Detailed Program - International Conference Ratio Ethica: Toward Epistemic Justice

Detailed Program

Monday, August 24

16:30–18:00 — Opening session: Opening Ceremony

Welcome by university representatives
Opening address — Rajani Sudan, Southern Methodist University, Texas, USA, President of the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts (SLSA)
Opening remarks by the Coordinators of the Conference — Paulo Daniel Farah, Rosane Borges and Artur Matuck

18:00 — Reception

18:30–20:30 — Music program

Musical performance: “Voices of Women in Movement”, by the Coral Mulheres em Movimento (Diadema – SP), conducted by Luciana Silva Avelino. The choir promotes an encounter between memory, resistance, citizenship and female empowerment through collective singing and a repertoire of popular Brazilian music.

Venue: University of São Paulo (USP) – Butantã Campus (Cidade Universitária). Building: FFLCH – Faculty of Philosophy, Languages and Human Sciences. Department: History and Geography.
History Auditorium (Auditório de História) — Av. Prof. Lineu Prestes, 338.

Tuesday, August 25

10:00–11:30 — Panel: Rethinking linguistic diversity for Indigenous and marginalized languages in South Africa and Brazil

Thematic axis: Axis 8 — Linguistic Diversity and Epistemic Justice

Quentin Williams (South Africa)
Jason Richardson (South Africa)
Babalwayashe Molate (South Africa)
Paulo Daniel Farah (USP)
Camila De Oliveira (USP)
Kleber Silva (UnB)

Panel’s Abstract

This panel seeks to advance a decolonial linguistic framework in the study of plurilingualism, language policy, multilingualism, family multilingualism, language and disability studies, and the study of indigenous and “historically marginalised language” (HML) speakers. The papers will demonstrate how linguistic diversity and epistemic justice are linked to the ideals of racial justice, multilingual education, and equality. The papers presented by colleagues in Brazil and South Africa demonstrate that both countries, although they exhibit profound inequalities, serve as ideal case studies due to their shared histories of colonial oppression and current efforts to reform the contexts and institutions of indigenous and HML speakers.

The panel brings together papers by researchers in the global south who are rethinking the terms and conditions of plurilingualism, multilingualism, family multilingualism, disability linguistics, multilingual education, and culture for indigenous and historically marginalized multilingual speakers in South Africa and Brazil. The question of how to write into policy linguistic diversity and ensuring epistemic justice for indigenous and “historically marginalized language” (HML) speakers are central to any decolonial linguistic framework in the global south. In many ways, indigenous and HML speakers have always been a defining part of any multilingual context in the global south but are often left out of discourses, debates and discussions by language makers, institution builders, resource framers, abstract theoretical frameworks of language policy planners and other forms of gatekeepers who determine and define language diversity and epistemic justice. While this panel will not offer final solutions and conclusions to the challenges that will be raised, it will ask: Should we be more explicit about the linguistic strategies in our recognition and inclusion of indigenous and HML speakers when we scope epistemic justice? Is it possible to present a unified decolonial linguistic framework that scopes and captures the multilingualism of indigenous and HML speakers? These are some of the questions we begin to ask.

Keywords: decolonial linguistics, global south, linguistic diversity, family multilingualism, multilingual education, language and disability

Tracing the Miseducation of Kaaps Speakers in South Africa: Challenges and Opportunities for Inclusion and Epistemic Justice

By Quentin Williams, Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research, University of the Western Cape (CMDR) — co-authored with Veronique Williams and Theo(dore) Rodrigues

Over the last few years, there has been an intense focus on the practical needs and ways to raise the functions of Kaaps in schools and higher education in the Western Cape, alongside other historically marginalized languages such as isiXhosa, N|uu and Khoekhoegowab. At the heart of it has been to find ways to implement an inclusive language policy to include speakers of those marginalized languages so they may fully participate in South Africa’s knowledge economy. But the question remains, how should we proceed to meaningfully include languages such as Kaaps in our higher education context?

In this talk, I trace the use of Kaaps in the classroom and its potential inclusion in higher education curricula through two studies. I first report on an experiment of translanguaging in Kaaps through the translation of English science learning materials into Kaaps at the basic education level. This experiment was completed as a qualitative study focusing on how grade 6 learners in the science classroom learn through Kaaps on the Cape Flats (Western Cape). This portion of the talk will demonstrate how Kaaps learners engage with multimodal bilingual learning materials and what needs are required to expand Kaaps beyond our basic education system. I then report on a higher education study of a large project on the intellectualisation of Kaaps through terminology and bilingual learning materials development at a historically disadvantaged university in the Western Cape.

I conclude the talk by proposing with a call for expanding research into the development and use of Kaaps as a language of teaching and learning and literacy from the basic education level to higher education. We also propose broader efforts to develop and implement an inclusive language policy that captures and permanently restores the historically marginalized voices and agency of Kaaps speakers.

Language and Disability Studies: Working in the Margins

By Jason Richardson, Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research (CMDR)

This paper reflects on the ethical, methodological, and epistemological challenges of conducting research at the intersection of language and disability studies. Drawing on the concept of marginality as both a site of oppression and resistance, I argue that the conflicts encountered in disability research can become productive spaces for knowledge generation. Through a reflexive examination of my own research journey, I explore three interconnected conflicts that have shaped my work as a sociolinguist and disability scholar: the politics of disclosure, the negotiation of insider–outsider identities in ethnographic research, and the role of vulnerability and humour in encounters with disability and difference.

In these vignettes, I argue that working in the margins requires researchers to engage critically with their own positionality, vulnerability, and ethical responsibilities. Rather than viewing conflict as an obstacle to research, I suggest that it can serve as a productive site from which new forms of knowledge emerge. The paper contributes to ongoing discussions in language and disability studies by demonstrating how reflexivity, disclosure, and vulnerability shape both the production of knowledge and the relationships through which that knowledge is made possible. Ultimately, I argue that the margins are not merely sites of exclusion, but productive spaces from which ethical, situated, and transformative forms of knowledge can emerge.

Theorising Family Multilingualism in Africa through a Southern Lens and Ikhaya

By Babalwayashe Molate, Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research, University of the Western Cape

This paper adopts a critical approach to the study of Family Multilingualism, which has the potential to grow Family Language Policy (FLP) research by addressing the underrepresentation of southern theories in sociolinguistics (Gomes, 2018). While FLP research has grown and is diversifying its scope, available studies in this field remain largely northern, both geographical and conceptually, with only limited research in African contexts and rooted in the Eurocentric framings of multilingualism. Informed by Epistemologies of the South (Escobar, 2016), I draw on local epistemes and the existing critical reflections on the notion of ‘family’ in Africa (Siqwana-Ndulo, 1998) specifically, and ‘family’ in family multilingualism research broadly (King, 2016; Wright & Higgins, 2022). Leading with the question: ‘what constitutes ‘family’, and in what ways does the construction of a family intersect with language and literacy socialisation in the home?’ I propose the isiXhosa concept of ikhaya, as useful our understanding of what constitutes family in South Africa. Conceptually, ikhaya captures the ways in which the family kinship system, home residences and language practices are interconnected and work interdependently to construct a family. To illustrate my point, I reflect on Makalela’s (2018) concept of ubuntu translanguaging and present the ‘ikhaya languaging’ model as a developing concept. The model has been drawn from analysing various sources of ethnographic data from a Black South African family. Ikhaya languaging shows the interconnection and interdependence between the construction of space, people and languaging, all of which are critical for understanding family multilingualism in the Southern context. Ikhaya offers both a theoretical and methodological contribution to expand our knowledge about family for language socialisation and family multilingualism in applied linguistics and sociolinguistics. Critically, I argue that developing a nuanced understanding of how family is constituted as ikhaya also has important implications for language policy shift in the education sector.

Rethinking and Reimagining Language Policy in Brazil: Anticolonial Perspectives, Multilingualism, and Epistemic Justice

By Paulo Daniel Farah, University of São Paulo

This paper examines language policy in Brazil through an anticolonial perspective, arguing that linguistic inequalities are inseparable from broader structures of epistemic injustice and coloniality. Rather than viewing language policy solely as state regulation of languages, the paper understands it as a set of political, educational, and institutional practices that shape whose languages, knowledge systems, and identities are recognized, legitimized, or silenced. This approach highlights the central role of language policy in promoting more democratic and socially just forms of education. This work also critically examines how different movements intersect with national policies aimed at improving access and success for historically marginalized populations and languages (Thiong’o, 1986; Farah, 2007, 2024).

Brazil constitutes a particularly significant case due to its extensive linguistic diversity and its long history of colonial language policies. Although hundreds of Indigenous, immigrant, sign, heritage, and Afro-descendant linguistic varieties have contributed to the country’s cultural formation, Portuguese has historically occupied a privileged position within educational institutions, while other languages have frequently been marginalized, erased, or rendered invisible. These asymmetries continue to influence educational policies, teacher education, knowledge production, and contemporary processes of higher education internationalization.

Drawing upon the work of Paulo Freire, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and contemporary scholarship on critical language policy, multilingual education, and linguistic and epistemic justice, this paper proposes an anticolonial framework that reconceptualizes multilingualism as a political, ethical, and pedagogical practice rather than simply a communicative resource. Within this perspective, multilingual education becomes a means of recognizing multiple epistemologies, fostering intercultural dialogue, and challenging enduring colonial hierarchies embedded in educational institutions.

Necroalgorithmization, Linguistic Justice, and Decolonial AI: Rethinking Algorithmic Security through Epistemic Justice in the Global South

By Kleber Silva, University of Brasília

This paper contributes to the panel Rethinking Linguistic Diversity, Reframing Epistemic Justice for Indigenous and Historically Marginalized Languages (HMLs) in South Africa and Brazil by extending the discussion of epistemic justice beyond multilingual education and language policy to the algorithmic infrastructures that increasingly regulate public life in the Global South. Drawing on the Brazilian research initiative Projeto NEGRA (Public Security and Algorithmic Justice in the Global South), we argue that artificial intelligence systems—particularly facial recognition technologies employed in public security—are not merely technical artifacts but linguistic and semiotic regimes that produce, classify, and legitimate social meanings through algorithmic discourse.

Building upon the concept of necroalgorithmization, which updates Achille Mbembe’s notion of necropolitics for the age of artificial intelligence, the paper examines how algorithmic systems reproduce colonial epistemologies by encoding racialized, gendered, and historically exclusionary forms of knowledge into digital infrastructures. Rather than viewing algorithms as neutral computational tools, we conceptualize them as performative texts that mediate power through three interconnected dimensions: prompt, algorithm, and response. This perspective reveals how algorithmic language shapes public security practices while simultaneously silencing the voices, experiences, and epistemologies of historically marginalized communities.

The paper establishes a dialogue between Critical Applied Linguistics, decolonial linguistics, Southern Epistemologies, Critical Discourse Studies, and emerging debates on AI ethics to argue that linguistic justice and algorithmic justice are inseparable. Just as Indigenous and historically marginalized language speakers have been excluded from language policy and institutional decision-making, algorithmic systems frequently erase or distort their identities through biased datasets, discriminatory classifications, and opaque decision-making processes. Consequently, algorithmic governance constitutes not only a technological challenge but also an epistemic and linguistic one.

Using Brazil as a case study while engaging in broader South–South conversations with South Africa, this research demonstrates how colonial histories continue to shape contemporary digital governance and surveillance. It proposes that decolonial linguistic frameworks should incorporate the critical examination of algorithmic language, digital infrastructures, and AI-mediated forms of communication as central sites for advancing epistemic justice. By connecting multilingualism, linguistic diversity, racial justice, and critical AI studies, the paper contributes to expanding the theoretical horizons of decolonial linguistics and offers new pathways for understanding how language, technology, and power intersect in contemporary societies.

Sustaining Orality, Reconstituting Language: Indigenous Schooling among the Guarani Mbyá and Tupinambá in Brazil

By Camila Cristina de Oliveira Alves, University of São Paulo

This paper offers a comparative mapping of the linguistic context of Indigenous schools in two Brazilian villages: Aldeia Krukutu, of the Guarani Mbyá ethnic group, in Parelheiros, on the southern edge of São Paulo, and Aldeia Itapuã, of the Tupinambá ethnic group, in Olivença, Ilhéus (Bahia).

It aims to understand what linguistic strategies the Indigenous schools mobilize. In Krukutu, Guarani Mbyá circulates as a language of daily use and essentially oral transmission; the bilingual curriculum of the Centro de Educação e Cultura Indígena (CECI) incorporates songs, narratives, and prayers as oral genres that structure learning itself, rather than as cultural content added onto Portuguese literacy. In Itapuã, by contrast, Tupi has not been spoken in daily life since the nineteenth century; its recovery, led by Colégio Amotara, has proceeded through the community’s construction of its own orthographic convention, built collectively from colonial-era documentary sources and deliberate phonological choices about how to represent sounds with no direct correspondence in Portuguese. This process illustrates what Makoni and Pennycook (2012) call linguistic reconstitution: not the restoration of a pre-existing system, but its active construction out of fragments.

The contrast between living oral transmission and deliberate orthographic reconstruction reveals how a single colonial process produces radically different linguistic demands depending on the intensity and duration of contact. Reading the Indigenous school as a space of linguistic autonomy, in both cases, resonates with Freire’s (2000) conception of education as the practice of freedom.

11:45–13:15 — Workshop (part 2): Rethinking linguistic diversity for Indigenous and marginalized languages in South Africa and Brazil

Thematic axis: Axis 8 — Linguistic Diversity and Epistemic Justice

The proposed panel seeks to advance a decolonial linguistic framework in the study of plurilingualism, language policy, multilingualism, family multilingualism, language and disability studies, and the study of indigenous and “historically marginalised language” (HML) speakers. The papers will demonstrate how linguistic diversity and epistemic justice are linked to the ideals of racial justice, multilingual education, and equality. The papers presented by colleagues in Brazil and South Africa demonstrate that both countries, although they exhibit profound inequalities, serve as ideal case studies due to their shared histories of colonial oppression and current efforts to reform the contexts and institutions of indigenous and HML speakers.

14:45–16:15 — Panel: Black aesthetics, archives, technics, and Afro-diasporic knowledges

Thematic axis: Axis 3 — Recognition of Indigenous and Afro-Diasporic Knowledges

Sonya Squires-Caesar — “Handkerchief Banking and Hollowed Archives: A Cultural Economy of Barbadian Market Women”

They walked barefoot for miles—Black Barbadian market women balanced trays of yams atop their heads, coins knotted in cloth for use in a banking tradition encoded in memory. During enslavement and post-emancipation, hawkers in Barbados transported more than provisions to the marketplace: they carried meeting turns—the Barbadian term for rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs). In this African Indigenous knowledge (AIK) system, that predates modern money, ROSCA members save together and each receives a lump sum in turn. AIK ways of knowing embrace communalism and interpersonal trust rooted in the cultural, social, and environmental contexts of Africa. This tacit AIK knowledge traveled from West Africa via the Transatlantic Slave Trade and took root in trading spaces where colonial authorities could neither see nor control it.

This multisensory exhibition positions market women as architects of a creole economy that resisted racialized capitalism. Premised on oral histories and fragmented archival records, i.e., history marked by deliberate absences, the presentation features handmade books, imaginary books (artist’s books meant to be touched or experienced rather than read traditionally), and material artifacts.

ROSCAs—often dismissed as “primitive”—still exist globally today, revealing the enduring nature and cultural shapeshifting of collective finance: from purchasing freedom to housing precarity to retirement planning. Serving as a witness and tribute to women who fostered financial solidarity amid colonial exclusion, this work culminates in a collaborative reimagining that extends beyond a single capitalistic economic model, asking: what do we need to build even more robust ROSCA systems?

Kitso Seti — “The Aesthetics of Blackness Through Black Art”

Existing in an anti-Black world, Black people eventually stand up to fight against the very system that aims to deem their humanity null and void. They strive to bring dignity to the colour of their skin. Black artists come to use their art as a way of challenging the anti-Black system, to remove Whiteness from its superior state, which seeks to keep Blackness inferior. Whether through theatre, music, dance, literature, poetry, or visual arts, Black artists reflect the world, showing it to itself, and representing the cries and aspirations of Black people for political liberation. Black art thus adopts a political ideology aimed at bringing dignity to Blacks. Black art, through aesthetics, considers the symbolism, the meaning and the way forward for a people under oppression. The aesthetics inform the politics while the politics inform the aesthetics. Others tend to mistake the insistence on meaning for a lack of aesthetic or entertainment value. Black art gives attention to both of these as content informs form, and vice versa. Because a work of art is towards a political end, the aesthetic must not be forgotten. Art for politics’ sake does give attention to the entertainment mode, however, it is against mere entertainment. This paper asserts that entertainment must be geared towards freedom. For the visualisation of Blackness, Black art uses symbolism and the aesthetic as the driving force. My research focuses on Blackness as an aesthetic category, informed by politics. How is Blackness made conscious through visualisation? Making the audience conscious through the gaze, through seeing. What images appear, than things being said vocally? The research uses plays produced in the 1970s and early 1980s.

Silas de Souza Leite Floresta — “Ọfọ̀ Translation: +1 Crossroads”

This presentation outlines ongoing doctoral research that builds upon the work conducted in the master’s thesis Tradução ọfọ̀: adentrando a encruzilhada (2025), submitted to the Graduate Program in Translation Studies (PPG-LETRA/USP). In Tradução ọfọ̀: +1 encruzilhada, we expand the scope of ọfọ̀ translation (from the Yoruba word for “spell” or “incantation”). This approach constitutes a science/poetics of translation that recovers ancestral knowledge preserved within Kétu Candomblé terreiro communities. It engages with Afro-diasporic theories—spanning translation, art, and philosophy—to shape itself as an ancestral linguistic continuum and a translational-performative movement. This movement originates in the spoken word—imbued with orality—found in terreiro communities and, consequently, in the perspective of Èṣù: his figure as a symbol and his communicative and transformative power. The practical component of our work focuses on poetic translations of oríkì dedicated to Èṣù, accompanied by detailed studies of the translation processes involved. A crucial objective of ọfọ̀ translation is to contribute to existing Afro-diasporic theories that highlight the importance and richness of considering schools of thought—whether in translation or beyond—anchored in African and Afro-diasporic cosmoperceptions, thereby shedding new light on the fields of Translation Studies and poetry translation.

Mo Jai Mckeown — “Sylvia Wynter’s Media Theory: Autopoiesis, Invention, and Black Technics”

The paper will primarily work toward understanding Sylvia Wynter’s inheritance of autopoiesis in her account of the antiblack socio-technical-aesthetic epochal narratives of ‘invention’ which produce the human. As I contend, Wynter’s anti-disciplinarian rejection of the Western epistemic narration of Man provides a ground upon which to theorise, and contest, technics within Black Studies. To this end, I follow recent theoretical writing by Rizvana Bradley and Armond Towns which works toward a critique of dominant media phenomenological accounts of technics and mediality, posited as resting atop an assumption of a division between tool-using human and natural environment, ultimately secured by a necessarily racializing discretisation between form and matter. In seeking to elaborate theories of black technicity, I turn to Sylvia Wynter, who offers an account of something akin to technics — or, in her terms, of the human as socio-technically produced — which seeks to diagnose and displace the ‘epochal’ white origin stories of Man which recursively constitute a stable socio-technical human subject. In tracing the project of this displacement, I reconstruct Wynter’s inheritance of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela’s autopoiesis, which forms the basis of Wynter’s description of the mechanism whereby the epochal narrative of Man comes to be instantiated at the scale of human phenomenality. Amidst this, I read toward elucidating Wynter’s privileging of ‘narrative’, which seeks to move beyond the Social Darwinism of extant biocentric accounts of human-technical evolution, toward a New Science of ‘autopoetics’. Through Wynter’s focus on narrative, I hope to think toward the following question: if the historical-epochal narratives underpinning theories of human technicity rely upon specific, culturally encoded histories, to what extent does blackness — read as that which ruptures with, yet is constitutive of, Western historicity — form the negative ground of media phenomenological accounts of technics?

16:30–18:00 — Panel: Expanded Curatorships for/in Contemporary Media Arts

Thematic axes: Axis 12 — Dialogical Processes between Science, Literature, and the Arts; Axis 1 — Planetary Governance and Social Innovation

Agnaldo Farias, Artur Matuck, Rodrigo Muniz, Isadora Matias, Adriana de Oliveira, Giovanna Gaba, Felipe Avelino — Curatorial Experiences and Practices

Xinyu Liu — “A Suspended Non-Place: Observation Deck as Communal Spectatorship and Spectral Anchor in Airport”

This paper examines contemporary transit infrastructure, airports in particular, not as transitional or exceptional spaces, but as media environments whose power operates through a perceptual register. Departing from critical frameworks that interpret infrastructural space primarily through loss—whether as non-place or as zone of exception—I approach infrastructure not as neutral substrate or site defined by the absence of historical identity, but as a set of semi-public environments in which routines, attachment, dwelling, and cultural memory can emerge. Conceived as a media system with operative tendencies, infrastructure is understood here as producing spatial information through the often undeclared activities of its “software”: protocols, routines, schedules, interfaces, and design decisions that materialize in space.

Drawing on Keller Easterling’s concept of disposition, and in dialogue with Foucault’s notion of the dispositif, I propose an aesthetic dimension of infrastructural disposition that is constitutive and indexical rather than representational. In this framework, infrastructural power lies not only in governance or socio-technical control, but in repeated, contingent acts of differentiation through which space becomes perceptible, actionable, and unevenly accessible. Power does not primarily appear through spectacle or crisis, but through the immanent relations between interfaces, protocols, access conditions, and the perceptual distinctions they repeatedly produce.

The paper develops this argument through an analysis of planespotting and contemporary online aircraft-tracking platforms. Once a localized, embodied practice associated with airport observation decks, planespotting has evolved into a distributed media ecology integrating satellite data, transponder signals, algorithmic visualization, and crowdsourced observation. Both forms of planespotting produce a suspension of movement and attention, rendering the visual traces of infrastructural disposition perceptible. By tracing the shifting media ecology, I argue that plane-tracking makes the disposition of the airport perceptible as a lived, mediated environment—one in which infrastructure surfaces not through its breakdown, but through its ongoing, aesthetic coordination of everyday life.

João Pentagna — “The Animistic Unconscious” (online)

Arnaud Mery — “De-Generating the Generic Eye: How to Enact a Neganthropic Aesthetics with AI”

The critical scholarship on AI has consistently shown that image-generation platforms based on diffusion models reinforce generic aesthetics as well as socially harmful stereotypes. In this practice-based research, we explore how these normative effects might be countered in concrete conditions of use by interfering with the models’ own logic of operation.

We begin by drawing on Cécile Malaspina’s Epistemology of Noise to situate our practice within a model of double entropy that directly incorporates these concerns. First, we examine how, once trained, diffusion models reduce informational entropy in Claude Shannon sense, insofar as they start from random noise and progressively narrow the range of possibilities to produce statistically stable outputs, at the expense of the singularity inherent in each user prompt. Second, drawing on Norbert Wiener’s concept of entropy, we consider how the establishment of a frictionless alignment between phenomenological intentionality and the model’s normative correlations might instead be deliberately disrupted.

This suggests a hypothesis: the core operations of a diffusion model could be adjusted to raise informational entropy, thereby intensifying—at the phenomenotechnical level—the negentropy that further strains the practitioner’s perceptual expectations and the model’s probabilistic targets.

To test this hypothesis, we use the open-source model Stable Diffusion within a nodal programming environment to repurpose its usual function. Instead of relying on prompts or intentional representation, we begin with generic, stereotypical AI-generated images and intervene directly in the model’s diffusion process, gradually dissolving them into misty, noisy forms that retain only faint traces of the original figure.

Following Bernard Stiegler’s later work, we conclude by framing our experimental approach as an effort to subvert and rechannel deep learning’s averaging effects on imagination, thereby reorienting our engagement with it in what he calls a “neganthropic” direction.

Luis Fernando Medina Cardona — “Pirarucú 01: Speculative Probe Object Made of Recyclable Materials” (performance)

This video installation is based on a speculative object and its surrounding narrative. It emerged from dialogues with the community of Leticia, Colombia, located along the Amazon (Solimões) River. A probe built from a PET bottle serves as the main artifact. The plastic pollution affecting Leticia prompted the following question: What would happen if a community-built probe made from a PET bottle were launched into the river to document and sense water quality?

This inquiry produced both the speculative object (the bottle) and a set of accompanying artifacts—a video, a book, a portable loudspeaker, a booklet, and a poster—that explore alternative ways of documenting an art–science endeavor combining aesthetics with materials used by local communities. The installation evokes a techno-indigenist video control center for the probe, including video communication systems and a simulated live video feed from the device.

In doing so, the proposal emphasizes that although the probe prototype is not functional, it poses concrete technical questions to be addressed and highlights the role of creative practice within scientific inquiry. In this way, the project engages with citizen and open science, as well as epistemological diversity, in addressing local problems through vernacular DIY technologies, positing sensorial–creative knowledge as a means of fostering critical thinking. The recycled, low-tech qualities of the probe foreground Global South alternatives within a framework of technological sovereignty. Additionally, the installation invites reflection on alternative modes of technological transfer, in which recycled technologies and local ethos challenge Western techno-deterministic approaches and propose processes of hybridization between Indigenous modern practices and ICT technologies as ways of assessing and engaging with the territory.

Wednesday, August 26

10:00–11:30 — Panel: Aesthetics, cognition, technology, and artistic research

Thematic axis: Axis 12 — Dialogical Processes between Science, Literature, and the Arts

Danilo de Athayde and Marco Bortolato — “The Continuum and the Cut: Self-Reference, Cognitive Heuristics, and the Figuration of the Whole”

The question of how a knowing system can describe a world to which it irreducibly belongs is not new. Long before contemporary neuroscience formulated it as the problem of consciousness, the Western literary tradition of the Machine of the World rehearsed it through the slow conceptual passage from “World”, a closed totality validated from without, to “Universe”, a self-referential totality that must include the gesture of naming it. This passage gives figurative form to an epistemological trap that a neurohumanist perspective, drawing on neuroscience, complexity theory, and post-reductionist approaches to consciousness, now encounters empirically: a cognitive system attempting to objectify itself.

Much of what modern thought treated as categorical rupture in the structure of the real, including mind and matter, subject and object, nature and culture, normal and pathological, may bear the trace of how human cognition cuts and stabilizes a continuous world. Under adaptive pressure, the brain developed discrete heuristics geared toward action, and language reinforces this movement through oppositions and stable categories. These tools are indispensable to intelligibility, yet they carry ethical and political consequences when their provisional cuts harden into classificatory absolutes. They then regulate credibility, recognition, and the threshold of intelligibility.

Reading these registers together is itself a practice of epistemic justice. It widens the field of who is heard as a knower, recognizes figurative thought as cognitively serious, and resists the conversion of classification into ontology. The presentation proposes this zone of translation between comparative literature and the cognitive sciences as a working program.

Chase Bucklew — “‘There’s a Body Alright’: David Lynch and the Atomic Sublime”

The entirety of the Twin Peaks story seems to hinge on this moment: July 16, 1945, White Sands, New Mexico. In “Part 8”, Lynch depicts the Trinity Test—nothing is the same before or after both in the universe of Twin Peaks and our own. This project explores how “Part 8” of Twin Peaks: The Return invokes the inception of an image so entrenched in the modern subconscious, it has become a symbol both overdetermined and emptied of meaning. Contending with the highly intentional public relations campaign of the Atomic Sublime born out of the 1940s and 1950s nuclear testing programs, Lynch uses experimental cinema to deconstruct the sterilization, ubiquity, commodification and kitsch of an unthinkably violent utterance. In the context of Twin Peaks, the first nuclear test is signaled in the story of Laura Palmer—an unspeakable violence that caused reality, as we knew it, to break from itself. Systems of meaning and signification no longer apply, and the frenzied detective work to reconstruct sense out of the horror fail indiscriminately. A rupture of light, seeing and representation at its core renders the violence unseeable by means of sight, photography or film. In this project, I argue that Lynch’s use of experimental cinema to represent the bomb amplifies this breakdown of meaning to offer a perspectival shift, subverting the Atomic Sublime’s project of amelioration, inoculation and domestication of unfathomable violence.

Eleonora Coloma Casaula — “The Walk: Sensitive Research of the Obsolescence Group to Think about Artistic Creation in Latin America”

By conceiving art as an ideal space for revealing, reinterpreting, and sparking new realities, this proposal is grounded in interdisciplinary creative work—spanning music, visual arts, and dance—aimed at critically addressing contemporary issues. Through what we term “sensitive research”—a methodology established in our previous projects, La obsolescencia del cuerpo (The Obsolescence of the Body) and La casa (The House)—we reflect on the biopolitical tensions of the neoliberal model, which renders fundamental aspects of life—such as dwelling, aging, and dying—precarious. Thus, this proposal seeks to reflect on how artistic creation and practice position themselves to address critical challenges shared by Latin American societies—challenges situated at the intersection of the welfare state model and neoliberal logic. In this way, artistic practice serves as a central axis for addressing critical challenges shared by Latin American societies, where the debate centers on the boundaries between the welfare model and the logic of capital. Within the framework of the current project, titled El paseo (The Walk/Stroll), we propose that the dynamics of dérive (drifting), walking, and getting lost serve as both an aesthetic creative methodology and an act of resistance against hyper-productivity and political polarization discourses that impose rigid responses on society. Artistic “walking” (the act of strolling) not only offers solace but also opens channels for cross-border dialogue aimed at reshaping reflections on the social fabric. This approach transforms the uncertainty inherent in the act of strolling into a catalyst for new questions regarding the human condition; furthermore, through artistic praxis, it champions the need for models of democratic coexistence that are more empathetic, reflective, and closely linked to the lived realities of individuals.

María Angélica Ochagavía Toledo — “Mito como condición de posibilidad del conocimiento”

This proposal examines the problem of language, experience, and knowledge through a reading of Nietzsche, Derrida, and Plato’s Timaeus. It argues that the Western metaphysical tradition subordinated the imaginative and figural dimension of language to an ideal of truth understood as presence and foundation. Yet, what was sought to be excluded constantly reappears at the tradition’s own limits.

It demonstrates that myth does not constitute an inferior form of knowledge; rather, it allows us to conceive of an experience linked to a receptivity distinct from the theoretical and perceptual reception of objects. Thus, the study explores a dimension where what is received can be neither captured nor appropriated, and where experience arises not from the subject or the object, but from the interplay of temporalization and spatialization that constitutes the meaningfulness of signs.

The research examines Derrida’s reading of khôra as a radical receptivity that admits becoming without appropriating it. Khôra emerges as an irreducible alterity that resists all conceptual determination.

This notion connects with the “wild essences” (Wesen) evoked by Merleau-Ponty and the “sense of the earth” developed by Nietzsche. The aim is to conceive a generative dimension of experience that precedes the oppositions between subject and object, sensible and intelligible, myth and reason. From this perspective, the research offers a critique of the modern conception of knowledge and opens the possibility of an epistemology founded on receptivity, plurality, and creation.

Raquel Saad — “Protection Systems for the Elderly in the Brazilian Legal System”

The failure to value the human being—specifically regarding their vulnerability—has significant legal implications. Given that several foundational constitutional principles align with this perspective of valuing human dignity, the elderly—who are among the primary victims when this value is not upheld—became the focus of our study. A shift away from the negative, stereotypical view of the elderly has gradually brought about changes in society and, consequently, in the law. When examining the criminal law aspect, it is necessary to integrate constitutional and statutory considerations. This unified yet distinct approach—required because these victims possess such specific characteristics—is sometimes overlooked in state interventions. Thus, we will present the specific operational nature of the specialized police station for the elderly in Anápolis, aiming to demonstrate the effectiveness of this specialized approach.

11:45–13:15 — Panel: Animal narratives, interspecies justice, and environmental law

Thematic axes: Axis 5 — Environmental Sciences and the Rights of Nature; Axis 7 — Human–Animal Interaction and Environmental and Animal Law

Silvana Andrade — “Who Has the Right to the Narrative? Animalist Journalism, Epistemic Justice, and the Deconstruction of Media Anthropocentrism” — with Artur Matuck and Paula Brügger

João Paulo Guimarães, Katharina Kalinowski, and Inês Caldas — “Uncharismatic Aliens: Epistemic Justice Beyond the Human”

This panel proposes that epistemic justice requires not only the inclusion of marginalized human knowledges, but also a radical rethinking of what counts as life, intelligence, and communication. Drawing on recent developments in astrobiology, science fiction, bio art, ecopoetics, and artificial intelligence studies, the panel argues that the search for extraterrestrial life has revealed the limits of anthropocentric and charismatic models of alterity. Increasingly, astrobiology suggests that the most likely forms of alien life may be microbial, chemically unfamiliar, and perceptually inaccessible—forms of life that resist narrative centrality, affective attachment, and representational clarity.

Rather than treating this “uncharismatic” alienness as a deficit, the panel frames it as an epistemic opportunity. Microbes, animals, and artificial intelligences challenge inherited assumptions about agency, meaning-making, and cognition, thereby exposing the biases embedded in dominant knowledge regimes. By placing speculative fiction in dialogue with bio art, ecotranslation, and AI theory, the panel explores how alternative epistemologies—sensorial, semiotic, machinic, and posthuman—can expand our capacity to relate to nonhuman others.

Collectively, the speakers examine how experimental artistic practices and speculative frameworks can function as epistemic bridges, enabling forms of communion that exceed language, vision, and human-scale cognition. In doing so, the panel advances epistemic justice as a future-oriented practice: one that not only repairs exclusions, but actively invents new modes of knowing appropriate to a damaged, multispecies, and potentially extraterrestrial world.

14:45–16:15 — Panel: Rights, care, neurodiversity, and gendered vulnerability

Thematic axes: Axis 6 — Human Rights, Mental Health, and Neurodiversity; Axis 9 — Women’s Rights and Children’s Rights

Vanessa Leal — “Neurodiversity, Neuroart, and Epistemic Justice: The Symbol as an Organ of Knowledge”

This work proposes viewing neurodiversity as a site of knowledge production that is systematically delegitimized by the normative clinical episteme—a framework centered on verbal-rational language as the sole standard for cognitive validity. The study draws on the authors’ experience at Casa de David, an institution serving individuals with intellectual disabilities and autism, where the Neuroarte (Neuro-art) methodology—an integration of psychoanalysis, neuroscience, and artistic practice—was developed. It is observed that neurodivergent individuals frequently access and communicate psychic content through symbolic, sensory, and bodily channels—modes of expression that the normative clinical episteme tends to interpret as deficits to be corrected rather than as valid forms of knowledge. Drawing on the psychiatric approach of Nise da Silveira—for whom the symbol represents a pathway to knowledge that precedes and transcends the concept—the study proposes that images created during Neuroarte sessions function as legitimate epistemological instruments. Clinical cases are presented and analyzed to illustrate how a symbolic reading of a neurodivergent individual’s artwork reveals content, intent, and knowledge that conventional clinical assessment fails to capture. The authors argue that the refusal to recognize this language as knowledge constitutes a form of epistemicide and that Neuroarte, by validating and translating these symbols without reducing them to mere symptoms, operates as a practice of epistemic justice and human rights.

Caroline Ferrante — “How Zoom Shapes What Counts as Knowledge: Autistic Epistemology, Storytelling, and Digital Cognitive Justice”

Engaging the conference’s thematic focus on media ecologies, digital epistemologies, and neurodiversity, this paper examines how digital communication platforms shape interaction and the conditions under which knowledge is produced and valued. I use the term Zoom Gaze to describe the regime of visibility, self-surveillance, and epistemic judgment produced by videoconferencing interfaces (Ferrante, 2025). Zoom’s design encodes assumptions about visual legibility, normalizing visible engagement and self-monitoring as signs of competence. These conditions disadvantage autistic participants, whose ways of knowing often involve sensory attunement, non-gaze-centered perception, relational pacing, and distributed attention, as described in autistic rhetoric and epistemology (Yergeau) and accounts of epistemic disablement (Catala et al.). Rather than framing this misalignment as a deficit, this paper locates epistemic injustice in technological design.

Building on the Zoom Gaze, the paper extends this analysis into cognitive justice, understood as the right of diverse epistemologies to exist without being subordinated to dominant knowledge regimes (Santos). Drawing on ecological and enactive theories of perception (Gibson; Rietveld & Kiverstein), Zoom is treated not as a neutral tool but as a cognitive environment that structures what forms of attention, perception, and interaction count as legitimate knowledge practices.

Methodologically, the paper integrates theoretical analysis with storytelling as epistemic practice, including non-verbal narratives through movement, sound, music, and visual art. Such alternative scientific modes of knowledge production interrupt dominant norms of speed and abstraction. By foregrounding sensory ways of knowing, autistic storytelling reveals how platform design enforces narrow epistemic norms and offers resources for imagining more just digital knowledge environments.

Glaucia de Brida — “Clinical-Political Listening and Human Rights: Challenges and Potentialities in Caring for Women in Situations of Violence”

Violence against women and girls is considered by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) to be a serious public health problem and one of the most prevalent human rights issues in Latin America and the Caribbean. In this context, Brazil stands out among the countries with the highest rates of femicide in the region. Over recent decades, feminist movements, international treaties aimed at promoting women’s rights, and—within the Brazilian context—the Maria da Penha Law have contributed to recognizing violence against women as a human rights violation stemming from gender inequalities. Incorporating a gender perspective allows for a critical examination not only of inequalities between men and women but also of those produced by differences among women themselves, taking into account the intersectionality of gender and other social markers such as class, race/ethnicity, territory, and sexuality. These forms of intersectional oppression limit women’s access to fundamental rights—such as life, safety, health, education, and dignity—and have significant impacts on mental health, manifesting as low self-esteem, depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, and the abusive use of alcohol and other drugs. Considering the sociopolitical dimension of this suffering, this study aims to reflect on the challenges and potential of a “clinical-political” approach to listening to women experiencing violence. Lélia Gonzalez highlights how racism, when intertwined with sexism, denies women the status of subjects of their own discourses and histories. In this sense, given that gender-based violence denies women their status as rights-bearing subjects, clinical-political listening emerges as a practice committed to human rights, the gender perspective, and the strengthening of women’s autonomy, thereby contributing to the restoration of voices that have been historically silenced.

Aurora Miller — “Not Your Mother’s Menopause: Opportunities Emerging from Menopausal Oppression”

Menstruators are subject to a variety of forms of epistemic violence. The menopausal transition brings a new set of exacerbating factors. With insufficient access to effective medical resources (because clinicians are systematically ill-informed and insurance companies regularly deny requests for treatment) many turn to social media for solutions to their menopausal symptoms. This can foster a tight-knit community, able to withstand or even overturn oppressive norms; it also exposes desperate women suffering physical, emotional, and cognitive distress to being targeted by non-evidence-based health interventions that can range from costly-but-innocuous to physically harmful.

The menopausal transition is also widely acknowledged to be a time of life that involves stepping into one’s power and letting go of societal constraints. How do we reconcile these two truths, being subjected to oppression while simultaneously rising in empowerment? What healing might be possible, individually and collectively, if effective medical care freed the 1 billion people currently undergoing menopause from the symptoms that inhibit them? In the meantime, how can we leverage creative, pedagogical, and neuropsychological tools to both undermine extant hierarchies and reinforce positive community bonds?

We stand at a pivotal moment, when those going through menopause will make up a larger percentage of the population than ever before and, thanks to digital tools, are no longer isolated in silent suffering. With effective treatment, menopause need no longer be a barrier to productivity, and in fact can become an impetus to epistemic justice.

14:45–18:00 — Exhibitions and interventions

Luis Fernando Medina Cardona — “Pirarucú 01: Speculative Probe: Objects Made of Recyclable Materials” (installation)

Isadora Matias — “Corre” (exhibition — portable suitcase)

Fernanda Sousa — “Fair of That Which Crosses Us” (performance intervention)

The performance piece “Feira Daquilo que nos Atravessa” (Fair of What Runs Through Us) proposes a space for the exchange of stories, memories, and affects, inspired by markets where goods are bought, sold, and traded. Using objects accompanied by personal narratives, the performer invites the audience to engage in symbolic exchanges, offering their own objects, recollections, or accounts in return.

By shifting the economic logic toward an economy of affect and memory, the performance transforms everyday objects into vessels for experiences, knowledge, and life stories. Each encounter fosters new connections among people, objects, and narratives, resulting in the collective creation of a network of affects that highlights the value of knowledge derived from both individual and shared lived experiences.

16:30–18:00 — Panel: More-than-human worlds, symbiosis, and environmental imagination

Thematic axes: Axis 5 — Environmental Sciences and the Rights of Nature; Axis 7 — Human–Animal Interaction and Environmental and Animal Law

Xinyi Yin — “Flickering Between Selves: Symbiosis, Scale, and Ecohorror in the Human-Fungal Encounter”

What can the framing of symbiosis do for reimagining our relationships with nonhuman entities and Nature? In what ways does it reveal humans portraying relationships to make them legible? Recent popular science work, such as Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life, highlights symbiosis as the fundamental relationship among beings, including parasitism and mutualism through mycelium. Richard Doyle’s ecodelic insights have provided the epistemological frameworks that acknowledge different conceptualizations of relationship as contingent upon various scales of consciousness, and psychedelic experiences differ according to the acceptance of the nested, recursive constitution of self and the dissolution of the ego. Sheldrake shares this perspective, celebrating the uncertainty in categorizing relationships as inherent to scientific knowledge and reminding us that the flicker between the whole and the collection of parts is the essence of relationships. Yet, Sheldrake occasionally retreats into dualistic parasitism and mutualism. M.R. Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts, on the other hand, frames symbiosis as relationships that preserve human selfhood, as revealed at the end that the second-generation hybrid children with human consciousness pass on human knowledge and culture, turning horror into comfort. This brings us the question: to what extent does the categorization of human-fungi relationships preserve the anthropocentric stance and generate the effects of ecophobia? Through this paper, I argue for the need for simultaneous participation in and stepping off the scales of consciousness to examine the constant construction of self and our relationships with other entities. This provides potential to reflect on the ecohorror generated by a certain, anthropocentric epistemological framework.

Verónica Jimenez Borja and Elisa Sofia Jimenez Borja — “When Plants Speak: Relation, Memory, and More-than-Human Worlds in Latin American Art”

Plants, like people, exist in relation, becoming through histories that web them to place, people, animals, bacteria, mythologies, knowledges, and embodied practices through which they cure, nourish, heal, sustain, and sometimes harm the bodies around them. These relations are made silent by colonial plantation systems and industrial monocultures, which uproot plants and people from ecological and cultural contexts and reduce them to commodities. Rather than only an agricultural model, monoculture is an epistemic and ontological system that narrows what can be seen, known, valued, remembered, and imagined possible. To know a plant, then, is not to isolate it, but to follow the relations, histories, bodies, and worlds through which it becomes knowable.

This paper explores works by Latin American artists that attend to the dense web of relations in which plants exist and which they sustain: place, bodies, memory, food, medicine, language, ritual, labor, and harm. Astrid González Quintero (Colombia) engages magical-religious plants in the Colombian Pacific, moving between family anthropology and fiction to make Afro-diasporic spiritual traditions visible while protecting them from exoticizing gazes. Yama’s Papakuna: When Potatoes Speak (Ecuador) asks what it means for potatoes to reclaim their place in history, evoking peasant resistance against the loss of food diversity and collective memory. Patricia Domínguez (Chile), moving between ethnobotany, healing, technology, and science fiction, unsettles the extractive logics of capitalist science and colonial botany by imagining plants as participants in arrangements of care. These works insist that plants are not commodities or symbols, but living archives of relation, memory, violence, care, and possible futures.

They refuse monoculture’s single story, gathering epistemes into forms of listening where relations remain active, partial, and alive. Their speculative force lies in opening spaces of attention where epistemes gather in creative friction, allowing human, ancestral, and more-than-human worlds to resonate.

Giovanna Gaba, Luanda Francine, Carla Santana Bulcão, Andrea Tedesco, Carolina Simon, and Roberto Dal — “Columbid Notes on Epistemic Justice” (performance)

For many generations, we have observed humans. From rocks, statues, rooftops, and public squares; from the ledges of public buildings and the crevices left by their architecture. We have learned that humans devote much of their energy to deciding who belongs, who should be protected, who deserves care, and who can be cast aside.

To this end, they create classifications. Some go by the name of science. Others, law. Others, politics. They often disagree on the criteria, yet rarely on the necessity of classifying. Over the centuries, we have seen the names of the “undesirables” change. The justifications have changed, too. The procedure, however, has remained surprisingly stable. Among humans, these classifications have targeted peoples, languages, migrants, dissidents, and other inhabitants of the margins. Among us, they have taken the form of sanitation campaigns, hostile architecture, policies of starvation, and narratives of infestation.

Our participation in this conference stems from a question. When humans speak of epistemic justice, are they discussing the expansion of those who can participate in knowledge production, or are they discussing the mechanisms that create the condition of exclusion? This question interests us because we occupy a privileged position from which to observe such mechanisms. Few species have lived so closely alongside humans while simultaneously being so persistently pushed out of the agreements that organize common life.

Based on these observations, we offer some reflections on justice, belonging, and knowledge—viewed from an average height of twenty meters above the ground.

Thursday, August 27

10:00–11:30 — Panel: Coloniality, memory, law, and Afro-Indigenous rights

Thematic axes: Axis 2 — Insurgent Epistemologies and Decoloniality; Axis 3 — Recognition of Indigenous and Afro-Diasporic Knowledges

Sandra Pinto — “Can the Judiciary Hear the Terreiro? Coloniality and Epistemic Injustice in the Limits of Legal Recognition of Afro-Brazilian Religions”

Although religious freedom is formally guaranteed by the Brazilian Constitution, its recognition within the legal sphere faces profound challenges linked to the coloniality of knowledge. Within the judiciary, this guarantee does not automatically translate into a genuine hearing for African-derived religions, whose cosmologies are frequently reinterpreted through Eurocentric frameworks alien to their own knowledge structures. Thus, the question “can the judiciary hear the terreiro?” transcends institutional concerns to become an epistemological and ontological problem regarding recognition.

This study draws upon Latin American decolonial thought—specifically the works of Quijano and Mignolo—integrating the concept of the coloniality of knowledge with Miranda Fricker’s theory of epistemic injustice, with particular emphasis on the hermeneutic dimension. It argues that modern law does not merely regulate conflicts but also establishes regimes of intelligibility that define which forms of life and knowledge are recognized as valid.

In this process, legal rationality functions as a technology of asymmetric translation, wherein Afro-diasporic forms of knowledge are converted into external categories that diminish their cosmological richness and ontological autonomy. This dynamic stems not from a mere interpretive difficulty, but from a historically constructed epistemological structure.

The research employed a qualitative methodology, utilizing bibliographic and documentary approaches alongside the deductive method. The theoretical framework incorporates—in addition to Quijano, Mignolo, and Fricker—thinkers such as Spivak, Mbembe, Segato, Viveiros de Castro, and Krenak, whose work challenges the universalism of law in the face of marginalized epistemologies.

It is argued that the persistence of these dynamics reveals that the limitations in legal protection for Afro-Brazilian religions stem not only from normative gaps but from the very structure of knowledge that shapes the understanding of the religious. Overcoming this situation requires an epistemological shift within the law—one capable of making room for the plural coexistence of rationalities in the current legal landscape.

Jose Eduardo Malua Ferreira — “Epistemic Necropolitics: The Genocide of Afro-Brazilian Knowledge and the Demand for Reparation”

This article proposes the concept of “epistemic necropolitics” as an analytical category to understand the systematic genocide of knowledge systems produced by African and Afro-Brazilian populations. By articulating Achille Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics with Miranda Fricker’s concept of epistemic injustice and Aníbal Quijano’s coloniality of power, we argue that Brazilian structural racism operates not only through the management of the physical death of Black bodies but also through the destruction of languages, memories, and social technologies. The central thesis maintains that slavery and Portuguese colonialism established a regime of sovereignty that decides which forms of knowledge are to live and which are to be systematically “killed” or rendered invisible. Drawing on the author’s situated position as a Black Angolan researcher based in Brazil, we examine how “continuing harm”—as theorized by Janna Thompson and Lukas Meyer—manifests in contemporary times as an epistemic gap that hinders full citizenship. We propose that historical reparation must be epistemically necromantic: a radical effort to rescue and validate ancestral knowledge, memories, and cosmologies produced in quilombos and terreiros. We conclude that constructing an “Alter-science” requires an ecology of knowledges that recognizes Afro-Brazilian “alternative legitimacies” as valid sources of knowledge—essential for overcoming the Eurocentric paradigm and realizing comprehensive reparative justice.

Mayne Souza Benedetto — “Necro-desire: Precarious Whiteness and Racial Autoimmunity in Brazil” (online)

This study analyzes the forms of racial regulation and self-regulation produced by subjects who attain the status of “whitened” individuals in Brazil. These are mixed-race individuals perceived as white—a transition that does not eliminate their racial constitution but reconfigures their position within a system structured by anti-Blackness. Drawing on the concept of necrodesire (necrodesejo), the study argues that whitening operates not merely as a historical or classificatory project, but as a reorganization of desire under necropolitical conditions. In a regime where life is unequally distributed, whitened subjects gain conditional access to life. However, this status demands the continuous suppression of traces of Blackness within themselves and the active regulation of Blackness in others. In this process, violence is not external or occasional but constitutive. Whitened subjects become agents of the racial order, mobilizing intensified forms of regulation and exclusion as they project onto the “other” what they must deny within themselves. Anti-Blackness, in this sense, is not limited to an imposed structure but is reproduced through everyday practices of self-erasure and relational control. Based on ethnographic and autoethnographic research conducted in São Paulo, the study examines how these dynamics play out in daily life. Rather than starting from fixed categories, the analysis prioritizes relational processes, demonstrating how whitening functions as an unstable position that must be constantly enacted and secured. Finally, the study questions the limitations of census categories and binary models of racial classification; while these capture material inequalities, they fail to account for the dynamics of regulation and self-regulation that sustain racism in Brazil. By illustrating how power shifts from external surveillance to the internalization of regulation, the concept of necrodesire sheds light on how anti-Blackness reproduces itself, turning subjectivity itself into a site for the management of racial difference.

Stella Maris Flores Cucatti — “Decolonial Studies and Indigenous Land Rights”

The article analyzes the contribution of decolonial studies to understanding and defending the land rights of Indigenous peoples in Brazil. Drawing on the theory of the “coloniality of power” developed by Aníbal Quijano, the author demonstrates how racial classification and Eurocentrism structured relations of domination that persist even after the formal end of colonialism. In this context, decolonial studies advocate for valuing historically marginalized epistemologies—particularly Indigenous, African, and Afro-diasporic ones—thereby promoting the recognition of their knowledge systems and ways of life.

The text highlights that the struggle for the recognition of Indigenous lands is a central element of identity for ensuring the dignity, culture, and survival of these peoples. The 1988 Federal Constitution recognizes the original rights of Indigenous peoples to their traditionally occupied lands, assigning the Union the duty to demarcate and respect them. The author emphasizes that the Indigenous relationship with the land transcends mere property ownership, encompassing spiritual, cultural, and communal dimensions.

Subsequently, the article examines recent legal debates regarding the “time-frame thesis” (marco temporal). After the Supreme Federal Court rejected this thesis during the ruling on “Theme 1031”—reaffirming the original nature of Indigenous territorial rights—legislative initiatives emerged, such as Law No. 14.701/2023 and Proposed Constitutional Amendment (PEC) No. 48/2023, seeking to reinstate the time-frame requirement. The article argues that such proposals represent a serious constitutional regression, as they restrict fundamental rights protected by Article 231 of the Constitution and run counter to international commitments upheld by Brazil. It concludes that defending Indigenous territorial rights is inseparable from overcoming the colonial structures that remain present in Brazilian society and the legal system.

Carolina Rodrigues de Faria — “The Resumption of Memory as a Place of Epistemic Justice at the Quilombo dos Coelhos/MG”

This abstract draws on experiences with the Quilombo dos Coelhos—located in the Zona da Mata region of Minas Gerais, in the municipality of Rio Pomba—spanning from 2015 to the present. It seeks to contribute to the community’s strengthening during its certification process with the Palmares Cultural Foundation, in accordance with Article 68 of the Temporary Constitutional Provisions Act of the 1988 Federal Constitution. The research aims to highlight the centrality of memory, oral tradition, and land-based technologies as foundational elements of quilombola political and community organization, thereby fostering epistemic justice within the territory. The methodology is rooted in the organic relationships revealed through conversations around the wood stove, the cultivation of vegetables, and walks along the road. This study is significant for understanding struggles for territorial and identity-based recognition, as well as for reinforcing counter-hegemonic practices that challenge Eurocentric narratives in knowledge production.

11:45–13:15 — Panel: Knowledge crises, colonial genealogies, and insurgent methods

Thematic axis: Axis 2 — Insurgent Epistemologies and Decoloniality

Chris Wildrick — “The Trickster and the Strongman: Exploring Peer Review to Regain a Consensus Reality”

Much of my art, which often uses a trickster paradigm, explores how we gain expertise. When, precisely, does one become an expert at something? How does one prove that?

One project involved my attempt to become a professional paleontologist without getting a PhD. Paleontology is a field where “amateurs” still make real contributions. However, when should we start taking what they say seriously? Should you listen to me?

Another project is about the path of my promotion toward full professor. As we know, promotion is based on one’s growth towards expertise, as measured by peer review. But for many faculty members, questions inevitably arise though this process, especially, What counts as peer review? In the art world—and in particular in the contemporary artworld where art can be anything—we ask which venues are “worthwhile” for peer review. How do we objectively rate one venue or artist higher than another? For this project, I tried to gain expertise in art fields that are normally not thought of as “professional” and used offbeat forms of peer review to prove it.

In the age of Trump, however, peer review and expertise are no longer entertaining academic questions—they are relentlessly under attack. Windmills cause cancer; the 2020 election was stolen; the nurse holding a phone in a video right in front of your eyes was in fact a domestic terrorist brandishing a gun.

My artwork interrogates expertise and peer review—because they do sometimes have flaws in practice—in order to eventually reinforce them. I believe we can use the contagious power of art and humor to better communicate these often-abstruse ideas to the wider public and re-establish a social consensus of reality, a necessity in these times. I will discuss my (expert!) artwork and what lessons we can learn from it.

Charu Maithani — “Palmistry Using Machine Learning: Colonial Genealogies and the Erasure of Traditional Knowledge”

The paper argues that current palmistry apps are symptomatic of a broader condition in which computational abstraction systematically devalues situated and relational knowledge. This devaluation has a colonial genealogy that dominant epistemologies of AI consistently render invisible. The paper establishes two intertwined genealogies of the palm as legible surface: palmistry, the study of palm lines to predict futures, as a situated, interpretive traditional practice throughout South and East Asia; and the colonial palm print as biometric data. The colonial genealogies connecting the ancient practice of palmistry to contemporary predictive analytics reveal how both systems share commitments to deterministic futures despite their apparent epistemological differences. In 1858, William James Herschel, a British officer in Bengal, recorded Rajyadhar Konai’s palmprint as testament for a road building contract. Francis Galton subsequently drew on Herschel’s collection of prints from colonial India in his fingerprint studies that instituted collecting biometrics in administrative and legal governance. While finger and palm printing has legacies in anthropometry, it also occupies a central place in modern biometrics. Current machine learning and data practices inherit several of the methods Galton established in his fingerprint studies.

Examining these connections through two lenses, the paper first positions current AI practices within the framework of cultural practices such as palmistry to challenge AI’s universalizing vision, asking how contemporary palmistry apps transform rather than preserve traditional knowledge by reducing it to simulacra. Second, by examining palmistry apps as sites where multiple temporalities and epistemologies collide, the paper reveals how promises to democratize ancient wisdom mask continued epistemic extractivism. Drawing on Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s concept of epistemicide, the paper argues that these palmistry apps perform a double epistemicide — killing the knowledge system and the situated personhood.

Danilo Silvestre Janeiro — “Game and Conspiracism: The Ludic as a Response to the Epistemic Crisis”

Censorship in authoritarian governments presupposes a rigid relationship with the truth, wherein divergent information is suppressed and removed from circulation. Censorship attempts to construct “epistemic bubbles”—that is, epistemic structures from which various relevant voices are excluded. A strategy for combating “epistemic bubbles” involves forced exposure to differing information, particularly through education. However, especially following the “Linguistic Turn,” the questioning of absolute truths—as well as of academia and experts—helped expose epistemic erasures by giving voice to previously silenced segments of the global population; ironically, this shift rendered the concept of “epistemic bubbles” virtually obsolete. These new constructions of truth—essential to an anticolonial process challenging the validity of a generally European and oppressive universalism—gave rise to narrative wars and, consequently, “echo chambers.” An “echo chamber” is an epistemic social structure in which other relevant voices are discredited based on alternative worldviews. Members of “echo chambers” are led to systematically distrust all external sources; thus, contradictory information—rather than bursting the bubble—merely reinforces existing distrust and, by extension, the established worldview. Addressing this scenario requires understanding the ludic (play-like) nature of the worldviews that shape “echo chambers,” analyzing how “ludic belief” is paradoxical (since the game requires one to simultaneously believe and not believe), persuasive, and capable of fostering diversity, empowerment, and a sense of belonging. From this perspective, it becomes possible to use the ludic element as a tool to combat “echo chambers” by offering diverse, alternative worldviews, rather than relying on the ineffective accusation that beliefs held within an “echo chamber” are far removed from the truth.

Sérgio Luis Tomioka — “An Almost Alternative History of Science”

This article aims to describe the scientific turns that took place in the early 18th century, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as well as the recent alterscientific turn that arises nowadays. The first of these turns occurred with the emergence of the Enlightenment and industrial capitalism. The second major shift is contemporary with the new scientific frontiers, such as the logical-linguistic turn, sociopolitical and historical insights, biological and psychological frameworks, in addition to the rise of the human sciences. The horizons of the current alterscientific turn represent the third scientific change, bringing the perspective of a future epistemic revolution that consists of hypothesizing domains, approaches, and beings not yet considered in their ontological plenitude.

Antonio Herci Ferreira Júnior — “Ontopoder e justiça epistêmica: Da produção algorítmica da Vida Nula à resistência da Carne do Mundo”

Danilo de Athayde — “After the Machine of the World: Allegorical Scarcity as an Epistemic Condition in the Expanding Universe”

The Western tradition of the “Machine of the World”, from Dante to Camões, organized a desire for intelligible totality, operating simultaneously as a cosmological structure and a poetic allegory. In this model, the cosmos presented itself as a legible artifact, ordered for human comprehension, a dimension that, in Camões, serves as a compass for imperial and historical expansion. However, modernity imposes a radical rupture of scale and nature, a transition that finds its critical witness in Carlos Drummond de Andrade, who, by rejecting cosmic revelation as a “trifling gift” [dom despiciendo] and facing the mining “pit” in his hometown of Itabira, denounces the collapse of ancient mechanical metaphors. We no longer inhabit a concentric “World” in the classical sense of mundus (a closed, ordered cosmos designed for habitation), but an accelerating, expanding universe, governed by a mathematical efficacy that escapes sensible imagination. This paper investigates how this ontological turn generates an “allegorical scarcity”: a diminished capacity of language to render a physical reality defined by events and relations rather than stable substances. I argue that this scarcity entails an epistemic-justice cost, widening the gap between technically valid knowledge and socially shareable intelligibility. Instead of restoring a lost symbolic cosmology, theory should embrace an asymptotic horizon as a new ethical figure. Under this lens, the “Machine of the Universe” emerges as a fugitive edge of representation, superseding the old image of visible gears and demanding an epistemic stance that recognizes structural incompleteness as the condition of knowledge.

14:45–16:15 — Panel: Poetics, spirituality, translation, and curatorial knowledge

Thematic axes: Axis 8 — Linguistic Diversity and Epistemic Justice; Axis 12 — Dialogical Processes between Science, Literature, and the Arts

Adriana Santos de Oliveira — “Intercultural Translation and Epistemic Justice: Re-existence via Rhythm in Rumi’s Sufi Poetics”

Drawing on Paulo Daniel Farah’s reflections regarding direct translation, critical interculturality, and the erasure of otherness in the literatures of non-hegemonic cultures, this paper investigates “translational epistemicide” in the contemporary reception of Jalāl ad-Dīn Rūmī’s poetics. The study seeks to understand how hegemonic translational mediations—particularly Anglophone ones—can de-Islamize Sufi poetry by reducing the heart (qalb in Arabic) to a sentimental image or a form of universal spirituality. It is argued that this operation not only erases religious markers but also systematically invalidates a mode of knowledge in which the heart functions as an ontological and epistemological organ within the Islamic science known as ilm al-qulūb (epistemology of the heart). Methodologically, the paper takes rubāʿī 157 as a paradigmatic case, comparing the Persian text, literal translations, and Coleman Barks’s version across three layers: the lexico-semantic, the syntactic-rhythmic, and the ethico-poetic. Engaging with Meschonnic, Said, Venuti, and Yunis—and grounded in Farah’s critique of the assimilative approach to translating non-hegemonic cultures—the paper proposes “re-existence via rhythm” as an ethico-poetic horizon. This approach aims to transform the target language so that the text may once again operate within its own distinct alterity. Thus, the proposal frames translation as a practice of epistemic justice and as a critical episteme within the horizon of ratio ethica, seeking to foster linguistic diversity and resistance against the erasure of subalternized Islamic forms of knowledge.

Ana Carolina Kerr — “The Mystical Experience of Sufi Women Through Art: Contributions of Oral Life History in the Study of Contemporary Islam”

This presentation outlines the findings of my doctoral research in the Science of Religion, which investigated the mystical experiences of Sufi women through Islamic art across various countries and cultural contexts. The study aimed to understand the mystical experiences of women within the Sufi tradition through the lens of Islamic art, analyzing how spirituality is cultivated and expressed in daily life via diverse artistic languages—languages that, through their forms and symbolism, foster sensory modes of relating to the sacred. The research unfolded as a journey interweaving conceptual, historical, aesthetic, and narrative dimensions, situated between the realm of the sensory and the ineffable.

The study employed the Oral Life History methodology, treating narrative as a source of knowledge. Through interviews and the subsequent transcription process, four analytical themes emerged from the participants’ accounts: life trajectories and the encounter with Sufism; development along the spiritual path; the cultivation of the ego; and sense of purpose and mission. These themes reveal mystical experience as an integrated process in which art, spirituality, and existence are inextricably intertwined. The results indicate that art plays a central role in these narrated life paths, serving as a symbolic articulation of spiritual experience and a means of constructing meaning.

This presentation proposes examining Oral Life History as a method that offers significant contributions to the study of contemporary Islam by centering the narratives and life stories of its practitioners. By prioritizing the lived experiences of Muslim women—a relatively underexplored area in academia—this research engages with contemporary debates regarding epistemic justice and the plurality of forms of knowledge.

Carolina Ruoso — “Art History and Curatorship: Participatory Experiences and the Construction of Epistemic Justice”

Maria Rita Taunay — “Beyond the State: Ancestral Feminine Practices and Non-Institutional Forms of Justice”

This paper analyzes the practice of magic within Afro-Indigenous feminine ancestral traditions as a means of navigating and resisting the paralysis of the colonial system. Its central argument is that, given the historical inability of modern institutions to provide equal protection and reparation to colonized and marginalized subjects, magic functions as a way of pursuing justice through alternative means.

Coloniality operated not only through political and economic domination, but also through the definition of which practices could be recognized as rational and legitimate. Magico-spiritual practices were systematically relegated to the realm of superstition and criminalization. This disqualification, however, did not eliminate such practices. On the contrary, they persisted and deepened precisely where the State failed: in the protection of bodies, territories, and historically vulnerable communities.

Drawing on authors such as Sueli Carneiro, Lélia Gonzalez, and Isabelle Stengers, the text develops the idea that magic functions as an ethical technology of protection: a situated practice that reorganizes relations of care, reparation, and belonging when institutional pathways become blocked or inaccessible. It is therefore a way of circumventing the immobility of the colonial system in order to construct parallel forms of justice.

The paper concludes that recognizing these practices as legitimate forms of non-institutional justice requires expanding the very concept of justice beyond the monopoly of the State, acknowledging the existence of plural ethical regimes produced by those who learned to protect life through other means.

14:45–16:15 — Workshop: Musical Comedy (Comicidade Musical) — Diogo Coutinho [parallel session]

16:30–18:00 — Panel: Migration, displacement, language, and epistemic belonging

Thematic axes: Axis 4 — Valuing Refugee and Migrant Knowledges; Axis 8 — Linguistic Diversity and Epistemic Justice

Ana Leviz — “Epistemic Justice and African Immigration in Brazil: From Theory to the Practice of Commitment to Cognitive Equity”

This article reflects on the concept of Epistemic Justice as a connecting thread between interdisciplinary theoretical production and a research practice committed to cognitive equity and social transformation. Drawing on contributions from Miranda Fricker, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Gayatri Spivak, Achille Mbembe, Lélia Gonzalez, Sueli Carneiro, and the concept of Alterciência (Matuck, Farah, and Borges, 2020), the text links the conceptual foundations of Epistemic Justice to an analysis of the institutional spaces where these concepts materialize—specifically the South America, Africa, and Arab Countries Library and Research Center (BibliASPA), the Brazil-Africa Research Support Center at the University of São Paulo, and the PPGHDL program. It presents the master’s thesis titled “It is ‘common’ for people with my characteristics to go through this in Brazil,” which examines the experiences and accounts of African immigrants in São Paulo as an application of the concept. This approach incorporates marginalized forms of knowledge, treats lived experience as a source of knowledge, questions knowledge structures, renders under-explored experiences intelligible, fosters intercultural dialogue, and generates knowledge with social impact. Drawing on the author’s positionality as a Black researcher and a returnee immigrant, the article demonstrates that Epistemic Justice is not merely a theoretical concept but a practice that can be integrated into research and academic training processes, thereby contributing to the construction of horizontal South-South relations and the recognition of African immigrants as bearers of knowledge that expands our collective understanding of the world.

Regina Silva — “Between Welcoming and Erasure: Immigration in Brazil from an Ethical Perspective”

Since the imperial era, the reception of immigrants has been grounded in eugenicist racial ideologies aimed at “whitening” the population and excluding Indigenous and African peoples—thereby erasing the “stain” of slavery through progressive elimination, whether via engineered miscegenation or systematic social exclusion. In this context, opening borders to European immigrants was intended to reshape Brazilian society.

Thus, even as the entry of certain groups was selectively restricted—highlighting the racialized nature of migration policies—the narrative promoted to the world was one of total harmony among all people in Brazil. This symbolic construct projected an international image of a welcoming, pluralistic nation, leading migrants and refugees—including Africans—to view Brazil as a potentially more inclusive destination.

Unfortunately, the lived experience falls short of expectations; these individuals encounter racism and xenophobia, which manifest both in daily interactions and through unequal access to fundamental rights. Consequently, despite the frustration arising from the gap between the projected image and the lived reality, a distorted notion persists that foreigners pose a threat to the domestic labor market. Yet, contemporary Brazil sees a significant number of its own citizens emigrating in search of better living conditions, while immigrants—particularly Africans and Haitians—face hostility driven by the intersection of racism and xenophobia.

Therefore, to protect immigrants and refugees, the government must implement public policies that bridge these social and moral divides, addressing racism and xenophobia while ensuring equal access to healthcare, education, housing, and employment for everyone residing in the country.

Sandra Alves — “Portuguese as a Language of Welcome (PLAc) and Epistemic Justice: Intercultural Practices with Migrants and Refugees at BibliASPA”

This study reflects on the practice of teaching Portuguese as a Language of Welcome (PLAc) at the Library and Research Center for South America, Arab Countries, and Africa (BibliASPA) in São Paulo. The classes are multilingual, comprising students (migrants and refugees) from over twenty nationalities whose linguistic repertoires include languages of wide international circulation.

A key element of this pedagogical practice is a teaching sequence focused on the relationship between art and the city, utilizing the São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP) as a space for language learning, cultural reading, and reflection on urban belonging.

The study aims to analyze how PLAc practices guided by critical interculturality can contribute to the linguistic welcoming of migrants without reducing language learning to mere cultural adaptation or the acquisition of instrumental communicative skills.

Drawing on these experiences, the work seeks to understand how activities fostering dialogue between diverse cultural and linguistic repertoires enable the recognition of students as producers of knowledge.

Natalie Wang — “Hungry Ghosts: Homesickness, Embodied Grief, and the Asian-American Diaspora”

In 1834, the woman known as Afong Moy—the first Chinese woman in the United States—was brought from Guangzhou to New York City by American merchants. Moy was exhibited in a show called “The Chinese Lady,” which toured across the US from 1834-1850. In the show, she showed her bound feet, used chopsticks, and sang folk songs to market the merchants’ goods in a decorated showroom of Oriental furniture. Beyond local newspaper advertisements announcing the arrival of the show in cities across the US, however, little is known today about her.

This project is an original poetry chapbook and multimedia art installation exploring embodied grief in the context of the Asian American diaspora. Drawing upon 18-19th century archival newspapers, 17th century porcelain, anatomical diagrams, and modern neuroscientific literature, the project will highlight that migratory and diasporic body is not a blank canvas; rather, it is a site of contestation where broader social structures converge. The project illustrates how the display and representation of Asian bodies in the US has been mediated by capitalist consumption and colonial subjugation.

The installation recounts the Taoist/Buddhist legend of the hungry ghost, known as spirits that can emerge from the neglect of ancestors in some Chinese interpretations. Through the specter of the hungry ghost, the exhibition suggests that the haunting absence of memory of diasporic ancestors like Afong Moy is reinscribed upon the modern body through surgeries like Asian blepharoplasty and lingual frenectomy. Conversely, the installation also asks of viewers: how can embodied poetic practice allow for a revival of forgotten diasporic memory and renaming of collective trauma? The installation introduces the framework of a politics of grief—one that reckons with the past and present of diasporic alienation through the neo-Confucian dialectical practice of chiku (eating, or enduring, bitterness) and suku (speaking bitterness).

Marianna Zawadi Kitenge Mukuna — “Researching from Within: Migratory Experience, Reflexivity, and Epistemic Justice in Knowledge Production”

This work discusses the experience of the immigrant researcher as a legitimate practice of knowledge production and as a vehicle for promoting epistemic justice within the university. This reflection stems from my own trajectory as a Congolese woman, immigrant, researcher, and professional working with immigrant women in São Paulo—a journey that informs my master’s project on hospitality, intersectionality, and the labor market in the state of São Paulo.

Historically, migrant populations have been positioned as objects of inquiry, while the processes of knowledge legitimation have remained concentrated among subjects socially authorized to speak for and represent certain realities. Drawing on contributions from epistemic justice, feminist epistemologies, and situated knowledge, this work challenges this division by examining how the migratory experience can constitute a legitimate source of academic knowledge—rather than merely serving as data to be analyzed.

Methodologically, the study adopts a reflexive and situated perspective, taking the researcher’s own experience of integration into the university and the research field as an object of analysis. It argues that the proximity between researcher and participants does not necessarily pose an epistemic risk; rather, it can deepen the understanding of phenomena, foster relationships of trust, and reveal dimensions often rendered invisible by external perspectives.

By problematizing the boundaries between lived experience and scientific knowledge, this work advocates for recognizing migrant subjects as producers of knowledge—not merely as objects of study. It thus proposes a reflection on the transformative potential of immigrant women’s presence in the university for the development of academic practices that are more plural, inclusive, and socially committed.

Friday, August 28

10:00–11:30 — Panel: Critique, interpretation, alter-science, and epistemic agency

Thematic axes: Axis 2 — Insurgent Epistemologies and Decoloniality; Axis 11 — Dialogical Critique and the Emergence of Alter-science

José Ricardo Cunha — “The Victim as an Epistemic Subject: Ethics of Liberation, Exteriority, and Critique of the Coloniality of Knowledge”

This study proposes interpreting the victim as an epistemic subject based on Enrique Dussel’s Ethics of Liberation, engaging with contemporary debates on epistemic justice and anticoloniality. It proceeds from the hypothesis that the victim should not be understood merely as a passive recipient of legal, moral, or political protection, but rather as a critical site where the contradictions of the prevailing totality are revealed, and as a subject who generates knowledge, normativity, and practices of liberation. From this perspective, social injustice appears not only as an unequal distribution of goods or opportunities but as a material denial of concrete human life, produced by historical structures of exploitation, exclusion, racialization, coloniality, and institutional fetishization. In Dussel’s framework, the victim’s “exteriority” allows for a shift in the locus of critique: the goal is not to include the excluded within the very epistemic criteria that denied them, but to recognize that their experiences, acts of resistance, and communities of struggle establish a different starting point for conceptualizing truth, validity, justice, and law. The study combines philosophical literature review with critical reflection on the social resistance practices of those subjected to social injustice, viewing these practices as expressions of an insurgent rationality capable of challenging dominant epistemology and generating counter-hegemonic ethical-political criteria. By bringing the Ethics of Liberation and epistemic justice into dialogue, the study argues that the victim—as a denied exteriority—is not merely an object of critical knowledge but the historical and ethical condition of possibility for an anticolonial critique of the totality. Thus, this paper aims to contribute to a theory of justice rooted in the alterity of victims and in praxis.

Irina Starikova — “Interpreting Before Evaluating: A Philosophical Criterion for Large Language Models”

Luis Fernando Medina Cardona — “Experimental and Alternative Publications as a Collective Contestation of the Hegemonic Publishing Paradigm”

Currently, science and technology systems around the world are based on metrics constructed on scientific publications. These metrics reward the volume of publications and, above all, the citations they receive. However, the traditional academic publishing system, which has centuries of history, is in crisis due to abuses produced by the neoliberalization of academia, epitomized by the dictum “Publish or Perish,” the imprecision of impact metrics, and the advent of AI. Against this backdrop, this proposal posits independent fanzine-type publications as a novel way to expand and diversify publishing opportunities for researchers and students. While these alternatives do not seek to replace the hegemonic publication scheme, they do question it under the hypothesis that publications of this type can invigorate the writing process by having a freer and more experimental format, serving as prototypes for subsequent publications in journals or definitively moving away from them and exploring areas closer to slow science and the interactions between art, science, and technology. In particular, two case studies are presented, one produced with undergraduate film students in the Research Methods seminar and another entitled Ritmo 2021, which is part of a research project. These two examples were developed using free software and low-budget techniques, thereby positing technological sovereignty as inseparable from academic publishing sovereignty as necessary conditions for developing open science for the common good from the global south.

11:45–13:15 — Panel: Interspecies voice, visuality, and epistemological legitimacy

Thematic axis: Axis 7 — Human–Animal Interaction and Environmental and Animal Law

Anna Caramuru Pessôa Aubert — “Epistemic Justice Beyond the Human: A Phenomenological Approach towards Interspecies Justice”

This work stems from my doctoral research, which gave rise to the book Embodied Communication and Interspecies Justice: A Phenomenological Approach to Law, Ethics, and Agency (forthcoming). However, by narrowing the initial scope, this proposal specifically questions what counts as knowledge, who can be recognized as a knowing subject, and—consequently—who can and should participate in various institutional dialogues within the realms of justice and law. To address these questions, I aim to demonstrate that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body (along with the eco-phenomenology and critical phenomenology derived from his work), combined with insights from the ethics of care, offers fertile ground for describing animal subjectivity. This subjectivity does not emerge from abstract rationality but from lived, embodied experience—experience that generates meanings which translate into movements and become public through intentionality. Within this framework, animals can be understood as agents, as agency is expanded beyond Cartesian reason to become a property of the “body-subject”—a body that perceives, interprets, and assigns meaning to the factual world, moving in surprising and intentional (i.e., non-mechanistic) ways. The various meanings created by different subjects, in turn, overlap and are co-created through embodied communication, including across different species. In this context, I argue that excluding animals from dialogues about the law constitutes a violation of basic ethical normative duties: the duties of recognition, listening, and response. These duties are not satisfied by abstract recognition alone; rather, they demand concrete practices of paying attention to the ways animals express their interests and preferences, and to how human institutions respond to them.

Artur Matuck — “Animals as Political Subjects of Knowledge”

Giovanna Gaba — “Visualities of Interspecies Justice: Anti-speciesist Activist Design and the Dispute for Epistemological Legitimacy”

The concept of epistemic justice has been mobilized to challenge historical processes of exclusion in the production and validation of knowledge. Despite efforts by various movements and critical perspectives aimed at contesting these hierarchies, power structures persist that define who can be recognized as a relevant subject in ethical, political, and epistemological spheres. Prominent among these are the anthropocentric assumptions that underpin the systematic exclusion of non-human animals and restrict the possibilities for their social recognition. In this context, this work reflects on anti-speciesist activist design as a challenge to the knowledge regimes that legitimize speciesism.

Drawing on research in visual culture, design, and critical animal studies, the presentation examines how visual artifacts produced by anti-speciesist movements confront hegemonic narratives about animals, making visible subjects historically reduced to the status of resource, commodity, or property. It is argued that these visual practices operate as forms of resistance by challenging dominant frameworks and expanding the possibilities for the moral and political recognition of animals.

By analyzing representation strategies, visual language, and meaning-making in activist campaigns and actions, this work seeks to contribute to the debate on epistemic justice from an interspecies perspective. It posits that an effective ecology of knowledges also requires questioning the anthropocentric boundaries that determine who can be recognized as a relevant subject in contests over knowledge, ethics, and justice.

Luan Matias do Vale — “Can the Animal Speak? Animalist Reflections from Spivak’s Subaltern”

This article aims to explore—drawing upon Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” and considering the possibility of non-human animals occupying the role of the subaltern—potential responses and reflections regarding this repositioned question. It does so by articulating the critique and theoretical output of Spivak’s work with significant contributions from animal studies, particularly the animal rights movement. To address this inquiry, the article first discusses the aforementioned essay, outlining its key ideas and concepts, as well as the context of its publication and its influence on contemporary social thought. Next, it outlines possible literal answers to the question “Can the animal speak?” by examining mundane examples of everyday interactions between human and non-human animals, while using insights from Spivak’s essay to highlight the limitations of such apparent transparency. Finally, delving deeper into the concepts—and, above all, the ambiguities—presented in Spivak’s essay, the article seeks to answer the title question beyond a literal level. It examines the terms under which non-human animals might be viewed as subalterns, establishing potential connections and points of friction with the theoretical proposals arising from Spivak’s political reading of Jacques Derrida—while revisiting Derrida’s own reflections on animality—ultimately aiming to enrich the field of animal rights studies.

14:45–16:15 — Paths Forward for Epistemic Justice

A plenary bringing together the symposium conveners and distinguished guests to reflect on the main themes, challenges, and future directions of epistemic justice, fostering dialogue across disciplines, cultures, and knowledge traditions.

Participants: Artur Matuck, Paulo Farah, Rosane Borges, Rajani Sudan

Saturday, August 29

12:00–17:30 — Closing Session and Cultural Program at BibliASPA

BibliASPA is a cultural, educational, research and social centre that develops actions with and for refugees.

Special lunch
Closing ceremony
Theatre play “From Now On” (Daqui pra frente)
Exhibitions (including “ISTAN”, about refugees in Brazil)
Performances
Featured performance: MIGRANTO — artists Paulo Zeminian, Artur Matuck, Itamar Vidal
Music and poetry program

Sunday, August 30

11:00–15:00 — Special programming: Guided walking tour of São Paulo historic downtown

An optional guided visit through São Paulo’s historic center, exploring sites of historical, cultural, and architectural significance.