Can we built a pluriversal education in Uruguay?

Abstract Book of the 11th International Conference on Advanced Research in Social Sciences and Humanities

Year: 2026

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Can we built a pluriversal education in Uruguay?

Prof. Dr. Maria Noel Miguez Passada

ABSTRACT:

The education we have inherited is increasingly revealed as a modern-colonial institution. Its homogenising characteristics and its foundation in a monolithic conception of knowledge position the rationality of the Global North as absolute truth. Simultaneously, it reproduces the pathologising logic of biomedicine, demarcating those whose bodies challenge the “ideology of normality” (Angelino and Rosato, 2009).
The education that emerges within our horizons of meaning challenges these arbitrary notions. To feel and think about it leads us to understand it as an art of encounter that expands the “field of possibilities” (Sartre, 2000), values intersubjectivity, and celebrates the polysemy of knowledge. It constitutes an ethical-political act that rejects the absolute truths established by modern-colonial knowledge and directs us towards the pluriversality of being/existence, knowledge/language, and power.
The decolonial perspective, through its decolonial pedagogies, provides the framework that gives meaning to the envisaged transformation. It invites us to dismantle the colonialities of power (by returning curricular autonomy to communities), of knowledge/language (by legitimising pluriversal and situated knowledge and languages), and of being/existence (by challenging the “ideology of normality” with its classifications and qualifications).
Pluriversal education from a decolonial perspective is not a method, but an ethical-political project that drives us to feel and think about ourselves in societies where the plurality of beings is the foundation and strength for coexistence, not a problem to be solved.

Keywords: Education, Pluriversality, Decoloniality