Critical science in university coloniality?

Abstract

Taking as a starting point the distinction between colonialism (the institutionalized power exercised by one nation over another), and coloniality (cultural and epistemological colonialism that remains after the end of colonialism) developed by Decolonial Thought, we are interested in reflecting upon the critical science in South America (understood as a reconstitution of critical thought, that is, as a critique of critical thought), within the current economic-political and epistemological contexts. Regarding the surrounding economic-political situatedness, we propose the construction of the descriptive-prescriptive category “accumulation by dispossession at world level”. Regarding our epistemological situations, as South American Critical Scientists, we endorse, on the one hand, the need to develop and use autochthonous categories of thought and analysis; and on the other hand, the need to abandon our exclusive belonging to the dimension of the theoretical and descriptive, so as to be able to move epistemologically toward a science more comprehensive of the dimensions of performance and praxis.