Counter-Pedagogies of Cruelty across Abya Yala: A Move with Otherwise Present-Futurities

Abstract This paper is a call for “counter-pedagogies of cruelty” and memory as counteractions to colonial technologies of violence, erasure, loss, and linear spatio-temporalities and notions of “progress.” In this paper, the authors move across geographic locations in Abya Yala to expose and unpack overlapping and often unnamed colonialities, violences, and racialized border logics. Centering a series of moments from our work and engagements in the nation-states of Chile, Guatemala, and the United States, we bring Segato’s concept of “pedagogies of cruelty” together with settler colonialism, decolonial feminisms, and decolonial geographies as central frameworks to illuminate ongoing colonial structures, violence, and resistance social movements across Abya Yala. We explore the ways “pedagogies of cruelty” are embodied, contested, and made visible when we move across borders and center the knowledges and demands of those most impacted. These frameworks also push us to think and move with and to an “otherwise” no longer beholden to modern/colonial frameworks. We center the “otherwise” as a future already present and past, that challenges neoliberal colonial temporalities and attends to the ways borders and the gratuitous nature of modern/colonial violences permeate schools and classrooms and the urgency of these disruptions.