Banca de QUALIFICAÇÃO: TEREZINHA DO SOCORRO LIRA PEREIRA

THE FEDERAL UNIVERSITY OF OESTE DO PARÁ AS A LIVING LABORATORY OF INDIGENOUS EPISTEMOLOGIES: TEACH AND LEARN WITH THE WAI WAI

Higher Education. Indigenous epistemologies. Wai Wai Science. Phew.

The opening of educational spaces for the insertion of indigenous peoples represents not only a historical milestone in the redemocratization of Brazilian education, but also a resignification, a new dynamic, which highlights the importance of thinking about higher education with cultural, ethnic specificities and new ways of conceiving education that reflect the expression and protagonism of the groups that make up the national society. It is from the perspective of interculturality that it is planned to carry out the doctoral research following the hypothesis that the Wai Wai Indians have a set of sciences capable of constructing a Wai Wai epistemological metaconcept. Based on the premise that these indigenous university students have their own sciences explicit in different academic and sociocultural manifestations that point to a possible Wai Wai epistemological Meta Concept, the research seeks to answer the following question-problem: What "paths" do the indigenous science of Wai Wai students and graduates follow to strengthen the policy of intercultural education at the Federal University of Western Pará? Thus, the objective is to analyze the indigenous science of the Wai Wai for the strengthening of the intercultural education policy at the Federal University of Western Pará. Specifically: (i) identify the original knowledge brought by the Wai Wai Indians and their insertion in the teaching, research and extension activities of the university; ii) to measure how this knowledge contributes within the university to its learning; (iii) to analyze how the knowledge of the Wai Wai Indians is perceived by the university community (managers, professors and indigenous and non-indigenous students) of Ufopa and (iv) to construct the Metaconcept of Indigenous Epistemology Wai with Them and not about Them. This is a qualitative study, with bibliographical, documentary and empirical research, adopting the method of collaborative ethnography. The hypothetical sample is of 245 participants, including Wai Wai indigenous students and graduates, non-indigenous students and UFOPA teachers. The instruments to be applied will be: questionnaire, interview, field diary and epistemological circles around interculturality. The research is based on decolonial conceptions, especially in the writings of Latin American theorists, among them Aníbal Quijano (1990), Enrique Dussel (1993), Ramón Grosfoguel (2016), Catherine Walsh (2019), Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (2008) and Conceição Almeida (2017), and indigenous scientists Gersem Baniwa (2019), Florêncio Vaz Filho (2010), Jaime Xamen Wai Wai (2022), Roque Yaxikma Wai Wai (2022), Ailton Krenak (2020) and David Kopenawa (2015), as well as other authors who will collaborate with the textual tessitura of this doctoral thesis. It is expected that more research will be carried out on this theme and that the epistemologies of the Wai Wai Indians can be disseminated as sciences, promoting dialogues between the Sciences and the epistemologies of indigenous scientists, as well as their valorization and insertion in the formative processes in the university context.