Corpo-território em diáspora: escrevivências de uma intelectual em (des)construção e suas encruzilhadas com as trajetórias de docentes negras na UNEB

Abstract

This research is the result of my Master's degree in Education in the Graduate Program in Education at the State University of Feira de Santana (PPGE-UEFS), coupled with my experience as a Black woman discovering herself as a researcher throughout my life's journey. The concerns that guide this work arise from my undergraduate studies at a public university in Salvador, Bahia, where the absence of body-territories like mine was the norm, especially when viewed from the perspective of university teaching. In this sense, questions about the naturalization of absence have haunted me since 2010, when I entered university teaching through the racial quota policy. Amidst crossroads and retracing paths, the problem that guides my research emerges: "How did Black female professors at UNEB forge their body-territories to reposition the absence of Black female professors in the institution's undergraduate programs?" This discussion was compounded by the ruminations fostered during my academic career, during which my diasporic body-territory experienced some discomforts. It seems that establishing epistemologies that engage with our own existences risks concealing them through academic canons, reinforcing the marginalized position to which they attempt to subjugate us. The central objective of this study was to understand how the forging of the body-territories of Black female professors in undergraduate programs at the Department of Education (DEDC I) occurred and continues to occur, reflecting on the repositioning of these bodies' absences beyond the physical, reverberating in the university's training, curricula, and epistemes, which are still extremely cisheteronormative and Eurocentric. Regarding the specific objectives: To identify the presence of Black female professors in undergraduate programs at the Department of Education at the State University of Bahia; To investigate how the bodies-territories of Black female teachers were forged through their trajectories; to reflect on whether the trajectories of Black female teachers at UNEB point to the construction of new epistemologies in education. As a theoretical and methodological contribution, I draw on the Black feminist movement, Lélia Gonzalez's (1988) perspective of Amefricanity, Beatriz Nascimento's concept of body-territory when she asserts herself as "Atlantic" in the documentary "Orí" (1989), and Eduardo Oliveira Miranda's (2020) book "Bodyterritory and Decolonial Education." Continuing the research of the research group "Bodyterritory and Decolonial Education" at UEFS, I used the writings of Conceição Evaristo (2020) as a theoretical contribution, while also using interviews as a device, in which I dialogued with the aforementioned research co-participants. As (in)conclusions of this work, the trajectories of the Black female teachers interviewed, intertwined with my writings shared in this research, bring ratifications of achievements and possible paths for the strengthening and humanization of our existences within and outside the academic sphere, as well as the effervescence of epistemologies that speak about us by ourselves in the production of valid knowledge within and outside the university.