WHY IS SOCIAL JUSTICE IMPORTANT FOR LANGUAGE TEACHER EDUCATION?

“Why is there so much unfair human suffering which is not considered a violation of the human rights?”^{2 Santos (2019}, p. 14) asks. This question echoes the long-standing Freirean concern with the reasons why some people can and others cannot participate actively in political societal domains, why some people have access to cultural capital and others do not. A fast answer would recognize the fact that, among many declarations, The Declaration of Human Rights was invented by the hegemonic Eurocentric elite, whose grammar universalized their language and culture. Such an interpretive procedure refused to profoundly listen to the minoritized voices concerning social practices imbued with cosmologies, values, principles, and knowledge construction other than the Westernized ones.

Social movements and other forms of agency have identified and resisted the colonial matrix of power (^{Quijano, 2007}), which has emerged from the sociohistorical process of European domination in Latin America articulating culture and capital. It has been observed that, despite some initiatives, violence, through colonial-racist, patriarchical and capitalist modes (^{Santos, 2019}), has prevailed in other geopolitical contexts in the world. In accordance with ^{Quijano (2007}), two main tenets are crucial: the imposition of racialized conceptions separating white from non-white people and the emphasis on the production of capital by the slaves.

In the realm of education, one exponent is ^{Freire (2005}), and, although he has not used the term literacy in his educational perspective, it is clear that he was ahead of time in the sense that he managed to transform the oppressive social conditions of various Brazilian groups. Through developing projects founded on the Bakhtinian notion of language, that is, a political social practice, such an educator brought about a change in people’s conscientização (critical consciousness) of their position and potential for active citizenship in society, regardless of any people’s identity/classification related to race, ethnics, gender, class, and religion - to mention a few examples.

With this introductory landscape, this article purports to outline critical educational perspectives, implicated in discursive and ideological life, according to ^{Freire (2005}), as important foundations to expand decolonial Southern social/cognitive justice and affection within languages. It also presents and discusses some findings of an ongoing research project with a similar theme in always already dilemmatic times.

UPDATED FREIREAN TERMS AND IMPLICATIONS FOR SOCIAL/COGNITIVE JUSTICE AND AFFECTION

Referring to the other as an indigenous person, ^{Freire (2005}, p. 69) stated: “[…] you assume the other’s naiveness, and in doing so, you discover that sometimes he is also critical […]”.³ Together with ^{Freire (2005}), I argue that respecting the other means helping transforming his/her ignorance in ways that does not “[…] trespass the systems of social and economic interests from his/her culture.”⁴ (^{Freire, 2005}, p. 84), while transforming common sense though a process of “rigorosidade” (^{Freire, 2005}, p. 153). It means problematizing the other and the self in this complex relationship, suspending preconceived ideas, challenging existing models to apprehend hidden forces and reconfigure interconnections for alternative conditions for mutual broader understanding.

In order to expand the aforementioned perspective, getting convinced that change is possible, following Freirean orientations, might be productive. Nevertheless, the verb “to hope” (esperançar) does not come as free lunch and it requires agency, affection, and creativity. As a product of my learning from Freirean social practices, my understanding is that decolonial Southern social/cognitive justice, as ethical education, cannot do without a permanent revision of an understanding of how my self and the other make meanings within my and his/her schemes of interpretation in (self)critical reflexive ways (^{Freire, 2005}; ^{Souza, 2011}; ^{Takaki, 2019}; ²⁰²¹). Reflexive (self)critique implies the following thought: “[…] there is no text reading without world reading, reading of context […] reading the world, writing about your reading of it and, in doing so, rethink your own reading.”⁵ (^{Freire, 2005}, p. 241).

Self(critical)-reflexivity entails the notion that the subject is embodied in affection, emotions, love, creativity, and respect for differences in a collective sense. This is possible through an attitude which allows for a contamination of distinct intersubjectivities, cosmovisions coming from corazonar (^{Santos, 2018}), as dealt with subsequently. It might be a good start being sensitive to the fact that students have diverse limitations and capacities, for they come from different socio-cultural and economic background, with interconnected epistemologies. In this way, the classroom would be a type of a microcosm embedded in happiness, a concern for both the student and the teacher’s well-being within the daily struggle for responsible solidarity and coauthorship of knowledge. Transforming negativity and oppression entails the recognition of the value of intuition, emotions, and love without homogenizing the identities and actions, a fundamental tenet in Freirean education. Being a teacher also requires grappling with differences in a respectful and ethical mode, according to ^{Freire (1997}). This is here illustrated:

This openness to wishing people’s well does not mean, in fact, that, because I am a teacher, I compel myself to wish all the students well in equal fashion. It means, in truth, that affection does not scares me, that I am not afraid of expressing it. It means this openness to wishing well the way I authentically seal my commitment to the learners, in a specific practice of the human being.⁶ (^{Freire, 1996}, p. 72).

This is evidence that affection and love are not free of tensions that might emerge due to the differences between the teacher and the students, and among the students. The way I read and understand Freirean affection and love means an ethical commitment to openness to struggle for the recognition of the minoritized voices, meanings, attitude, and actions. Being open to diversity signifies “[…] listening to the students while listening to myself.” (^{Souza, 2011}) without being afraid of provoking new questionings of my own, of the students’ own and of the institutional geo-ontoepistemologies as a life-long (self)critical reflexivity for all parts, that is, a constant project or re-educating ourselves-themselves towards “freedom”.

Thus, dealing with differences is inherent to the teacher and student’s comprehension of affection and love as socially constructed. This means they deserve being contested and reconstructed according to the new demands related to the transformations in language, identity, power, technology, and citizenship, as a social-ideological practice, avoiding the recolonization of paradigms within rhizomatic relations.

With such a premise, it is possible to read Freirean social justice as being decolonial/Southern and permeated by ethical nature as well as beauty in ways to amplify paths for problematizations of what/how/when, with/for whom and why we recreate education in more affective and implicated ways. Ethical is used here as recognition of differences as part of the elaboration of new dialogues and social configurations, in which the other is an active coauthor of meanings and agency. Beauty emerges from the very intellectual process of reconstruction (rigorosidade) of a less violent world with the radical other. One of the implications of Freirean terms for language teacher education evinces ethical decolonial/Southern social/cognitive justice, and affection in which the learner is responsible for his/her own learning. Learning means curiosity and engagement to search for meanings that make sense and, this, in turn, might generate beauty. While referring to the learner, an important pedagogical procedure is emphasized: “It is necessary that he situates the author in his time, that he understands the moment the author wrote and relates it with the current moment of the reader.” ⁷ (^{Freire, 2005}, p. 269).

Freirean principles emphasize differences to amplify decolonial/Southern perspectives for social/cognitive justice and affection:

The more critically clear we are in face of, in favor of what and whom, against what, and against whom we are educators, the better we perceive that the efficacy of our practice demands from us scientific, technical, and political abilities. Never one without the other.⁸ (^{Freire, 2005}, p. 161)

Being reflexively (self)critical is congruent to the articulations of different forces while constructing meanings in transit with other fields of knowledge and observing their situated and entangled consequences for diverse social groups. Decoloniality, in its pluralized interfaces, might pave the way in this direction. The pluralized interfaces embrace decolonizing our own thought intertwined with why we do things in particular ways in the everyday classes. This means conceiving the student as an incomplete subject of affect, an active learner who is capable of creating dialogues to question the universality of ideas and action together with the teacher. By assuming the position of a learner, the one who teaches while learn, the Freirean teacher might promote mutual respect and problematizations of his/her own ontoepistemologies, inviting the students to reconstruct knowledge to favor mainly those in vulnerable social conditions.

Including the students’ home languages, affections, dreams, contestations of oppressive forces in their own communities, in local-global contexts, also requires a change in the teachers’ and schools’ routine. Listening to what/who is generating uncomfortable situations for the student, for example, is an exercise of educational empathy. Far from being total agreement with the students and institutions, Freirean love and affection are political and educational acts in dynamic mode, and they permit both - teacher and student - to contest their attitude against the backdrop of current crises, as a collective project of life. This presupposes our understanding of our/the students’ historical reasons why we/they see the world and position ourselves/themselves while articulating new emotions, feelings, ideas, ways of being with otherness (for example, the minoritized groups in terms of number and power). Horizontal hierarchical interventions in our/their own conditions are fundamental complements for decolonial Southern and affective education.

TOWARDS (DE)COLONIALITY

“How is it possible to get there, departing from there. (sic) It has to departure from here. So, there is a walk, a crossing, unquestionably.”⁹ (^{Freire, 2005}, p. 70). It is in this way that decolonial Southern attempts have to departure: from ontological-epistemological-methodological paradigms (^{Takaki, 2019}; ²⁰²¹) arising from minoritized locality.

Speaking from my locality, drawing on critical education (Freirean, decolonial/Southern perspectives) and being aware of the need to rethink affect for non-heterosexual students majoring in English at a public university, I have been trying to create space for them to perform activities in which they can present, contest essentialist notions of gender, race, and ethnics - to cite a few examples - and combat structural racism. The great majority of such students come from underprivileged sociohistorical contexts and the question of love and affection are crucial and it is even more so in relation to those who might have had traumatic life experiences. Through opportunities to make short video clips, informal seminars in groups or individually, they have significantly become more culturally-sensitive citizens. Not only do they become self-conscious of their potential to enact transformations in their discourses and human relations, but also help me decolonize traditional forms of assessment grounded on written tasks and standardized language. Putting it differently, such students have created a sense of coauthorship of programs for the English classes and evaluation, including critical views and performativity, multimodality, translanguaging, creativity implicated in love, affection, care, and concern for each other together with me. My routine is guided by ^{Grosfoguel’s (2016}), ^{Pessoa (2019}) and ^{Pessoa, Silvestre and Borelli (2019}) principles.

In conformity with ^{Grosfoguel (2016}), one difference that has to be identified is the fact that the Westernized universities operate by “[…] carrying the Cartesian legacy as a criterion to validate the production of science and knowledge.”¹⁰ (^{Grosfoguel, 2016}, p. 30). In his view, four intertwined “genocides/epistemicides” (idem, p. 31) are brought about from such logics in this century

[…] 1) against the Muslims and Jews in the Al-Andalus conquest in the name of “purity of blood”; 2) against the indigenous people in the American Continent, first, and, then, against the aborigines in Asia; 3) against the Africans imprisoned in their territory and, afterwards, enslaved in the American Continent; and 4) against women who practiced and transmitted Indo-European knowledge in Europe, who were burnt live under the accusation of being witches.¹¹ (^{Grosfoguel, 2016}, p. 31)

Muslins and Jews were obliged to convert into Christianity, the religion for blood purity. Methods to burn written manuscripts of indigenous practices were implemented in the Americas, cancelling native spirituality and knowledge. Seeing people without religion meant they had no souls and were treated like animals (^{Grosfoguel, 2016}). Racial discrimination starts from this point creating discourses on biological and cultural biases. It would be a sin to enslave indigenous people at work, with the exception of the Mouriscos. Instead, Africans were brought to the Americas to substitute them. That was the consolidation of the structure of the colonial modern world, explains the author (idem, p. 39).

Leadership to organize policy and economics in local communities, autonomy, and ancestral knowledge lead Indo-European women to be burnt alive. Considered as witches, their bodies were used to transmit knowledge by orality and represented a menace for the aristocracy. Patriarchal regimes stemmed from such violence. In short, the power of Eurocentric Modernity derived from racial/sexist (^{Grosfoguel, 2016}) and patriarchal relations aiming at the production of wealth accumulation to reinforce global capitalism.

In this sense, a process of decolonization starting from knowledge which was made invisible and counting on diverse traditions is claimed by such an author. Hence, pluriversal meanings with multiple solutions to decolonize Westernized university appears to be an alternative (^{Grosfoguel, 2016}, p. 46) aiming at the following principles:

Recognition of the provincialism and of the epistemic racism/sexism resulting from a genocide/epistemicide implemented by the colonial and patriarchal project of the 16^th century;¹²

Interruption of the universalism where one (“uni”) decides for the others, that is, the Western epistemology;¹³

Promote the epistemic diversity for the canon of thought creating the plurality of meanings, concepts, in which interepistemic conversation, among the many traditions, produce new redefinitions for old concepts and create new plural concepts with “many deciding for many” (pluri-verso).¹⁴

It has been observed that ^{Grosfoguel (2016}) is not alone in this enterprise. The beforementioned traditions encompass a pluralized production of meanings within different ecological and entangled perspectives, as we shall see.

A SIP OF THE ECOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE AND INTERCULTURAL TRANSLATION

^{Santos (2018}; ²⁰¹⁹) draws on the Freirean sense of political, affective, and social responsibility for transformations: “[…] for you to transform the world you have to initiate a little of transformation in yourself. It is a mutual compromise - ours, the world’s, the world’s and ours.”¹⁵ (^{Freire, 2005}, p. 148). In doing so, we destabilize our “self fetishism”, as ^{Santos (2018}, p. 53) puts it.

The copresence of contexts of social movements and struggles with diverse knowledge, feelings, claims, affinities, divergencies, paradoxes, risks and the study of their possibilities characterize the ecology of knowledge (^{Santos, 2018}). Under this assumption, identifying aspects, issues, priorities, enactments in certain contexts is vital to understand locality and to avoid generalizations coming from transnational circulations of people and ideas accelerated by the new media.

Paraphrasing the author, the ecology of knowledge presupposes intercultural translation, whose aim is to promote the articulation of social movements and struggles against colonialism, patriarchalism, and capitalism. It involves a cognitive and collective effort made in informal spaces, through fluidity, anonymity, and orality forwarded by further critical reflections which are publicized (^{Santos, 2018}).

One example of intercultural translation reflects the idea of corazonar¹⁶ (^{Santos, 2018}, p. 154): “It is a revitalizing process of a subjectivity which is entangled with others, highlighting what helps strengthen sharing and responsibility.”. It entails the copresence of bodies, feelings, images, sounds, smells, and tools of people in vulnerable situations calling for meanings other than those generated by mainstream Westernized epistemologies towards social/cognitive justice.

The interlink between decoloniality and ecological perspectives, through Freirean education, resides in the need to open space for the subjects, who were unjustly erased from history to participate in the articulations with other subalternized groups with diverse meanings, feelings, libraries, claims, and social practices to readdress strategies to interrupt radical violence. This does not mean absence of renegotiations of meanings with radical otherness, a challenge for (self)critical reflexivity within decolonial Southern social/cognitive justice and affection.

I now present and discuss some findings connected to ongoing research on decolonial Southern social/cognitive justice with a place for affection.

THE STUDY

In this part, I report some of my ongoing research findings in the field of teacher linguistic-cultural education, and technologies. In tune with the decolonial Southern social/cognitive justice ingrained in Freirean affection and educational devotion towards the collective other, I have been developing a project, whose aim is to investigate how participants construct meanings around linguistic cultural education permeated by questions of social/cognitive justice and its dilemmas and also how they problematize such questions attempting to envision possibilities within differences in ways that contest the radical global forces.

In order to attend to the sociocultural, political, ethical, and educational aspects of the data generation,¹⁷ the current participants of my research had to read my project and sign an Informed Consent Form. They are:

They were selected according to the sequence with which they responded affirmatively to my invitation to participate in this project.¹⁸ The research methodology prioritizes the qualitative and interpretive processes of meaning making grounded on each participant’s context and on my own (as coordinator of this project), based on the theoretical framework I have presented so far. The data constructed/generated is two-folded: online interviews and questionnaires for each term. It initiated in 2019.

I concentrate on two questions and their corresponding responses firstly and, subsequently, I present two others with a focus on Freirean affection and love. For each term, one question for the interview (via WhatsApp) and one for the questionnaire (via e-mail) were used. The first question related to the interview was: Is the question of social justice important for your current life context?¹⁹; and the other for the questionnaire: How do you understand social justice, that is, what counts as social justice?²⁰

In many instances, the participants’ ideas and positions were reinforced in recursive mode, appearing in other answers for the other question. This does not cause any loss in terms of meaning. On the contrary, it was evidence of their coherent engagement with the subject matter and the richness of their repertories and experience.

PRESENTING AND DISCUSSING PARTICIPANTS’ MEANINGS

Concerning the first question, all of the participants were unanimous to affirm that social/cognitive justice, in its broader sense, permeates their life context.²¹ Such adherence is justified under the following participant’s allegation:

Pa:²² Yes, the question of social justice is very important to me, as I am a teacher of English language, I work with teacher education and I think that, we, professors of all fields, should enact to understand and combat social injustices such as inequality among the peoples, the disrespect for cultural diversities and the lack of access to basic rights such as education, health and work. According to the Report of the Human Development of December by the UN, inequality in the world has reached records, and Brazil is vice-champion of concentration of wealth, as 1% of the richer population gets 28,3% of the GDP, losing only to Qatar (29%). This means that the economic expansion in the last decades has not resulted in fewer inequalities within and among the countries.²³

Asking a particular question means to construct a springboard to get more than expected. Pa portrays an imbalance not only between hegemonic and non-hegemonic culture but also among the economic situations of the countries. It can be inferred that high culture, for example, originated in the Global North (^{Santos, 2018}) has verticalized power and privilege, engendering a form of coloniality. Inequality restricts vulnerable people’s access to life chances, whose main pillars comprise education, health, and work, as pointed out by Pa. Such crises constitute Pa’s concern while seeking to connect her role as higher educator to the demands of the broader society embedded in complex historical diversified contexts. Arguing for a transdisciplinary attitude among her colleagues with a view to reduce inequalities, Pa’s assumption hints that the English language education is crucial in this endeavor. Hence, pluriversal meanings with multiple “solutions” to decolonize Westernized university appears to be an alternative.

In fact, I interpret that Pa accentuates the ecology of knowledge, as ^{Santos (2018}) postulates, to better understand the articulations of multiple cultures and domestic and transnational economic expansions to not only resist, but also to minimize social inequities. In this sense, English teacher education²⁴ and the English language have an indispensable role to play, in which she and (probably) her colleagues are conceived as active agents of possible social transformations. This recognition may come from Freirean lessons as a daily effort. Such an endeavor presupposes awareness of the political nature of language, going beyond reading and writing, in other words, “[…] critical understanding of his²⁵ own experience and of the learner.”²⁶ (^{Freire, 2005}, p. 129). Thus, resources for epistemological-ontological-methodological (^{Takaki, 2016}) directions can be amplified with the “input of different sciences”²⁷ (^{Freire, 2005}, p. 135) in dialogue with those by/from indigenous communities, encompassing their cosmologies, conceptions of nature (non-linear and unpredictable daily procedures), and ways of coexistence.

In a similar vein, social daily realities are not part of a natural order for U4, undergraduate student, as shown below:

U4: SJ²⁸ is fundamental. We live in a capitalist system. We consume even when we do not perceive and this feeds this system, social inequity. Social inequality is a social problem due to the bad distribution of resources, capitals. Understanding SJ and what can be done for us to become citizens conscious of our places in the world. Understanding that our simple actions generate consequences, such as prejudice, discourse of the communities that feed inequity through their actions, and that is why critical knowledge towards respect is crucial subject that promulgate social union. Studying, reading, researching has helped me understand the other and his/her reality, it has helped me to create empathy to be a better citizen. In this way, Sharon Todd, in her article “Teaching with ignorance”, points out that the more we feel with each other, the better, we can have a notion of what is important for the other. It is crucial to see a community as subjects who promulgate a way of social union […] welcoming differences, prioritizing respect. We have power to understand our space and that no one needs to be underrated. Educating critical and conscious citizens through knowledge.²⁹

One can infer that an attempt to redesign the development of alternative conceptualizations of language, society and culture in diverse contexts is present in U4’s claims. Despite recognizing the bad distribution of capitals, U4 sees herself as conniving by feeding the very system that reinforces such a discrepancy: capitalism. A mature critical perception of the fact that discourse might be used as a tool to produce prejudice is raised. Such awareness displaces traditional conceptions of language, those which assumes neutrality. Furthermore, U4 signals a (self)critical reflexivity (^{Freire, 2005}; ^{Souza, 2011}; ^{Takaki, 2019}; ²⁰²¹) posture in being aware of her locus of enunciation as a consumer implicated/entangled in complicit ways with capitalism, and as a student who is capable of using theory to envisage collectivity. Also, U4 reminds us of the role of the community members as potent subjects, and of the importance of teacher education together with the notion of language, which accentuates its political and affective nature.

One can apprehend a significant change in her understanding of social justice, although the ideas of empathy and respect are insufficient to weaken capitalism, which perpetuates in the Global North and is also cultivated differently in many parts of the world. U4’s capacity to externalize her approaching to the other to understand her reality and exercise empathy in ways that “no one needs to be underrated” is a result of the way she sees herself in implicated ways with heterogeneity. In granting this perception and together with knowledge she has been constructing in the academic domain, a possible way to broaden this notion would be questioning the implications of such articulations: when is it situated within the very logics of capitalism encompassing commercial interests of the State, institutions, including educational ones with, for example, standardized curricula?

A comprehension of equity through a complex relationship including the capitalist lenses is presented by another undergraduate student.

U5: Equity will need to be changed all the time to reach at its objective: equality and justice. And this necessity, it is reflected in the way we relate to each other, in the way we do business, how we consume, what we study, how we behave […] and all this is constantly progressing […] many points to be corrected and adjusted.³⁰

Approaching equality as a social historical conception embodied in daily human routine is hinted in the lead-up citation, which contributes significantly to growing criticism of ossified rationalized notions revolving around social/cognitive justice and affection. Another key point is the perception of a collective serious engagement towards reflections upon the affective relationship among ourselves. This is suggestive of an essential dimension to be included and expanded taking into account the idea of “progressing”, for example, the increasing heterogeneity in online-offline highly interconnected spaces within fluxes of immigrants, transnational services, and capitals.

With reference to capitals, U5 accentuates a powerful observation of modern economics. Through addressing the two themes - consumption and business -, one may infer that the consequences of capitalism need to be contested and discontinued, as Pa also emphasizes. This suggests that struggles over understanding how we relate to each other, how we consume, behave and what we study go beyond discursive levels (^{Chun, 2017}). Critically engaged consciousness of people’s conditions today, contextually mediated, call for reinventions. ^{Chun (2017}) interrogates: is capitalism an inescapable uncreative agentive force? U5 conveys the impression that equality, justice, affection, and capitalism are not absolute conceptions. On the contrary, their meanings are constantly shifting and contesting, an acute understanding. Another insinuation comes with the idea of “many points to be corrected and adjusted”, which might require an ecological view encompassing rigorosidade (^{Freire, 2005}), intercultural translation and corazonar (^{Santos, 2018}). Corazonar means indigenous knowledge constructed within spirituality and states of being, going beyond pedagogical scientific objectivism and seeking to establish sensibility in the continuous educational horizontal process.

A graduate student alludes to a rich experience:

G2: In no other moment of my life, SJ has been as important as in the present context of my life [...] I said that because I am a volunteer teacher of a project carried out by UEMS³¹Acolhe. I teach Portuguese language as host language to immigrants from various countries, Russia, Japan, Porto Rico, Paraguay, Bolivia, but the majority of them is Venezuelan, Colombian, and Haitian. The focus of this project, apart from Portuguese language, is to work on the recent immigrants’ immediate needs, for example, everyday situations such as how to rent a house, how to take a bus, how to go to a health station, how to write a resumé, etc. […] to help them with survival items: documentation, job interviews. A report of a Venezuelan woman, doctor, called my attention as she and her husband decided to come to Brazil when their salary of a month permitted them to buy only a box of eggs and here she is now working as a caretaker of an elderly and she has been waiting for the process of necessary evaluations to have her certificate as a doctor validated.³²

Through rendering Portuguese a powerful means to try to integrate the diverse immigrants in the capital of Mato Grosso do Sul, in the extreme West in Brazil, G2 provides another version of social/cognitive justice centered on an instrumental paradigm for language teaching. Under this dimension and by the reports presented, insufficiency in Portuguese proficiency, as in any other “mother” tongue, represents a gate keeper for survival, let alone for social inclusion in the case of such immigrants. This perception is supported by many theorists postulating that language seen as discrete items for instrumental purposes and language right per se, in this case, Portuguese, leaves behind notions of local knowledge and community, which emerge during the students’ performativity (^{Pennycook, 2010}; ^{Canagarajah, 2013}, among others).

Performativity, thus, would include questions of rigorosidade (^{Freire, 2005}), epistemic diversity (^{Grosfoguel, 2016}), intercultural translation and corazonar (^{Santos, 2018}, p. 152), drawing attention to the students’ various modes for deconstruction (^{Derrida, 1997}), reconstruction and renegotiation of meanings with entangled translingual elements and diverse strategies (^{García and Wei, 2014}; ^{Canagarajah, 2013}). I read translanguaging from a decolonial Southern perspective whose affection is built in complex embodiment of images, gestures, sounds, emotions, smells, and strategies also elaborated on the spot, very often not to be reached by Westernized epistemologies-ontologies-methodologies (^{Takaki, 2016}). How the students’ analyze their talk through questioning the implications of their own meanings and of the others in their community and in broader society might open up alternatives that recognize the immigrants’ affections to “disinvent and reconstitute” (^{Makoni and Pennycook, 2006}) Portuguese as gains. I say gains in the sense of the creation of a political space that recognizes the immigrants’ capacity to learn/practice Portuguese, among themselves, in their own space of conviviality, outside of university. Such autonomy and learning can/should contest the colonial knowledge regime that might go unnoticed in mere instrumental Portuguese teaching as host language.

Another participant, Pb, foregrounds a political viewpoint with a keen eye on the inner heterogeneity and the lack of articulation among minoritized social movements, and also the challenge with which the left-wing party will have to deal, as shown in the excerpt below:

Pb: In Brazil, there is a tendency to put everything in the same cauldron while in the minoritarian movements there is a fragmentation, you know [...] as in the case of the elections last year with fake news and as we see all this political process in which one part has to account for everything and the other part does not account for anything. Nobody charges, right? And such groups, in general, are obliged to act correctly in accordance with the world view of a group that has more power and, if we decide on a fair play, as it is said it should be, we are in a disadvantageous situation because we don’t have the same tools and weapons. And if we decide to play their game, we will be giving support to ethics which is not very acceptable […] I see myself in this way, but not wanting to be domineering and dictate the paths, I see myself in this situation.³³

This seems clear evidence that social/cognitive justice is a political act which should start from the perspective and agency of the minoritized groups to transform their life chances in ways that also favor the collective affections. Here esperançar (^{Freire, 2005}) seems pivotal, which signifies dream and work to reduce inequities as an educational project of life. Subtly, Pb insinuates the need to listen to such disempowered people, whose tools and weapons do not enjoy the same status as those of more powerful groups. The latter even appealed to fake news to play their game (to win the last elections) with specific agendas enmeshed with political strategies of domination.

Not having voices listened and attended to reiterates what ^{Santos (2019}), ^{Quijano (2007}), ^{Grosfoguel (2016}), and ^{Madonado-Torres et al. (2018}), among others, have been criticizing in terms of epistemicide coming from the Global North. Not only standardized world views were imposed on such minoritized groups, but also compliance to life procedures reinforcing the monocultural, monolinguistic (^{Pennycook and Makoni, 2020}), colonial, patriarchal and capitalist mode (^{Santos, 2018}). This is bolstered by Pb’s identification of the power exerted by the dominant side over the less powerful one. A follow-up of his reasoning claims for the “Interruption of the universalism where one (“uni”) decides for the others, that is, the Western epistemology” (^{Grosfoguel, 2016}, p. 46) at the risk of being repetitive.

Despite signaling the importance of resisting such a game, Pb recognizes the lack of organization on the part of the social movements with a view to favor ethical reconstructions in the Brazilian scenario. More sustained dialogues grasping situated political ethical aims the use of technology and language to avoid putting “everything in the same packet” appear to be at stake in Pb’s argumentation. Applying critical literacies to understand the differences between existing and emergent dimensions of competing minoritized movements by rendering a qualitative understanding of them can/may/might shed light on how social/cognitive justice can/may/might also (re)produce structures of new inequalities within standardized emotions.

In this respect, ^{Santos (2018}, p. 66) asks: “What are the objectives of the struggle and the means to attain them?”³⁴ He draws attention to the different types of struggles, aims, their beginnings and ends, the parties involved and their ever-changing meanings with digital interfaces. In short, the rural and/or urban contexts in which each struggle is situated. Such struggles bring the ecology of knowledge to the fore. Its performative dimension highlights narratives, memories, oral virtual culture (a principle inspired by Freirean inclusive nature of affection, love, and respect for differences), that is,

[…] an artisanal knowledge proper to indigenous peoples and peasants, gave rise to a new and complex epistemology in which the oral text was combined with the written text and the knowledge proper to the indigenous peoples was complemented by the knowledge of solidary social scientists.³⁵ (^{Santos, 2018}, p. 59)

According to such a theorist, the “ecology of knowledges” (^{Santos, 2018}, p. 8) counts on the recognition of hidden and emergent knowledge, claims, risks, opportunities of social groups and “intercultural and interpolitical translation” (^{Santos, 2018}, p. 59), which are tools for intelligibility towards the identification of paradoxes and possible alliances to combat capitalism, colonialism and patriarchalism.

Focusing on decolonial/Southern social/cognitive justice, another participant emphasized the importance of understanding the students’ critical views and agency concerning social injustices. Not imposing his/her views, Pc follows Freirean affective attitude to expand their perceptions via discussions and debates. In responding to the interview question: “How can memory undo polarizations, such as: urban and rural spaces, nature and technology, man and woman, black and white, local and global; present and past, and regenerate the relations between these two extremes?”,³⁶ Pc announces a position, which is influenced by Freirean affection and love as tools, which decolonial Southern theories seem to miss, to problematize otherwise the challenges to deconstruct and go beyond dichotomies.

Pc: My pedagogical practices are driven by a search for understanding the students’ critique in relation to social injustices [...]. As a teacher, my weapon is critical education. I do not propose to indoctrinate anyone. My classroom is a barn of discussions and debates. My experience has shown that students, in general, have affiliated with those who struggle for a fairer society. Sharpening their perceptions has been my task […]. The vulnerable and the unjustly treated people have accessed these “public virtual squares” to raise their voices in discourse of struggles, resistance, intolerance, indignation in relation to the injustices they have suffered. Their shouts echo […]. They reach any place with power, threatening the hegemony of the so called powerful people. The fact that many white Brazilians have had generous and sweet cleaning ladies in the past, remembering the delicious food they made, having some of their belongings as memories and considering them as “family”, all these memories are not enough to regenerate or undo the structural racism existent in our society. Visiting the Pelourinho in Salvador and remember that, in that place, black people who arrived from Africa were beaten and traded, also does not undo the polarization between the whites and the blacks […]. The first impressions of the world or the most superficial are, usually, polarized. The children’s stories, in general, bring the hero and the villain, as if the human being was good or bad. The child starts to understand the world defining extremes, in a simple and naïve way: this is beautiful, that is ugly; this is good, that is bad, etc. After that, growth, maturity, and knowledge of life teach this individual that being good or bad is relative. That between the white (presence of all colors) and the black (absence of all colors) there is an endless range of tones. That the black color, for example, is not enough for a person to be seen as black, at least in Brazil. […] In short, it is by maturity, understanding of life, by knowledge, by suffering, by human interactions, by struggles, by militancy, and in conflicts which we go through, that we understand that there is an infinite whole between urban and rural, nature and technology, men and women, present and past. Besides that, it is exactly in such in-between-spaces that human survival is found.³⁷ (My emphasis)

Pc rethinks her attitude with powerful and emotive tones in her narrative. She is vigilant about the dichotomies aggravated by racist human relations, while resorting to critical education to recreate affective spaces otherwise. The idea is to go beyond that, with a view to denaturalize common sense around racism, power, bodies, affection, and love, interrupt consent, and actively participate and reconstruct society for more collective interests. Being (self)critical reflexive, which can be translated into an exercise of problematizations, is crucial to evaluate not only “in favor of what and who”³⁸, but also “against whom we are educators”³⁹ (^{Freire, 2005}, p. 161).

In this moment, it is worth interrogating the historical reasons or groups or things who/which control what counts as race, gender, ethnics, class, religion, and ways of being, feeling, thinking, and doing (^{Walsh, 2018}). As a result, coliving within situated and dynamic loci of enunciation entangled with many other differences would not be exempt from social/cognitive justice and critical affection, struggles for the creation of opportunities to experience processes of critical literacy following Freirean terms.

For another question of the questionnaire, “Apart from the multiplicity of voices and looks, what else is missing for the people who feel excluded to participate with more legitimation in the classroom and in research, for example?”⁴⁰ Pd postulates that:

Pd: I believe that a teacher and/or the researcher need to have a more attentive look and a really open listening to this multiplicity of voices and ways of seeing. We have our own preconceived ideas, values, word views which prevent us from seeing/listening to the other as he/she really needs to be seen/listened to. Many times we go to the classroom/research field with our own aims and pre-selected and pre-conceived research questions and maybe the objectives and the questions of our students and/or research participants would be completely different. An example of research which might work in contexts of vulnerability is the Exploratory Practice (Dick Allright, Inés Kayon de Müller are some of the most important names), in which the students and/or participants are integrated to the research as researchers.⁴¹ (My emphasis).

Pd shows evidence that, if a teacher and/or researcher acknowledge(s) his/her complicity and modesty in teaching, learning, and researching, chances are that the students will feel more sensitively integrated in the process of knowledge construction. Fondness, affection, and care are implicit in this approach, which is closely related to Freirean teaching in terms of affection, love, valorizing the students as coauthors of meanings and projects, if they are invited to become co-researchers. In particular, Pd places emphasis on the teacher and the researcher’s power to understand that otherness is interlaced in his/her own (self)critical reflexive potential (^{Freire, 2005}; ^{Souza, 2011}; ^{Takaki, 2019}; ²⁰²¹) to produce (non) academic knowledge.

It is worth reminding that respect to differences entails exposure to risks. Accepting the unforeseeable meanings and the fragility (modest attitude incapable to predict the outcome) to respond to the other (^{Todd, 2003}, p. 37) is an ethical matter, resembling Freirean affection and love on the basis of changeable differences. Drawing on Bauman’s idea of being for empathy, ^{Todd (2003}) exemplifies two cases: “projective empathy” and “identificatory empathy” (idem, p. 49). In the first one, a teacher asks her Canadian third grade students to refrain from eating anything for a day to understand Third World hunger. Students are supposed to put themselves in unknown people’s shoes and to discuss this experience in the following class. In the second case, a simulation exercise was proposed by another teacher in order the students to experience suffering by the victims of the Holocaust, by means of their attaching to emotions, love, images, testimony, and texts. For the author, these anecdotes reflecting a demand for empathy are not free from contestations and call for questions.

For instance, what forms of togetherness and otherness are at work in the demand for empathy and in empathy proper? When we empathize with others, do we engage each one through her difference, through her alterity, or is empathy always already about “overcoming” difference in the hope of finding some common ground? And finally, does empathy allow for learning from the Other as a condition for nonviolence? (^{Todd, 2003}, p. 45)

It is perceived that empathy may not be devoid of coloniality; one is in control of establishing/creating space for it departing from a limited filter of the other shaped by one’s self, as ^{Todd (2003}) warns. It is projective, that is, it forces the other into one’s portrait, and it says more about the self of the person in control and less about the other (^{Todd, 2003}). “Each knowledge system must realize that in moments of dominance, it may destroy life-giving alternatives available in the other. Each paradigm must sustain the otherness of other knowledge systems” (^{Visvanathan, 2007}, p. 215). The way we render assistance to underrepresented community members might pacify and universalize the affections and love embedded in social movements, concealing subtle and dangerous strategies that empower the dominant elite, while maintaining exclusion and poverty, another reason to invest in (self)critical reflexivity within decolonial Southern cognitive/social justice and affection, bearing in mind its enigma (^{Takaki, 2021}).

FINAL INFERENCES

In this paper, I have presented and discussed some thoughts about decolonial/Southern social/cognitive justice and affection in the light of (self)critical reflexivity to understand them as socially (re)constructed in the encounter with differences. The participants’ engagement with social justice revealed that intellectual activity is entangled with ethical interactions, emotional attachment, and attentiveness to the other, whose basic rights accompanied by their narratives, languages and ways of being have been looted by Eurocentrism. In conclusion, decolonial/Southern social/cognitive justice means an everyday encounter with our own differences, conceptions of power, affection, love, and of the others’ (people and institutions) as an effort to permanently learn from and with the contextualized pluralities of meanings.

Denying the incomplete and dynamic nature of such conceptions might lead one to think they have predictable points of departure and arrival: from (A) to (Z). It is worth keeping in mind, along these lines, how empathy, affection, love, and learning, in their pluralized and situated sense, under ceaseless revisions of (self)critical reflexivity, can contribute to the reduction of violence in social educational environment in which the research participants are inserted.