(Video) Alice Advanced Seminar – “Women’s things are not small things: the struggles of indigenous women of the Amazon”
This seminar, organised by the project ALICE – Strange Mirrors, Unsuspected Lessons: Leading Europe to a new way of sharing the world experiences intends to celebrate and honour the Women’s International Day.
Women’s things are not small things: the struggles of indigenous women of the Amazon with Jennifer Simpson dos Santos, José Manuel Mendes, Maurício Hashizume and Teresa Cunha
March 8, 2016
(Video in Portuguese)
Abstract: Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ Epistemologies of the South, central core of the ALICE project, invert the victimising narratives of a forever poor, forever ignorant, forever obscure South, picturing it as a loom woven with a formidable vital energy where invention and strength are composed of other premises.
The documentary ‘Lutas artesanais: mulheres indígenas no Amazonas’ (51’) by Jenniffer Simpson dos Santos gives body, sound and colour to the Epistemologies of the South through a postcolonial feminist perspective.
From crafts, indigenous women articulate know-how inspired by their cultural references and continually reworked depending on their current needs; simultaneously they question canonical intellectual property and the hegemonic govern of the economic system. Thus, these artisans mobilise resistances that are only insignificant when viewed from afar and reveal ways of life that just are not apparent because ignored.
Because women things are not little things, and not only women things, this seminar aims to enable reflection and a feminist debate where men have much to say.
Shorts Biographies:
Teresa Cunha, CES researcher, Co-coordinator of the ALICE project, professor at the Polytechnical Institue of Coimbra. Research interest include: Feminisms, Postcolonialisms and Other Economies in the Indian Ocean and Brazil.
José Manuel Mendes, CES researcher, Co-coordinator of the ALICE project, professor at the University of Coimbra. Research interest include: Democracy, inequalities, social mobility, social movements and collective action, risk and social vulnerability.
Maurício Hashizume, CES junior researcher and ALICE project researcher, Ph.D. candidate in the Programme “Postcolonialisms and Global Citizenship”. Research interest include: political subjects; indigenous movements, colonialities/decolonialities; postcolonial/decolonial studies, interculturality; political sociology, autonomies and social transformation.
Jennifer Simpson dos Santos Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at the Faculty of Economics of the University of Coimbra her research interests include arts as political tools, artisanal struggles and indigenous women.
