Ni con dios ni con el diablo : Tales of survival, resistance, and rebellion from a reluctant academic

Contemporary social movements challenge dominant ideas about democracy, freedom, independence, and autonomy as the daily experiences of the marginalized show these ideas have not lead to decolonization. When one examines academic knowledge production and academic institutions, common assumptions about “autonomy” and “freedom” clash with the expectation to submit to institutionalized cannons. At issue here are the ways in which the academic establishment reproduces the coloniality of power. For radical sociologist Aníbal Quijano, coloniality of power is a pattern of domination that articulates the multiple forms of exploitation that took hold at a global scale with the conquest of Abia Yala (The Americas). As Lao-Montes (2010) explains, the exploitation of work by capital, as a pattern of coloniality, is expressed in all forms of labor organization that are subordinated to the process of accumulation of global capital. For those of us committed to knowledge production from a decolonizing standpoint, the challenge is to elaborate strategies of resistance to the reproduction of coloniality in our daily practice. This autoethnographic paper explores (de)coloniality from the author’s experiences in survival and resistance as she faces the precarization and privatization of academic work and the possibilities for deeply emancipatory knowledge production.