethinks scales as an opportunity for sustainability studies to engage with decolonial strategies that stand against the confinement of Southern studies as local knowledge, compared to the Western knowledge that is seen as universal. Politics of scales inform sustainability science to focus carefully on peoples’ institutions, territories, and territorialities as contingent levels of power interactions. Examples are offered by the plurinational ‘scale jumping’ as rescaling strategies played by indigenous organizations in Ecuador in relation to the central powers, to affirm the plurinational identity of the state; and by kinship networks in Northeast Madagascar. These strategies redefine the western ordering of scales and redress complicated histories of ecological and social colonization.

Minoia, P., & Mölkänen, J. (2021). Scales. In C. P. Krieg, & R. Toivanen (Eds.), Situated Sustainability : A Handbook of Contexts and Concepts (pp. 91-104). Helsinki University Press. https://doi.org/10.33134 /HUP-14-7

Posted on

From discourse to structure: intercultural education from the experience of the Universidad Estatal Amazónica (UEA) – EADI ISS Conference 2021, 5 – 8 July 2021, The Hague

The text is an excerpt from the paper that Ruth Arias (UEA) has presented at the Conference.

In her presentation at the EADI ISS Conference 2021 – Solidarity, Peace and Social Justice, Ruth Arias from the Universidad Estatal Amazonica (UEA) has spoken of the necessity of interculturality as a central axis of the Pluricultural State. However, interculturality is a challenge in Ecuador, and especially in higher education. Indigenous and Afro-descendant students access and complete their studies in alarmingly inequitable conditions (Mato, 2008). Policies to modify monocultural higher education need to address structural problems of the population they are intended to serve (Cuji, 2012). This aspect is not only related to the education sector, but is overall political.

The talk started with a video self-produced by Mariana Canelos (Student of Communication), Indira Vargas (Tourism Engineering graduate), Dixon Andi (Environmental Engineer, Laboratorio de plantas) and edited by Mario Rodríguez Dávila y Diego Lucero Rivas. The three UEA students and graduates, from the kichwa nationality, have presented their point of view on interculturality in higher education.

 

Continue reading “From discourse to structure: intercultural education from the experience of the Universidad Estatal Amazónica (UEA) – EADI ISS Conference 2021, 5 – 8 July 2021, The Hague”

Posted on

Ecuadorian repository of literature on Interculturality and Ethnoeducation: open access

Repositorio

A new bibliographic Repository of Intercultural Bilingual Education, Ethnoeducation and Interculturality is online.

The project has addressed the problem of fragmentation and loss of research on interculturality and etnoeducation. The Repository includes books, articles, essays, and theses that are in different public or private libraries and archives. This activity has been coordinated by the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO), Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar Sede Ecuador (UASB-E), Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador (PUCE), Universidad de Cuenca, Universidad Politécnica Salesiana (UPS), the publisher house Abya Yala, and UNICEF. Universidad Estatal Amazonica will also take part in this effort.

The digital repository is freely accessible for all:

http://www.repositoriointerculturalidad.ec/

 

Posted on

Covid-19 Pandemic among Indigenous Kichwa Communities in Ecuadorian Amazonia

Here is the link to a new article by Andres Siren et al: Resilience Against the Covid-19 Pandemic among Indigenous Kichwa Communities in Ecuadorian Amazonia, published by Preprints 2020 (online)

Abstract: There has been a very widespread contagion of covid-19 in Kichwa indigenous communities in Ecuadorian Amazonia, but the peak of contagion has already passed, and total mortality has been remarkably low. The Kichwa people themselves typically attribute this to the widespread use of medicinal plants.

 

Posted on

Una conversación sobre la refundación de la Universidad Intercultural Amawtay Wasi

¡La investigación continúa gracias al zoom! El 30 de septiembre tuve el placer de hablar sobre la reconstitución de la Universidad Intercultural de las Nacionalidades y Pueblos Indígenas Amawtay Wasi, que finalmente debería reabrir el próximo año académico. A la reunión asistieron, además de mí, Ruth Arias, rectora de UEA, Nelson Calapucha, CONFENIAE, miembro de la comisión asesora del Sistema de Educación Intercultural Bilingüe, y Ángel Ramírez, miembro de la comisión gestora de la Amawtay Wasi en esta fase de refundación, luego del cierre por parte del gobierno de Correa, en 2013. La Amawtay Wasi se basa sobre el paradigma de la soberanía epistémica de la Abya Yala (con respecto al proyecto occidental de origen colonial), y el modelo educativo de la interculturalidad como instrumental a la plurinacionalidad, que Ramírez explica como un “modelo nuevo de estadio de monocultural a plurinacional, caracterizados por lenguas, pensamientos, espiritualidades, y colectivos sociales diferentes”, desde los cuales pueden representarse adecuadamente los pensamientos críticos de las varias nacionalidades y pueblos.

Continue reading “Una conversación sobre la refundación de la Universidad Intercultural Amawtay Wasi”

Proudly powered by WordPress