O potencial da extensão como opção de pensamento decolonial: um estudo sobre a ação extensionista no jornal dos atingidos pela barragem da Samarco

Abstract

We are involved in a structural arrangement of the world that reproduces material, subjective, and symbolic colonial violence. Among these forms of violence is the denial of the capacity of subalternized peoples to produce valid and legitimate knowledge, resulting in the silencing of thoughts, knowledge, and realities deemed irrelevant, irrational, mere objects of research because they are separated from the impositions of the civilizing modernity of the centers. This colonialist silencing and denial is incorporated into the thought and reasoning of modernity, as well as into the product of its expression: scientific knowledge. As an alternative to this process, decolonial authors advocate for the legitimation and validation of other, non-hegemonic forms of knowledge through a dialogue between various forms of knowledge, which confronts hegemony head-on, reclaiming the power of all subalternized populations to tell and make their own history. Having established this, reflections were made on the possible spaces capable of catalyzing and potentiating the emergence of the decolonization of knowledge, that is, a space that allows for the consideration, validation, and legitimation of "other" thoughts and knowledge, different from the hegemonic one. In this work, this space is seen as a potentiality in the exercise of university extension. Henceforth, this research aims to understand how power relations and the construction of knowledge occur in the extension activities of the newspaper "A Sirene" with those affected by the Fundão dam, in light of the decolonial approach. To this end, participatory research, memory-based interviews, informal conversations, and documentary research were used to construct the corpus of analysis. The results obtained point to a communicative, dialogical, and horizontal extension perspective as a potential for the decolonization of knowledge.