Rural Women and Collective Action for the Decolonization, Depatriarchalization, and Democratization of Knowledge in Quindío, Colombia

Abstract

The objective of this research is to describe the processes of collective action that rural women sow in Quindío-Colombia, to advance toward decolonization, depatriarchalization and democratization of knowledge, revealing how women re-exist on their land, make their struggles visible and every day utopias, to make other ways of life possible. The theoretical framework is based on the Epistemologies of the South, as a metaphor for exclusion; it seeks to value the knowledge of the peoples, who during history have systematically suffered dispossession, discrimination, and structural violence, within the framework of capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy. Some issues about gender are linked, diverse Latin American women, black, indigenous, peasant, who in conversation, problematize against patriarchy, the establishment of power relations, inequalities and precariousness processes. The methodology is based on the analysis of situated theories, contemplates the biographical-narrative method and the critical-dialogical method of intercultural translation with social groups of women, which emerge from an immersion in context, from the experiences walked with women who they go on foot’ and who share their daily struggles, their militant pedagogies in rural areas, to write stories in the plural. The qualitative analysis was carried out using the Atlas. Ti software, which made it possible to recognize, through semantic networks, the significance of women’s social, cultural and community practices, their cries for re-existence despite the prevalence of hegemonic discourses, and the construction of emancipatory knowledge that comes from local pedagogical knowledge.