Abyssal Thinking Research Articles

Epistemologies from the North of Brazil: the counterhegemony of Epistemologies from the Southeast

The North and the global South are separated not only by the Equator, but also by an abyssal thinking, as emphasized by the author Portuguese Boaventura de Sousa Santos, which presents the Modern Western Thought as responsible for making invisible, non existent, the knowledge produced and practiced by humans in the global South, while the North is global hegemonic in its being, being and doing in the world. However, the South epistemologies exist and can help you understand how to practice co-presence, until now denied by abyssal thinking that makes the hegemonic global North. So, open up possibilities for exploring parallel understanding epistemologies North of Brazil, located in the global South, since the existence of abyssal thinking global instigates us to also discuss the hypothesis of a thought abysmal environmental Brazil, definer a line; 'this side of the line' is the Southeast and 'across the line' is the North of Brazil, in which context the North represents all other regions, except the Southeast. Epistemologies of southeastern Brazil are assumed hegemonic, but need to be deconstructed to the revelations engendered research on the epistemologies of the North Country, thereby reconstruct a Brazilian thought, where North, South, Southeast, Northeast and Midwest recognize physical geography and politics of Brazil, without forgetting that the human being in any geographical locations and under different political contexts are diverse, complex, and this has to be knowledge and expertise, and must take up counter-hegemonic, while there is no hegemony . The beginning of the reconstruction process is understanding how the sociology of absences makes this all that was made invisible by the logic and methods of production of non existence and presents the ecology of knowledge as an antidote to the production of absences, because that will represent the ecology superstructure built this new thinking replacement of abyssal thinking of Southeastern Brazil hegemonic. The purpose of this article, therefore, is to explore the possibilities of epistemologies of Northern Brazil for the construction of Brazilian thought.

(Un)grounded language ideologies: A brief history of translanguaging theory

Aims: The authors develop a contrast between grounded and ungrounded language ideologies, defining grounded ideologies as those which are anchored empirically and ungrounded ideologies as those which are not. This framework guides a description of the history of translanguaging theory from early translanguaging theory, grounded in empirical research on codeswitching and other scholarship on bilingualism, to late translanguaging theory, which changed under the influence of a postmodernist approach to language policy known as deconstructivism. The authors further discuss charges of “abyssal thinking” attributed to those who do not accept deconstructivism. Approach: The approach is argumentative. Data and Analysis: The authors draw on a wide range of previously published empirical work to support their conclusions. Conclusions: The authors conclude that late translanguaging theory is at odds with empirical research and holds negative consequences for pluralist language ideologies and civil rights advocacy. Originality: The article makes original contributions to language ideology, the history of translanguaging theory, and the relationship between language theory and language ideology. Significance: The article makes a significant critical contribution to the literature on multilingual language theory by drawing attention to significant limitations of translanguaging theory as a resource for language ideology.

“Going around it to go into it”: tensions and questions in teacher–researcher work towards a critical translanguaging stance

Abstract This article blends autoethnography with other qualitative research methods to address the following question: what tensions and questions emerged as a white, English-dominant researcher and white, English-dominant teachers co-developed a critical, anti-racist translanguaging stance? The co-development of such a stance occurred through a year-long professional development (PD) series on critical translingual approaches to English teaching (Seltzer, Kate. 2020. “My English is its own rule”: Voicing a translingual sensibility through poetry. Journal of Language, Identity and Education 19(5). 297–311), which, unlike many traditional teacher education and development programs, shifted away from “strategies” and “best practices” and instead centered and aimed to unpack ideologies that lead to deficit perceptions and ways of teaching racialized bi/multilingual students. By drawing on three moments from this PD series, I explore and raise questions about how (or whether) the translanguaging co-stance (García, Ofelia, Susana Johnson & Kate Seltzer. 2017. Rejecting abyssal thinking in the language and education of racialized bilinguals: A manifesto. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies 18(3). 203–228; Tian, Zhongfeng & Leah Shepard‐Carey. 2020. (Re) imagining the future of translanguaging pedagogies in TESOL through teacher–researcher collaboration. Tesol Quarterly 54(4). 1131–1143) the teachers and I were developing was as explicitly critical and anti-racist as I intended. To delve into these moments, I mesh data from the PD project with scholarship on whiteness, translanguaging, and raciolinguistic ideologies to explore these tensions and reflect critically on my own ways forward in collaborative translanguaging research with teachers.

Nauczyciel jako artysta: perspektywy roli i cech nauczyciela jako artysty w dobie zmian i niestabilności

This article aims to provide new viewpoints on the role of the teacher by combining epistemological and artistic perspectives on education. In the age embossed by change and instability, the teacher must build a role that facilitates the development of resilient and independent pupils. A point of emphasis in the article is to renegotiate the view of knowledge and how knowledge can be attained. The “abyssal thinking” of Western modernity, which is heavily reliant on abstract intellectual thinking, is imbedded in the current educational system, which causes profound challenges in the encounter between individuals and education. These challenges come to expression in increasing mental illness and pedagogical challenges in schools and classrooms, as more pupils cannot cope with current demands and expectations. To address these complex challenges, the teacher needs new conceptual and practical tools to provide an education that can accommodate the entirety of human existence and potential. This is where artistic perspectives and approaches can prove highly potent and beneficial for further development of education. The article utilizes perspectives on education from Pestalozzi, Steiner, Freire, and Biesta. The educational dimensions are discussed in light of epistemological theories from Buber and Heron, which is expanded by the relation between art and freedom as formulated by Arendt, Tolle, Klein and Csikszentmihalyi. The complexity of society is likely to increase even further, and hence pupils will need new and more profound tools. These tools are necessary not only to tackle life, but to become resilient and independent creators of it. The article aims to point out areas of potential development, that can provide pupils with necessary emotional and existential support and means of expression.

The jihadists are coming! Abyssal thinking and spatial politics of un/knowing in Ghana’s terrorism discourse

ABSTRACT Coastal West African countries are in a threat anticipatory anxiety mode: over the fear that subaltern violent “jihadist” groups (SVJGs) are breaching their borders and heading south from across the Sahel. In Ghana, this fear has led to a build-up of commentaries, political statements, and counter-extremism/counterterrorism programs. This article interrogates the terrorism discourse in this West African country at the intersection of critical security studies and the politics of space, by applying securitisation theory and critical discourse analysis. In what is the most comprehensive academic review of news articles on the terrorism discourse in Ghana yet, I contend that the discourse evokes what Boaventura de Sousa Santos calls ‘abyssal thinking’ and creates cognitive and physical spatial abyssal lines. On the invisible side, insecurity within Ghana gets “normalised” by the discourse. On the visible side, however, SVJGs are securitised as abnormal, foreign, and uniquely threatening. This nature of the discourse effectively places events and conditions in the country that are either terroristic or constitutive of terrorism on the invisible side of Ghana’s security priorities. The discourse, therefore, hides much about the reality of insecurity and political violence within the country. These arguments advance the frontiers of security/terrorism knowledge and practice in West Africa by demonstrating the pervasiveness of “global war on terror” systems of representation, two decades after their inception and despite their flaws and adverse implications for human and national security.

Plurilingual Chinese learners of French Lx: agentic assembling of semiotic resources for learning

Abstract This paper reports an interview study with Chinese international students in an Anglophone university in Quebec, Canada, exploring their use of language and cross-language learning strategies to support their learning of French Lx (third language and beyond). Drawing on plurilingualism, Dynamic Model of Multilingualism, and language learning strategies, this article examines how Chinese learners made dynamic, creative, and, at times, unexpected links among Chinese and other additional languages and mobilized previous learning and professional experience to strategically enhance their French language learning. As a logographic language, Chinese is typologically distant from Latin-based languages. The focal participants, however, generated multilingual, multidirectional, and multimodal connections among the languages they knew. Their agentic assemblage of communicative repertoires for language learning contests the abyssal thinking behind the deficit-oriented label of “allophones” (those whose mother tongue is neither French nor English) that is used widely in the country. The study urges teachers and researchers to rethink language pedagogies that respond to and take full advantage of these student-directed strategies for better learning. Particularly, the paper argues for greater attention to students of non-alphabetic language backgrounds to recognize and co-learn with them about these self-initiated plurilingual strategies in order to build on their metalinguistic resources and create equitable classroom spaces for more effective teaching and learning.

MOVING BEYOND THE ABYSSAL LINE: THE POSSIBILITY OF EPISTEMIC JUSTICE IN THE ‘POST’- APARTHEID CONSTITUTIONALISM

In this article, I reflect on the idea of a ‘post’-apartheid South Africanconstitutionalism and the related and implicated notion ofTransformative Constitutionalism by emphasising its continued bondageto a colonial and apartheid past. In an effort to critically explore the‘post’-apartheid transformative constitutional framework, I examinethe endurance of colonialism as coloniality in the manner it hasunfolded in the South African context. This exploration involveshighlighting three constitutive elements of this endurance: linearhistoricism as observed in Hobbes’ social contract; the geography ofreason as theorised by Schmitt; and the lines within South Africansociety and knowledge systems as a result of what De Sousa Santos calls‘abyssal thinking’. Although the endurance of historical colonialism ascoloniality can be described in a number of ways, I deal with thesespecific constitutive elements in order to argue that the doctrine of transformation, which includes Transformative Constitutionalism, haslargely been ineffective in its attempt to eradicate coloniality as it hasfailed to achieve epistemic justice for the majority of (South) Africans.I conclude by suggesting that the doctrine of transformation and, assuch, Transformative Constitutionalism has served to further excludeand marginalise the knowledge of indigenous (South) African people inthe ‘post’-apartheid constitutional dispensation. The project oftransformation has sustained the abyssal line as it has been internalisedthrough coloniality. As such, the ‘post’-apartheid South Africandispensation remains divided by this line — essentially discardingindigenous (South) African people and their knowledge systems to theabyss. I further argue that the persistence of coloniality, sustained bythe abyssal line, requires a project of conceptual decolonisation ifcoloniality and epistemic injustice is to be undone. In this sense, a true(South) African dispensation may be disclosed.

Restorative learning for fostering a decolonised curriculum attuned to sustainable teacher education

Social sustainability is paramount for peaceful and inclusive societies. It embraces all cultures and civilizations while promoting that these contribute to, and are crucial enablers of, sustainable development. One aspect hereof is knowledge-what is taught and who decides. South African students remain frustrated with the Eurocentric and Western dominated university curriculum. This was made evident in the iconic 2015 student protest movement that, along with current and preceding protests laid bare the stark inequalities that persist in higher education and students outcries for socially relevant education that acknowledges the global South. In this article, we draw on data that emanated from qualitative interviews conducted with ten North-West University postgraduate teacher education students to unlock their concerns and aspirations for a decolonised curriculum in higher education. Students expressed their concerns with the political nature of the systems of power in higher education that are exclusionary, the need for the curriculum to be contextualized, and the tendency for decolonisation to be perceived as a threat. Students voiced their aspirations for a decolonised curriculum by specifying the importance of decolonisation as a process through teaching approaches like storytelling. We propose restorative learning as one avenue in response to students' outcries for the need to be critical of abyssal thinking and to challenge the root of hegemonic knowledge systems in such a way that decolonising the curriculum can be attuned to sustainability aspirations related to justice and social equity.

Guilty knowledge: A postcolonial inquiry into knowledge, suspicion, and responsibility in the fight against terrorism financing

AbstractThis article studies practices of knowledge production during counterterrorism financing court cases in European courts. Developments in international law have contributed to novel regulations to criminalise and prosecute the funding of terrorism in advance of terrorist violence. In this study, we study how court cases have become important spaces for contesting and evaluating multiple knowledge claims on terrorist threat and suspicion by analysing case proceedings from both the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Building on recent debates in International Relations and postcolonial theory, we make two contributions. First, building on insights from postcolonial literature on ‘abyssal thinking’, we illustrate how legal practices differentiate between different ways of knowing by dismissing certain experiences as ‘emotional’ or ‘subjective’ in contrast to the assumed objectivity of other knowledge claims. We argue that decisions on what counts as knowledge in a court setting are situated in a specific sociopolitical setting, whereby particular knowledge and life-worlds are recognised at the expense of others. Second, we empirically show how the novel criminal laws shifts the responsibility to know terrorist threat from the state to ordinary citizens. We illustrate how the court reinforces new security logics where the state can entertain doubt, uncertainty, and trust in their practices, while the citizens cannot.

“Our country has gained independence, but we haven't”: Collaborative translanguaging to decolonize English language teaching

AbstractThe colonial history of many English language teaching (ELT) contexts has shaped how the concept of language is understood, how language policies are constructed, and how language education is organized. Various aspects of ELT in countries that were colonized continue to promote the imperialism of English (Motha, 2014) through the naming (i.e., labeling of linguistic phenomena as distinct languages, dialects, and language varieties), separation and hierarchization of languages, and the dominance of monolingual policies and practices in the classroom. Translanguaging, a theory and pedagogy that challenges colonial understandings of language and monoglossic norms in language teaching, has the transformative potential to liberate language practices that have been rendered invisible by abyssal thinking in ELT (García et al., 2021). Translanguaging as a theory posits that multilingual learners do not possess two or more autonomous language systems but rather that they select and deploy linguistic features from a unitary linguistic repertoire (Vogel & García, 2017). Translanguaging as a pedagogy urges educators to leverage learners’ entire linguistic and semiotic repertoires to support their learning instead of requiring them to keep certain languages outside the classroom. However, in educational contexts that respond to socially and politically imposed boundaries between languages, there are ideological and systemic challenges to the enactment of translanguaging as a pedagogy. This paper discusses these challenges with reference to the Malaysian language education context and draws on data from a collaborative translanguaging pedagogy designed through teacher-researcher collaboration and implemented in two Malaysian elementary English classrooms to offer recommendations for how ELT can be decolonized.

Beyond Abyssal Thinking: The Deep Decolonization of the Studies on War and Violence in Contemporary Mozambique

Based upon a critical reading of the civil war that left a profound mark in Mozambique (1976-1992), this article intends to contribute to present-day debates over the importance of peace studies in state building, addressing the cultural resistances that frequently go undetected. At the same time, this article —rooted in the political and epistemological proposal of Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ abyssal thinking (2018)— aims to theorize the political events that permeate this conflict, transcending the (pre)dominant interpretations of the global North. In this sense, this study —from a concise analysis of the geopolitical complexity of the civil war— addresses inherent resistance, prioritizes local voices and explanations, and thus expands the analysis of the root causes of the conflict. Additionally, and stemming out of the epistemologies of the South, it aims to expose situations of cognitive injustice in “international” readings of this war, while —from a contextual reading of wars within the Mozambican civil war— it presents clues for a methodological approach that paves the way for a deep decolonization of security and peace studies.

In my skin: racial education and post abyssal thinking of black aesthetics

This work, which is a fragment of a research that has been discussed in lectures and presented separately in other journals and books, examines through the lens of critical racial literacy, the discrimination, tension, and racism experienced by Afro-Brazilian persons due to the aesthetics of their phenotypic traits. The theoretical framework draws on Critical Race Theory (LADSON-BILLINGS, 1998; FERREIRA, 2014) and Epistemologies of the South (SANTOS, 2014) which provided the basis for data analysis. The methodology for data gathering was autobiographical narratives provided by the informants, who were selected due to their experiences of the subject. The primary research instrument was an online questionnaire, voluntarily and anonymously, answered by the participants. The results show that black people in Brazil face issues of race and racism in their own homes, at schools and universities as students, as well as in their working environments. The discussion is pertinent to the field of Applied Linguistics and Education as it highlights the paramount importance of developing a critical racial literacy at schools, which can address these issues and overcome racism from a variety of perspectives.

Rejecting abyssal thinking in the language and education of racialized bilinguals: A manifesto

ABSTRACT Following Boaventura de Sousa Santos, the authors of this article reject the type of “abyssal thinking” that erases the existence of counter-hegemonic knowledges and lifeways, adopting instead the “from the inside out” perspective that is required for thinking constructively about the language and education of racialized bilinguals. On the basis of deep personal experience and extensive field-work research, we challenge prevailing assumptions about language, bilingualism, and education that are based on raciolinguistic ideologies with roots in colonialism. Adopting a translanguaging perspective that rejects rigid colonial boundaries of named languages, we argue that racialized bilingual learners, like all students, draw from linguistic-semiotic, cultural, and historical repertoires. The decolonial approach that guides our work reveals these students making a world by means of cultural and linguistic practices derived from their own knowledge systems. We propose that in order to attain justice and success, a decolonial education must center non-hegemonic modes of “otherwise thinking” by attending to racialized bilinguals’ knowledges and abilities that have always existed yet have continually been distorted and erased through abyssal thinking.

Glissant and the Middle Passage: Philosophy, Beginning, Abyss

Glissant and the Middle Passage: Philosophy, Beginning, Abyss

Análise Real na licenciatura: do pensamento abissal à ecologia de saberes.

Este trabalho apresenta uma discussão a cerca de reflexos da colonização epistêmica que rege nossa sociedade sobre o campo da educação matemática e da formação de professores, à luz da lógica do pensamento abissal e da ecologia de saberes propostas por Boaventura de Sousa Santos. Neste contexto, nosso foco se direciona para as disciplinas de Análise Real na Licenciatura.Adotamos uma abordagem cartográfica e, ecoando vozes registradas na literatura de pesquisa sobre o ensino de Análise, buscamos dar visibilidade a linhas que caracterizam o pensamento abissal. Agregandorelatos e reflexões sobre nossas vivências em projetos associados a disciplinas de Análise, buscamoscontribuir para a emergênciade configurações pedagógicas compatíveis com a ecologia de saberes.

Elecciones, poder y antipoder en la República Democrática del Congo (1960-2019): el voto de lo "invisibilizado"

Análisis del avance de la razón universal de carácter metonímico y su inherente y constante lógica de producción de binomios y dicotomías capaces de producir repetidamente fronteras de carácter abisal que definen las zonas de no existencia, lugares de aquello que es definido como verdadero o ininteligible. Estos límites de pensamiento abisal o fronteras del no ser han sobrevivido a los procesos independentistas de África en general, y en particular al proceso de liberación nacional de la República Democrática del Congo. La persistencia de estas líneas abisales implica que las utopías de emancipación han perdido su potencial de liberación o que incluso han terminado por convertirse en la contracara del pensamiento abisal. ¿Hay, entonces, más allá de lo que este pensamiento abisal determina como existente o no existente, alguna posibilidad de identificar fórmulas de antipoder cuyos términos de emancipación, subjetivación o instrumentalización escapen a la lógica del pensamiento abisal?

Can the Undocumented Speak? Undocumented Immigrants and Self-Representation

Undocumented immigrants usually trust their voices to immigration activists rather than engaging with strategies of visuality to reclaim their rights. The universe of illegal border crossing is about radical experiences of invisibility, misidentification, erasure, dispossession, and disappearance. First person testimonies by undocumented immigrants have, however, seen the light of day throughout the last decade in unsuspected media venues, from the New York Times to the Guardian, small sites of independent journalism, and also some book publications. Revealing their presence, their names, and their faces seems a brave decision, when the risk of deportation is part of their everyday reality. In my reading of their testimonies and the photographs illustrating them, I follow two theoretical lines that engage with the subjectivities of marginalized groups: sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ elaboration of a post abyssal thinking and cultural critic Nicholas Mirzoeff’s ideas of spaces of appearance and practices of counter visuality. Combining them will allow me to analyze how instances of self-representation by undocumented immigrants in the United States contribute to crafting a new subject position by a group who, by definition, cannot speak because it is deemed non-existent in legal terms. The issue brings back to the discussion Gayatri Spivak’s classical questions on subalternity and power.

Epistemological tug of war, traditional medicine and the potential for <i>modus vivendi</i> in Ethiopia

This study analysed the bench marks of regulatory framework of traditional medicine in Ethiopia and how it serves as an impediment to the fostering of indigenous medical knowledge. Data were collected through observation, unstructured and semi structured interviews from healers, their assistants, patients, pharmacists, and botanists. The findings of the study reveal that the procedure for certifying healers fails to consider the context of indigenous medical knowledge. There is a tendency to force indigenous medical knowledge to fit it into epistemological and methodological imports. The process results in epistemological tug of war. These aspects were explained by Santos’ (2007) metaphor of abyssal thinking. The study acknowledged the attempt to regulate traditional medicine in Ethiopia as a quest of good intent; however, it may produce disastrous long-term outcomes, unless it begins to involve an interdisciplinary understanding of the practice. Hence, the potential for modus vivendi is in sight if we draw on Green’s (2008) concept of knowledge diversity.Keywords: Abyssal thinking, Epistemology, Ethiopia, indigenous knowledge, knowledge diversity

A Pedagogia do Destino: baby sacer na Educação Infantil

<em><em></em></em><p>What if nothing is like the official documents that protect childhood say? What if, in practice, there is the planned birth of right-naked beings in the peripheries of the peripheries – baby sacer – and what if for them the passage through Early Childhood Education is nothing more than a stage of “Destiny Pedagogy”, an “educational process” that keeps them on the sidelines? This study,which is an excerpt of a thesis with further reflections, addresses the contingencies of schooling of poor children. Bauman, Boaventura, Pinto and Sarmento, respectively, emphasize the ideas of “Modern Liquid Consumption Society”, “Abyssal Thinking”, and the “Social Structure as a constraint to inequalities and discrimination” with and among children.</p><div><hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /><div><p><a title="" href="file:///C:/Users/MCris/Desktop/baby%201.docx#_ftnref1">[1]</a> Termo produzido a partir da ideia de <em>homo sacer</em>, contudo, reforçando a influência estadunidense nas regras de consumo no Brasil.</p></div></div>

Against the scandal: itinerant curriculum theory as subaltern momentum

PurposeKeeping Spivak’s essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in mind, the purpose of this paper is to examine the itinerant curriculum theory (ICT) as a subaltern momentum unveiling how ICT informs subaltern ways of being and thus, potentially, the research lens for qualitative approaches. In this context, the paper examines how curriculum as an ideological devise produces an epistemicide – the killing of knowledge – an epistemological havoc cooked up daily in the process of qualitative studies promoting and legitimizing a specific modern western Eurocentric episteme.Design/methodology/approachThe paper dissects modernity as a colonial zone, creating “abyssal thinking,” a eugenic system of visible and invisible distinctions that legitimizes the visible, i.e. “this side of the line” and produces “the other side of the line” as “non-existent.”FindingsThe paper urges the need to decolonize leading modern western Eurocentric counter-hegemonic traditions such as Marxism.Originality/valueThe paper analyzes ICT’s contribution to subaltern struggles, asserts ICT’s commitment against any form of canon, grabs the educational matrix of qualitative research as an eugenic beast from its very own ideological horns, alerting the need to examine any study of education and society within the ideological eugenic political economy and modes of production of systems pillared by poverty, exploitation, segregation, and intellectual rape.