The utopian dimension of education: Reflections to postpone the end of the world

Abstract

This chapter aims to propose decolonial reflections that project ways to postpone the end of the world, based on the approximation between education and utopia. This intersection – education and utopia – is inspired by the readings of the works of thinkers Ailton Krenak (2019) and Vandana Shiva (2002; 2016), whose purpose is to rescue a memory capable of activating radical imaginaries for an effectively intercultural education. By radicals, I mean the possibility of constructing an original-original praxis that points out paths that move the bases and, with that, contests the foundations of the knowledges canonized by the status quo, responsible for naturalizing practices of epistemological violence of the most diverse against peoples and nations, consolidating what I will call the epistemicidal regime; that is, a set of practices that structure the marginality of knowledges that escape Eurocentric and Eurocentric production. of the global north and are intertwined in the production of stereotypes that place certain bodies and subjects on the margins of knowledge and power. This process of consolidation of the epistemicidal regime must be understood, therefore, through the notion of coloniality in its multiple forms and expressions. Therefore, alongside the previously mentioned authors, I activate the reading of Anibal Quijano (2005), Alberto Acosta (2018), Walter Mignolo (2003), Catherine Walsh (2007) and Alberto Galindo (1988) on the need to criticize the persecution for development imposed by the hegemony of progress and governed by international actors uncommitted to the well-being of peoples considered to be of the third world (or 'developing'),  and I seek to think about the dimension of utopia as a critical tool for the defense of an intercultural education capable of opposing the epistemicidal regime that deepens in the face of the technologies of precariousness activated in the period of the Covid-19 pandemic. Therefore, I argue that the utopian dimension is an important decolonial tool for us to cross the present without giving up rescuing the past to postpone the end of the world.

DOI:https://doi.org/10.56238/sevened2024.002-023