This public event was organised in collaboration with the Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies in the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. Dr Sara Motta, Associate Professor in University of Newcastle (NSW) presented her work on decolonising feminist methodologies and the importance of enfleshed and embodied experiences when undertaking these practices.
Abstract:
In this presentation I explore my journey of co-developing decolonising feminist methodologies with raced and feminised women and communities and/as enfleshed reason, and how this is inseparable from the re-embodiment of scholarly practise and feminist theorising as liberatory healing. I’ll weave my reflections around some key themes of this praxis such as critical intimacy as opposed to critical distance, speaking from non-being as opposed to a default unmarked human subjectivity, multiple literacies of the political/theoretical as opposed to separation of the word from the world; and nurturing territories of body and Country/Madre Tierra as opposed to extractivist logics and rationalities. I hope that this disrupts taken for granted methodological framings and theoretical practices which reproduce the disavowal and denial of the knowing-being of raced and feminised subjects and thus relegates hir to absence and enforced silence, and also resonates with those engaged in such disruptive and heretical practices from decolonial and sister praxis.
Sara C. Motta is a mother, storyteller, poet, activist-political theorist, popular educator, and convenes the Politics Discipline at the University of Newcastle, NSW. Sara has worked for over two decades with communities in struggle forging emancipatory and decolonising pedagogical and epistemological practices and resistances/re-existencias in, against and beyond patriarchal capitalist-coloniality in Europe, Latin America and Australia. She has co-created numerous radical education projects and processes and published widely in academic and activist-community outlets and her latest book (2018) Liminal Subjects: Weaving (Our) Liberation (Rowman and Littlefield) was winner of the 2019 best Gender Theory and Feminist Book, International Studies Associate (ISA). She is currently writing her next book (M)otherwise.