Vincent Pascal Kretschmer Calderón
PhD project: “Indigenous Struggles for Anticolonial Academic Knowledge Production. Tracing Colonial Legacies and Epistemic Resistance from Colonial to Indigenous Universities in Mexico”
In Latin America, the emergence of Indigenous Universities marks an historical step towards autonomous knowledge production that challenges Eurocentric notions of higher education. In contrast, academic knowledge historically functioned as a powerful tool of empires, embedding colonial epistemologies within global structures of knowledge production. Departing from Indigenous struggles of anticolonial epistemic resistance, this research proposes to address the gap between the historical role of universities in epistemic oppression and the recent emergence of Indigenous universities which reconfigure the epistemic role of Indigenous agency within post-imperial orders. The project investigates the historical and contemporary intersections between colonial universities as imperial institutions and Indigenous epistemic resistance with a regional focus on Mexico, tracing the long-term effects of this relationship from the colonial period to the present, to ask how the anticolonial knowledge production in Indigenous universities is shaped by historical relationships between Indigenous and Occidental knowledge.
This project draws on world-system analysis, anticolonial thought, epistemic oppression, and utopian sociology to interrogate the imperial politics of knowledge production. It constructs a theoretical framework that allows to understand how Indigenous knowledge was systematically suppressed, how it could persist, and how the recent developments constitute new pathways of academic knowledge production. It employs a methodological triangulation combining archival research and institutional ethnography to bridge historical and contemporary analysis. The archival research examines focuses on the Archivo General de la Nación (AGN) in Mexico City and regional archives to search for documents related to the establishment and operation of colonial universities. The ethnographic research will take place at Indigenous Universities using participatory observation, interviews with students, faculty, and community members, and analysis of institutional documents to uncover the everyday practices of anticolonial knowledge production.