The crisis in the education systems in Brazil and Palestine has been exacerbated as a result of the confluence of necropolitical and ecrocapitalist power structures. On the one hand, necropolitical regimes that aim to produce death-worlds that subdue life to the power of death and that turn national (colonial) subjects into the living dead-subjects who are deprived of their individual and collective vitality and subjectivity(Mbembe, 2016). On the other, necrocapitalist practices (Valencia,2018;MIAsma,2021), in which global capitalist strategies such as privatization, corporatization, militarization, and appropriation of indigenous resources, contribute to the excrementalization of racialized bodies. Moreover, necrocapitalist practices accelerate the production of an unskilled and unemployable labor force in times of austerity and immiseration, as part of a disposable, surplus population, which reproduces the global capitalist system and its racialized neoliberal structures.
In this context, insurgent, decolonial pedagogies in Brazil and Palestine play an important role in organizing spaces for disclosing and destabilizing hegemonic power systems and creating the language and conditions of possibility for the future (Freire,1970; Walsh,2019). Such a pedagogy analyzes society in terms not only of liberal or neoliberal policies, but also of colonial history. Moreover, this pedagogy demonstrates that education is an essential means for people to dive into reality, develop an informed, generalized, and historical understanding of it in order to act for its transformation. From this perspective, two central concepts emerge as essential: collaboration and agency.
This presentation thus suggests that central to the development of such insurgent, decolonial pedagogies is the promotion of what Latin American indigenous groups call sumac kawsay ("vivir bien or living well"). Collaboration and agency are at the core of this holistic model of social relations, since it emphasizes living in complementarity and with reciprocity, reaching agreement by consensus, development as distinct from growth, and working with joy. While the model offers an alternative to the capitalist development model, it refrains from romanticizing indigenous communities or coopting their struggles.
The Brincadas Project, conceived by researchers associated with the Language in Activities in the School Context at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo, is used as a case study. Drawing on Vygotsky's (1933) concept of play and on Freire's (1970) notion of the viable unheard of, this multimediatic pedagogical project served throughout the pandemic as a critical collaborative context where participants' agencies are mobilized to play with possibilities not yet known or created. Play is seen as enabling the transformation of subjects in relation to their immediate realities and the broader context of the world especially, in the context of Covid-19 pandemic and necropolitical sovereignty. In the project, participants engage in play activities that prepare them to dive into their immediate reality and to discuss the theoretical possibilities for understanding and for criticizing it. They also engage in different opportunities to examine a wide range of issues from diverse perspectives in different contexts, thus expanding the horizon of their understanding. This process leads to the construction of new possibilities for acting, that is, for the viable unheard of.
