Movement Rhythms, Motley Knowledges

This article introduces a special issue of LÁPIZ, The Pedagogies of Social Justice Movements in the Americas which contains articles by Bruno Baronnet on the politico-pedagogical practices of the Zapatistas; Vanessa Andreotti on radical education as a practice of collective ontogenesis that subverts the abstract domination of colonial, capitalist modernity; and Lia Barabosa Pinheiro on the sentipensante (feeling-thinking) pedagogies of the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST), Vía Campesina Internacional, and other struggles. I frame the intervention of the issue as an inquiry into the possibility of an equal encounter between colonial, university knowledges and the knowledges authored by social movements in their movement, an intervention that problematizes the all too familiar temporal lag between events and our knowledge about them which often only betrays the possessive subject of “our knowledge” that jealously guards its class supremacy by policing the division between mental and manual labor, the head and the hand. Through a reading of Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar and the militant research of Argentinean theory collective Situaciones together with the education working group of the Solano Unemployed Workers Movement (MTD-Solano), I make the case for understanding the articles in the issue as relations in the sense of stories that bind or else recountings of the beats of the uncanny rhythms of social movements and their knowledges. Calling on the work of Bolivian sociologist René Zavaleta Mercado and the Bolivian Aymara scholar-activist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, I suggest that the resulting counterpoint telegraphs the image of a motley (abigarrado in Spanish) or heathered (ch’ixi in Aymara) knowledge, one which combines without synthesizing these different modes and relations of knowledge production