Amazon University, coloniality of knowledge and philosophy: epistemic arrangements and conceptions

Abstract

This article aims to analyze the ways in which the coloniality of knowledge makes itself present in the teaching of Philosophy in two public universities from the city of Belém-Pará. The analysis was conducted from a Decolonial perspective and, as a whole, the study is methodologically characterized as qualitative field research. The research participants were students and teachers from higher education institutions. The subject to be analyzed and studied emerged from the interviews and it can be summarized as the understanding of philosophical knowledge and the teaching of Philosophy in the geopolitics of knowledge point of view. From that point on, different analyses were carried out on how the coloniality of knowledge influences the pedagogical practices, the philosophical and educational conceptions that professors and students that participated in the research have. Coloniality is considered as a matrix of power/knowledge that invades both macrosocial and microsocial relations and creates the absence of philosophical knowledge produced in Latin America and the Caribbean. The coloniality of knowledge establishes conceptual arrangements such as: tradition, regionalism, totality, universality, simultaneity, authenticity, among others. These concepts appear intertwined within professors' and students' discourses. These conceptual operations based on the coloniality of knowledge build cognitive hierarchies that are incorporated into systems of thought, philosophical and educational understandings and are, at the same time, inducing and producing theories, curricula, pedagogical practices, and teaching methodologies.