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Sara C Motta

University of Newcastle NSW, Politics/IR, Faculty Member

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Claudiana Alencar

Universidade Estadual do Ceara

Erasmus University Rotterdam

Katia Valenzuela

Universidad de Concepción

University of South Australia

Cathryn Teasley

Universidade da Coruña

Tampere University

University of Kassel

Tiina Seppälä

University of Helsinki

Professor Ana Cecilia Dinerstein

University of Bath

Jairo I Fúnez-Flores

Texas Tech University

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Papers by Sara C Motta

Grandmother genealogies: Feminist/ised, indigenist decolonising pedagogies against and beyond the university

Journal of International Political Theory, 2024

As a collective of inter-cultural women moving in but not of, and against and beyond the modern/c... more As a collective of inter-cultural women moving in but not of, and against and beyond the modern/colonial (neoliberalised) university we (t)race generative pedagogical experiences of worldmaking cosmopolitics and their (im)possibilities within the University and Politics Disciplinarity. We do this not to redeem or reimagine but to contribute to an enfleshed feminised and racialised undercommons for whom indigenist-decolonial feminist pedagogical-political praxis can never be nor desire to be obedient to the constraints, containments and violences of the settler colonial and its epistemologicalpedagogical genocidal project of the Lettered City of anti-Blackness and Indigenous disavowal. We refuse inclusion within, representation as legibility, and the making of community of and as the University. We instead foreground abolitionist categories such as enfleshment, dignity, mutual recognition as exteriority, differential responsible relationship-making, multiple temporalities and the epistemological as ontological, and we centre the knowledges of Indigenist feminised subjects from the exteriority of *They were all students at the University of Newcastle who undertook this course.

Decolonising feminist methodologies: an epistemological politics of the racialised and feminised flesh

Handbook of Feminist Research Methodologies, 2023

In this chapter, I chart my journey-in-relation to feminist decoloniality as a methodological pra... more In this chapter, I chart my journey-in-relation to feminist decoloniality as a methodological praxis of healing liberations and transformative justice. I walk us through the roots of this framework and its site/relationship of emergence to then move to three stories and ‘organisational’ moments in this ongoing journey of feminised and decolonised unlearning and becoming new/ancient in theory, practice and (self)relation. I explore these moments from my placedness in relation and responsibility as an Indigenous-mestiza single mother, daughter, granddaughters and comadres of Colombian-Muisca, Eastern European Jewish and Celtic heritages, living, loving, re-existiendo on the unceded and sovereign lands of the Awabakal and Worimi peoples in so-called South-East Australia. My mapping of these roots/routes is with the intent and intentionality to share the onto-epistemological and ethico-political roots, responsibilities, praxis and implications of the political and epistemological choice of walking in the borderlands of displacement and desire as a decolonial feminist. This choice is a commitment to not only our survivance but to our joyous wild flourishing as an imminent movement of this epistemological politics of the raced and feminised flesh.

Decolonial feminist solidarity:ies

Handbook of Feminist Research Methodologies, 2023

We came together to dialogue across difference to senti-pensar (think-feel) and bring to thought ... more We came together to dialogue across difference to senti-pensar (think-feel) and bring to thought in this text and in our relating key thematics, processes and ethical protocols of embodying feminist decolonial solidarity. We co-created a methodology of our own, building on the previous practice of one of us around the concept of the meeting-place, a trans-Indigenous praxis of cultivating embodied encounters in which research is ceremony and in which we co-create meaning and transformation through dialogue across human, more-than-human and non-human kin (Motta and Manning, forthcoming). We nurture infrastructures of care and ecologies of intimacy (Simpson, 2017) as key conditions of possibility for decolonising feminist encounters and solidarity. Our meeting-place encounters involved different elements. We engaged with the decades of work of decolonial foremothers such as Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Gloria Anzaldúa and María Lugones, drawing from their wisdoms and knowledges. Then, we read texts by Black feminist scholars such as Sara Ahmed, Audre Lorde and bell hooks, and put these into dialogue with our own theory-making. We came together to discuss their gifts for each of us individually and to identify thematics that we felt were key elements of embodying and bringing to thought feminist decolonial solidarity. We wrote short reflections and stories of our experiences and dark wisdoms between our meetings, which we then co-weaved into collective, yet plural narratives. We chose to embody this methodology of the meeting-place (Motta and Manning, forthcoming) because we believe that in decolonial feminist work, relationality and relationship-creating beyond the borders of the modern/colonial subject and its epistemological coordinates is vital; it is the planting of roots and tending of seeds so that we and the organisations we inhabit might be (im)possibly feminist and decolonised and thus inhabited and re-occupied otherwise.

“Civil society” versus social movements

Survey of the field of relationships between &quot;civil society&quot; and NGOs and popul... more

Interface 3/2 Feminism, Women's Movements and Women in Movement

Interface: a journal for and about social movements, Nov 1, 2011

Decolonising Feminist Methodologies: An Epistemological Politics of the Raced and Feminised Flesh

Handbook of Feminist Research Methodologies in Management and Organization Studies, 2023

In this piece I chart my journey-in-relation with feminist decoloniality as a methodological prax... more In this piece I chart my journey-in-relation with feminist decoloniality as a methodological praxis of healing liberations and transformative justice. I walk us through the roots of this framework and its site/relationship of emergence to then move to three stories and 'organisational' moments in this ongoing journey of feminised and decolonised unlearning and becoming anew-ancient in theory, practise and (self)relation. I explore these moments from my placedness in relation and responsibility as an Indigenous-Mestiza single mother, daughter, granddaughters and comadres of Colombian-Muisca, Eastern European Jewish and Celtic heritages, living, loving, re-existiendo on the unceded and sovereign lands of the Awabakal and Worimi peoples in so called SouthEast Australia. My mapping of these roots/

"Revolutionary Pedagogical-Political Kinship (M)otherwise: The Gifts of (Autonomous) Marxist Feminisms and Decolonial/Abolitionist Communitarian Feminisms to Pedagogical-Political Projects of Collective Liberation"

The Palgrave International Handbook of Marxism and Education, 2023

This piece emerges out of the connections, disconnections, resonances, and dissonances between he... more This piece emerges out of the connections, disconnections, resonances, and dissonances between heritages of Marxist feminisms (De La Costa and James, 1975; Federici, 2004; Mason-Deese, 2020; Motta, 2013; Motta et al., 2023) and decolonial/indigenist feminism (Anzaldúa, 1987, 2002, 2015; Lugones, 2010; Motta, 2018, 2023a, 2023b; Simpson, 2016, 2017), and their (non) relationships and/or sometimes begrudged and sometimes loving kinship with (Southern) heterodox Marxisms (Gramsci, 1971; Cardoso, 1972; Holloway, 2002; Mignolo, 2002; Tischler, 2014; Ndlovu-Gatsheni & Ndlovu, 2022). These are not abstract (feminist) theoretical constructions about and for, codi- fying and naming the analysis of categories from a critical distance, but co- creation with/as critical intimacy (see Motta, 2016 for the conceptualization of critical intimacy). Rather, my (t)racing, and attempt at bringing-to-text these lineages together, captures some of the complexities of mestizaje1 (non) belonging, and the collective threads of sense-making of my/our in-relation, complex Black/Indigenist/abolitionist feminist revolutionary praxis/medi- cine-making in the South. This embodies the yearning, and embraces the desires, for pluridiverse meeting-places that epistemologically-politically-peda- gogically take seriously the feminized and racialized Southern body, and/as flesh for a revolutionary praxis for our times(Motta, 2018, 2023a, 2023b).

Motta Mother Scholar failures ella habla por la entrepierna

Writing Saved Me, edited with shine choi, Marysia Zalewski & Swati Parashar. Forthcoming with Creative Interventions in Global Politics, Rowman & Littlefield, Autumn 2023. , 2023

I am playful here not pained I am irreverent I want to make love to failure I am in-relation, alw... more I am playful here not pained
I am irreverent
I want to make love to failure
I am in-relation, always in-relation, mother-scholar otherwise

What happens when mother-scholars speak of the exclusions, elisions, splitting, invisibilising and exhaustion? What happens when a thread of the unspeakable conditions of devaluation and dispossession of all that is feminised and racialised upon which the university is reproduced is made present in our weave of theoretical-conceptual-political registers of speech? What logics and (ir)rationalities of the entire edifice of colonial-modern (neoliberalised) project of the university and as state are exposed, and what (m)other (im)possibilities of onto-epistemological projects of (education as) life-nurturing become emergent and touchable to the skin?

When we fail as (m)other-scholars, - and we always-already and necessarily fail to perform to the registers of excellence, success, and mastery, the faultlines of carelessness and/as eradication of feminised and racialised flesh (Cruz, 2001; Hartman, 2008; Motta, 2019, 2022a); is exposed for its absurd yet macabre (ir)reality. Such failures are not necessarily relief filled and intimacy cultivating (although at times, in and as our out-of-time rhythms and relationalities they can be (Motta and Davies, 2022; Motta and Amsler, 2019; Motta and Bermudez, 2019)), yet they make visible the unmarked conditions of (non)being and separation from racialised flesh of the ideal White scholar and scholarship. They allow a dropping into (m)other temporalities and spatialities in relation, the telling of other(ed) (m)other stories, the bringing to thought, to speech and visibility ourselves (m)otherwise (Motta, 2018; Motta, 2022a), and the creation of emergent yet multiple epistemological (political) grounds of becoming enfleshed through the medicinal mysteries of our (Black/Indigenous) bodies and/as territories (Motta, 2021, 2022b; 2023).

Yes, We Speak, Si Tenemos Voz: On Refusing Epistemological Terra-Nullius

by Ybiskay Gonzalez and Sara C Motta

Journal of Critical Southern Studies

Weaving Enfleshed Citizenship (M)otherwise

Routledge eBooks, Nov 21, 2022

Our remembering can be everything as fragments, loose threads, multiple tongues; transversing lac... more Our remembering can be everything as fragments, loose threads, multiple tongues; transversing lack and loss, longing and survivance; enfleshed archiving of the silenced and violated racialised mothers and daughters, daughters and mother; excavating the fecund silence; escape, migration, dispossession, and desire. We are at once mother and daughter, lover, and sister, comadre (comother) and wisdom keeper, the centre of the subterranean webs, pulsating as pluridiverse rhythms, wild indecipherability to the registers of unreason and antilife that were never ours, flows and re-connection to an ancient-yet-new becoming political (m)otherwise (Motta 2018a, 2019).

Feminised and Decolonising Reoccupations, Re-existencias and Escrevivências: Learning from Women’s Movement Collectives in Northeast Brazil

by Sara C Motta and Claudiana Alencar

Bristol University Press eBooks, Jan 31, 2023

In this chapter we trace the feminised, decolonising and revolutionary nature of reoccupations, r... more In this chapter we trace the feminised, decolonising and revolutionary nature of reoccupations, re-existencias and escrevivências occurring in movement collectives in Ceará, Northeast Brazil: Mãos que Criam, a women’s cooperative that forms part of the Zé Maria de Tomé Movimento Sem Terra Settlement, and three collectives of Afro-Brazilian women poets and artisans of the periphery of Fortaleza. We explore what the sharing of herstories of popular movements and collectives can illuminate regarding reoccupations and defence – not only of physical territories of the rural and urban landscapes but also of the political and of the emancipatory political subject herself. We consider the implications for the politics of knowledge of engaging with such praxis. We focus therefore on pluralising and provincialising conceptualisation, and foreground how this necessarily involves the decolonising of reason bound by modern/coloniality and the enfleshment of epistemology. In particular, we dwell and bring to thought in relation the concepts of the ‘feminisation of resistance’, escrevivência and the gramática da dor e alegria, and their interweaving with the concept and practice of reoccupation.

Weaving Enfleshed Citizenship (M)otherwise

Mothering Performance: Maternal Action, 2022

Our remembering can be everything as fragments, loose threads, multiple tongues; transversing lac... more Our remembering can be everything as fragments, loose threads, multiple tongues; transversing lack and loss, longing and survivance; enfleshed archiving of the silenced and violated racialised mothers and daughters, daughters and mother; excavating the fecund silence; escape, migration, dispossession, and desire.

We are at once mother and daughter, lover, and sister, comadre (comother) and wisdom keeper, the centre of the subterranean webs, pulsating as pluridiverse rhythms, wild indecipherability to the registers of unreason and antilife that were never ours, flows and re-connection to an ancient-yet-new becoming political (m)otherwise (Motta 2018a, 2019).

Social Movements and/in the Postcolonial: Dispossession, Development and Resistance in the Global South

Social Movements in the Global South, 2011

A new lie is sold to us as history. The lie about the defeat of hope, the lie about the defeat of... more A new lie is sold to us as history. The lie about the defeat of hope, the lie about the defeat of dignity, the lie about the defeat of humanity. The mirror of power offers us equilibrium in the balance scale: the lie about the victory of cynicism, the lie about the victory of servitude, the lie about the victory of neoliberalism.

Decolonising critique in, against and beyond the business school Forthcoming contributions article

ephemera: theory and politics in organisation, 2022

Emerging from a year-long process of dialogos de saberes (dialogue of knowledges) between the aut... more Emerging from a year-long process of dialogos de saberes (dialogue of knowledges) between the authors, this paper seeks to explore and draw attention to the possibilities (and impossibilities) of nurturing a kind of affirmative critique which we feel has a place and relevance both within and beyond the Business School as metaphor, materiality, and relationality. The purpose of such a critique is not simply to highlight the specific violent exclusion, elisions, and epistemic injustices coconstitutive of the modern/colonial (neoliberalised) University, but to affirm and nurture the continued existence/re-existencias of other(ed) ways of being and knowing. We draw upon our dark wisdoms and weave our text as decolonising critique through multiple literacies, poetry, decolonising and feminist pedagogical methodologies, story, and interpersonal dialogue. We question in the flesh as text, thought and relationship the logics of rationality and coloniality that undergird the University, while also seeking to affirm the possibility of an onto-epistemological being/becoming 'otherwise'. Our approaches are grounded in the theory and praxis of embodiment, feminist decoloniality and critical pedagogy, and we seek to contribute to literature on the nature of critique, the role of the University in the modern/(de)colonial project, and the radical possibilities for dialogue, collaboration and kinship that can emerge when we move beyond the real and imaginary boundaries that the University creates to constrain our mind, bodies, and spirits.

Student Movements in Latin America: Decolonizing and Feminizing Education and Life

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics

Student movements and radical education collectives across Latin America, building on traditions ... more Student movements and radical education collectives across Latin America, building on traditions of radical, popular, feminist, and Indigenizing education, are seeking the democratization of the politics of knowledge and education in their regional contexts. Drawing on the cases of Chile, Colombia, and Mexico, it is possible to map and conceptualize a clear autonomous/decolonizing strand within the broader weaving of students’ movements, looking at the pedagogies of emancipation that underpin and are emergent in their praxis. The process of researching such movements and their politics of knowledge involves a decolonizing and pedagogical approach that embeds the co-creation of knowledges for transformation between researcher and movements. This builds upon work related to prefigurative epistemologies and decolonizing pedagogies of movement scholars such as Motta, Bermúdez, and Valenzuela Fuentes. It foregrounds the work of Neplanteras, of whom Gloria Anzaldúa speaks, those who bridg...

Decolonising (critical) social theory: Enfleshing post-Covid futurities

Thesis Eleven

Decolonial/anti-colonial Black, Indigenous and Mestiza feminist movements and scholar-activists f... more Decolonial/anti-colonial Black, Indigenous and Mestiza feminist movements and scholar-activists foreground how the oft-touted apocalypse that the Covid-19 pandemic heralds is not new, nor does it signify the great rupture into chaos that those from within modernity-coloniality often claim it to be. Rather Covid-19 is preceded by and will be out-lived by the apocalyptic anti-life onto-epistemological logics that are foundational to the (re)production of hetero-patriarchal capitalist-(settler) coloniality. However, one would commit the violence of reproduction of the epistemological logics and (ir)rationalities constitutive of the current system if the story ended there. We have survived (despite our losses) and our survival points to the urgent necessity and responsibility of (critical) social theory to listen to the story of the pandemic from a Black/Indigenous genealogy and to begin the sense-making of the Covid-19 pandemic, from prior to this particular virus, outside, against and...

Social Sciences for an Other Politics

The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this p... more

Introduction to the Special Section: Social Movements and Social Emancipation in Latin America

Bulletin of Latin American Research, 2016

Decolonising (critical) social theory: Enfleshing post-Covid futurities

Thesis 11, 2022

Decolonial/anti-colonial Black, Indigenous and Mestiza feminist movements and scholar-activists f... more Decolonial/anti-colonial Black, Indigenous and Mestiza feminist movements and scholar-activists foreground how the oft-touted apocalypse that the Covid-19 pandemic heralds is not new, nor does it signify the great rupture into chaos that those from within modernity-coloniality often claim it to be. Rather Covid-19 is preceded by and will be outlived by the apocalyptic anti-life onto-epistemological logics that are foundational to the (re)production of hetero-patriarchal capitalist-(settler) coloniality. However, one would commit the violence of reproduction of the epistemological logics and (ir)rationalities constitutive of the current system if the story ended there. We have survived (despite our losses) and our survival points to the urgent necessity and responsibility of (critical) social theory to listen to the story of the pandemic from a Black/Indigenous genealogy and to begin the sense-making of the Covid-19 pandemic, from prior to this particular virus, outside, against and beyond the politics of knowledge of critical social theory itself. Thus, I invite you to journey to an affirmative re-enfleshment of reason and theory-making in relation to and dialogue with Black, Indigenous, and subaltern Mestiza feminist movements in southwest Colombia and in southeast so-called Australia in the unceded lands of the Awabakal and the Worimi. I explore this through the metaphor, the materiality, the cosmology and the herstory of the mangrove swamps a knowing-being otherwise (in)visible to the dehumanising gave of Whiteness and bring to thought three stories of a politics of knowledge of/as the Black/racialised and feminised body/flesh. To do this is to suggest that the co-creation of pathways which are life affirming and life making beyond and out of the post-Covid 19 conjuncture involves an epistemologicalpolitical project which decolonises and feminises the containments of reason and knowing (non)being of coloniality/modernity.

1“We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For” The Feminization of Resistance in Venezuela

by

Grandmother genealogies: Feminist/ised, indigenist decolonising pedagogies against and beyond the university

Journal of International Political Theory, 2024

As a collective of inter-cultural women moving in but not of, and against and beyond the modern/c... more As a collective of inter-cultural women moving in but not of, and against and beyond the modern/colonial (neoliberalised) university we (t)race generative pedagogical experiences of worldmaking cosmopolitics and their (im)possibilities within the University and Politics Disciplinarity. We do this not to redeem or reimagine but to contribute to an enfleshed feminised and racialised undercommons for whom indigenist-decolonial feminist pedagogical-political praxis can never be nor desire to be obedient to the constraints, containments and violences of the settler colonial and its epistemologicalpedagogical genocidal project of the Lettered City of anti-Blackness and Indigenous disavowal. We refuse inclusion within, representation as legibility, and the making of community of and as the University. We instead foreground abolitionist categories such as enfleshment, dignity, mutual recognition as exteriority, differential responsible relationship-making, multiple temporalities and the epistemological as ontological, and we centre the knowledges of Indigenist feminised subjects from the exteriority of *They were all students at the University of Newcastle who undertook this course.

Decolonising feminist methodologies: an epistemological politics of the racialised and feminised flesh

Handbook of Feminist Research Methodologies, 2023

In this chapter, I chart my journey-in-relation to feminist decoloniality as a methodological pra... more In this chapter, I chart my journey-in-relation to feminist decoloniality as a methodological praxis of healing liberations and transformative justice. I walk us through the roots of this framework and its site/relationship of emergence to then move to three stories and ‘organisational’ moments in this ongoing journey of feminised and decolonised unlearning and becoming new/ancient in theory, practice and (self)relation. I explore these moments from my placedness in relation and responsibility as an Indigenous-mestiza single mother, daughter, granddaughters and comadres of Colombian-Muisca, Eastern European Jewish and Celtic heritages, living, loving, re-existiendo on the unceded and sovereign lands of the Awabakal and Worimi peoples in so-called South-East Australia. My mapping of these roots/routes is with the intent and intentionality to share the onto-epistemological and ethico-political roots, responsibilities, praxis and implications of the political and epistemological choice of walking in the borderlands of displacement and desire as a decolonial feminist. This choice is a commitment to not only our survivance but to our joyous wild flourishing as an imminent movement of this epistemological politics of the raced and feminised flesh.

Decolonial feminist solidarity:ies

Handbook of Feminist Research Methodologies, 2023

We came together to dialogue across difference to senti-pensar (think-feel) and bring to thought ... more We came together to dialogue across difference to senti-pensar (think-feel) and bring to thought in this text and in our relating key thematics, processes and ethical protocols of embodying feminist decolonial solidarity. We co-created a methodology of our own, building on the previous practice of one of us around the concept of the meeting-place, a trans-Indigenous praxis of cultivating embodied encounters in which research is ceremony and in which we co-create meaning and transformation through dialogue across human, more-than-human and non-human kin (Motta and Manning, forthcoming). We nurture infrastructures of care and ecologies of intimacy (Simpson, 2017) as key conditions of possibility for decolonising feminist encounters and solidarity. Our meeting-place encounters involved different elements. We engaged with the decades of work of decolonial foremothers such as Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Gloria Anzaldúa and María Lugones, drawing from their wisdoms and knowledges. Then, we read texts by Black feminist scholars such as Sara Ahmed, Audre Lorde and bell hooks, and put these into dialogue with our own theory-making. We came together to discuss their gifts for each of us individually and to identify thematics that we felt were key elements of embodying and bringing to thought feminist decolonial solidarity. We wrote short reflections and stories of our experiences and dark wisdoms between our meetings, which we then co-weaved into collective, yet plural narratives. We chose to embody this methodology of the meeting-place (Motta and Manning, forthcoming) because we believe that in decolonial feminist work, relationality and relationship-creating beyond the borders of the modern/colonial subject and its epistemological coordinates is vital; it is the planting of roots and tending of seeds so that we and the organisations we inhabit might be (im)possibly feminist and decolonised and thus inhabited and re-occupied otherwise.

“Civil society” versus social movements

Survey of the field of relationships between &quot;civil society&quot; and NGOs and popul... more

Interface 3/2 Feminism, Women's Movements and Women in Movement

Interface: a journal for and about social movements, Nov 1, 2011

Decolonising Feminist Methodologies: An Epistemological Politics of the Raced and Feminised Flesh

Handbook of Feminist Research Methodologies in Management and Organization Studies, 2023

In this piece I chart my journey-in-relation with feminist decoloniality as a methodological prax... more In this piece I chart my journey-in-relation with feminist decoloniality as a methodological praxis of healing liberations and transformative justice. I walk us through the roots of this framework and its site/relationship of emergence to then move to three stories and 'organisational' moments in this ongoing journey of feminised and decolonised unlearning and becoming anew-ancient in theory, practise and (self)relation. I explore these moments from my placedness in relation and responsibility as an Indigenous-Mestiza single mother, daughter, granddaughters and comadres of Colombian-Muisca, Eastern European Jewish and Celtic heritages, living, loving, re-existiendo on the unceded and sovereign lands of the Awabakal and Worimi peoples in so called SouthEast Australia. My mapping of these roots/

"Revolutionary Pedagogical-Political Kinship (M)otherwise: The Gifts of (Autonomous) Marxist Feminisms and Decolonial/Abolitionist Communitarian Feminisms to Pedagogical-Political Projects of Collective Liberation"

The Palgrave International Handbook of Marxism and Education, 2023

This piece emerges out of the connections, disconnections, resonances, and dissonances between he... more This piece emerges out of the connections, disconnections, resonances, and dissonances between heritages of Marxist feminisms (De La Costa and James, 1975; Federici, 2004; Mason-Deese, 2020; Motta, 2013; Motta et al., 2023) and decolonial/indigenist feminism (Anzaldúa, 1987, 2002, 2015; Lugones, 2010; Motta, 2018, 2023a, 2023b; Simpson, 2016, 2017), and their (non) relationships and/or sometimes begrudged and sometimes loving kinship with (Southern) heterodox Marxisms (Gramsci, 1971; Cardoso, 1972; Holloway, 2002; Mignolo, 2002; Tischler, 2014; Ndlovu-Gatsheni & Ndlovu, 2022). These are not abstract (feminist) theoretical constructions about and for, codi- fying and naming the analysis of categories from a critical distance, but co- creation with/as critical intimacy (see Motta, 2016 for the conceptualization of critical intimacy). Rather, my (t)racing, and attempt at bringing-to-text these lineages together, captures some of the complexities of mestizaje1 (non) belonging, and the collective threads of sense-making of my/our in-relation, complex Black/Indigenist/abolitionist feminist revolutionary praxis/medi- cine-making in the South. This embodies the yearning, and embraces the desires, for pluridiverse meeting-places that epistemologically-politically-peda- gogically take seriously the feminized and racialized Southern body, and/as flesh for a revolutionary praxis for our times(Motta, 2018, 2023a, 2023b).

Motta Mother Scholar failures ella habla por la entrepierna

Writing Saved Me, edited with shine choi, Marysia Zalewski & Swati Parashar. Forthcoming with Creative Interventions in Global Politics, Rowman & Littlefield, Autumn 2023. , 2023

I am playful here not pained I am irreverent I want to make love to failure I am in-relation, alw... more I am playful here not pained
I am irreverent
I want to make love to failure
I am in-relation, always in-relation, mother-scholar otherwise

What happens when mother-scholars speak of the exclusions, elisions, splitting, invisibilising and exhaustion? What happens when a thread of the unspeakable conditions of devaluation and dispossession of all that is feminised and racialised upon which the university is reproduced is made present in our weave of theoretical-conceptual-political registers of speech? What logics and (ir)rationalities of the entire edifice of colonial-modern (neoliberalised) project of the university and as state are exposed, and what (m)other (im)possibilities of onto-epistemological projects of (education as) life-nurturing become emergent and touchable to the skin?

When we fail as (m)other-scholars, - and we always-already and necessarily fail to perform to the registers of excellence, success, and mastery, the faultlines of carelessness and/as eradication of feminised and racialised flesh (Cruz, 2001; Hartman, 2008; Motta, 2019, 2022a); is exposed for its absurd yet macabre (ir)reality. Such failures are not necessarily relief filled and intimacy cultivating (although at times, in and as our out-of-time rhythms and relationalities they can be (Motta and Davies, 2022; Motta and Amsler, 2019; Motta and Bermudez, 2019)), yet they make visible the unmarked conditions of (non)being and separation from racialised flesh of the ideal White scholar and scholarship. They allow a dropping into (m)other temporalities and spatialities in relation, the telling of other(ed) (m)other stories, the bringing to thought, to speech and visibility ourselves (m)otherwise (Motta, 2018; Motta, 2022a), and the creation of emergent yet multiple epistemological (political) grounds of becoming enfleshed through the medicinal mysteries of our (Black/Indigenous) bodies and/as territories (Motta, 2021, 2022b; 2023).

Yes, We Speak, Si Tenemos Voz: On Refusing Epistemological Terra-Nullius

by Ybiskay Gonzalez and Sara C Motta

Journal of Critical Southern Studies

Weaving Enfleshed Citizenship (M)otherwise

Routledge eBooks, Nov 21, 2022

Our remembering can be everything as fragments, loose threads, multiple tongues; transversing lac... more Our remembering can be everything as fragments, loose threads, multiple tongues; transversing lack and loss, longing and survivance; enfleshed archiving of the silenced and violated racialised mothers and daughters, daughters and mother; excavating the fecund silence; escape, migration, dispossession, and desire. We are at once mother and daughter, lover, and sister, comadre (comother) and wisdom keeper, the centre of the subterranean webs, pulsating as pluridiverse rhythms, wild indecipherability to the registers of unreason and antilife that were never ours, flows and re-connection to an ancient-yet-new becoming political (m)otherwise (Motta 2018a, 2019).

Feminised and Decolonising Reoccupations, Re-existencias and Escrevivências: Learning from Women’s Movement Collectives in Northeast Brazil

by Sara C Motta and Claudiana Alencar

Bristol University Press eBooks, Jan 31, 2023

In this chapter we trace the feminised, decolonising and revolutionary nature of reoccupations, r... more In this chapter we trace the feminised, decolonising and revolutionary nature of reoccupations, re-existencias and escrevivências occurring in movement collectives in Ceará, Northeast Brazil: Mãos que Criam, a women’s cooperative that forms part of the Zé Maria de Tomé Movimento Sem Terra Settlement, and three collectives of Afro-Brazilian women poets and artisans of the periphery of Fortaleza. We explore what the sharing of herstories of popular movements and collectives can illuminate regarding reoccupations and defence – not only of physical territories of the rural and urban landscapes but also of the political and of the emancipatory political subject herself. We consider the implications for the politics of knowledge of engaging with such praxis. We focus therefore on pluralising and provincialising conceptualisation, and foreground how this necessarily involves the decolonising of reason bound by modern/coloniality and the enfleshment of epistemology. In particular, we dwell and bring to thought in relation the concepts of the ‘feminisation of resistance’, escrevivência and the gramática da dor e alegria, and their interweaving with the concept and practice of reoccupation.

Weaving Enfleshed Citizenship (M)otherwise

Mothering Performance: Maternal Action, 2022

Our remembering can be everything as fragments, loose threads, multiple tongues; transversing lac... more Our remembering can be everything as fragments, loose threads, multiple tongues; transversing lack and loss, longing and survivance; enfleshed archiving of the silenced and violated racialised mothers and daughters, daughters and mother; excavating the fecund silence; escape, migration, dispossession, and desire.

We are at once mother and daughter, lover, and sister, comadre (comother) and wisdom keeper, the centre of the subterranean webs, pulsating as pluridiverse rhythms, wild indecipherability to the registers of unreason and antilife that were never ours, flows and re-connection to an ancient-yet-new becoming political (m)otherwise (Motta 2018a, 2019).

Social Movements and/in the Postcolonial: Dispossession, Development and Resistance in the Global South

Social Movements in the Global South, 2011

A new lie is sold to us as history. The lie about the defeat of hope, the lie about the defeat of... more A new lie is sold to us as history. The lie about the defeat of hope, the lie about the defeat of dignity, the lie about the defeat of humanity. The mirror of power offers us equilibrium in the balance scale: the lie about the victory of cynicism, the lie about the victory of servitude, the lie about the victory of neoliberalism.

Decolonising critique in, against and beyond the business school Forthcoming contributions article

ephemera: theory and politics in organisation, 2022

Emerging from a year-long process of dialogos de saberes (dialogue of knowledges) between the aut... more Emerging from a year-long process of dialogos de saberes (dialogue of knowledges) between the authors, this paper seeks to explore and draw attention to the possibilities (and impossibilities) of nurturing a kind of affirmative critique which we feel has a place and relevance both within and beyond the Business School as metaphor, materiality, and relationality. The purpose of such a critique is not simply to highlight the specific violent exclusion, elisions, and epistemic injustices coconstitutive of the modern/colonial (neoliberalised) University, but to affirm and nurture the continued existence/re-existencias of other(ed) ways of being and knowing. We draw upon our dark wisdoms and weave our text as decolonising critique through multiple literacies, poetry, decolonising and feminist pedagogical methodologies, story, and interpersonal dialogue. We question in the flesh as text, thought and relationship the logics of rationality and coloniality that undergird the University, while also seeking to affirm the possibility of an onto-epistemological being/becoming 'otherwise'. Our approaches are grounded in the theory and praxis of embodiment, feminist decoloniality and critical pedagogy, and we seek to contribute to literature on the nature of critique, the role of the University in the modern/(de)colonial project, and the radical possibilities for dialogue, collaboration and kinship that can emerge when we move beyond the real and imaginary boundaries that the University creates to constrain our mind, bodies, and spirits.

Student Movements in Latin America: Decolonizing and Feminizing Education and Life

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics

Student movements and radical education collectives across Latin America, building on traditions ... more Student movements and radical education collectives across Latin America, building on traditions of radical, popular, feminist, and Indigenizing education, are seeking the democratization of the politics of knowledge and education in their regional contexts. Drawing on the cases of Chile, Colombia, and Mexico, it is possible to map and conceptualize a clear autonomous/decolonizing strand within the broader weaving of students’ movements, looking at the pedagogies of emancipation that underpin and are emergent in their praxis. The process of researching such movements and their politics of knowledge involves a decolonizing and pedagogical approach that embeds the co-creation of knowledges for transformation between researcher and movements. This builds upon work related to prefigurative epistemologies and decolonizing pedagogies of movement scholars such as Motta, Bermúdez, and Valenzuela Fuentes. It foregrounds the work of Neplanteras, of whom Gloria Anzaldúa speaks, those who bridg...

Decolonising (critical) social theory: Enfleshing post-Covid futurities

Thesis Eleven

Decolonial/anti-colonial Black, Indigenous and Mestiza feminist movements and scholar-activists f... more Decolonial/anti-colonial Black, Indigenous and Mestiza feminist movements and scholar-activists foreground how the oft-touted apocalypse that the Covid-19 pandemic heralds is not new, nor does it signify the great rupture into chaos that those from within modernity-coloniality often claim it to be. Rather Covid-19 is preceded by and will be out-lived by the apocalyptic anti-life onto-epistemological logics that are foundational to the (re)production of hetero-patriarchal capitalist-(settler) coloniality. However, one would commit the violence of reproduction of the epistemological logics and (ir)rationalities constitutive of the current system if the story ended there. We have survived (despite our losses) and our survival points to the urgent necessity and responsibility of (critical) social theory to listen to the story of the pandemic from a Black/Indigenous genealogy and to begin the sense-making of the Covid-19 pandemic, from prior to this particular virus, outside, against and...

Social Sciences for an Other Politics

The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this p... more

Introduction to the Special Section: Social Movements and Social Emancipation in Latin America

Bulletin of Latin American Research, 2016

Decolonising (critical) social theory: Enfleshing post-Covid futurities

Thesis 11, 2022

Decolonial/anti-colonial Black, Indigenous and Mestiza feminist movements and scholar-activists f... more Decolonial/anti-colonial Black, Indigenous and Mestiza feminist movements and scholar-activists foreground how the oft-touted apocalypse that the Covid-19 pandemic heralds is not new, nor does it signify the great rupture into chaos that those from within modernity-coloniality often claim it to be. Rather Covid-19 is preceded by and will be outlived by the apocalyptic anti-life onto-epistemological logics that are foundational to the (re)production of hetero-patriarchal capitalist-(settler) coloniality. However, one would commit the violence of reproduction of the epistemological logics and (ir)rationalities constitutive of the current system if the story ended there. We have survived (despite our losses) and our survival points to the urgent necessity and responsibility of (critical) social theory to listen to the story of the pandemic from a Black/Indigenous genealogy and to begin the sense-making of the Covid-19 pandemic, from prior to this particular virus, outside, against and beyond the politics of knowledge of critical social theory itself. Thus, I invite you to journey to an affirmative re-enfleshment of reason and theory-making in relation to and dialogue with Black, Indigenous, and subaltern Mestiza feminist movements in southwest Colombia and in southeast so-called Australia in the unceded lands of the Awabakal and the Worimi. I explore this through the metaphor, the materiality, the cosmology and the herstory of the mangrove swamps a knowing-being otherwise (in)visible to the dehumanising gave of Whiteness and bring to thought three stories of a politics of knowledge of/as the Black/racialised and feminised body/flesh. To do this is to suggest that the co-creation of pathways which are life affirming and life making beyond and out of the post-Covid 19 conjuncture involves an epistemologicalpolitical project which decolonises and feminises the containments of reason and knowing (non)being of coloniality/modernity.

1“We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For” The Feminization of Resistance in Venezuela

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Australian Politics and Policy: Senior Edition

by Peter John Chen, Adele Garnier, and Sara C Motta

The first completely customisable, open access textbook on Australian politics, Australian Politi... more The first completely customisable, open access textbook on Australian politics, Australian Politics and Policy provides a unique, holistic coverage of politics and public topics for use in junior and senior university courses. With an online database of 40 chapters, the book innovatively enables instructors to compile a bespoke edition to suit their teaching needs, or to include individual chapters in course readers.

With contributions from Australia’s leading politics and public-policy scholars, the textbook includes material on Australian political history and philosophy, key political institutions, Australian political sociology, public policy-making in Australia, and specialised chapters on a range of key policy domains.

Each chapter was subject to anonymous and rigorous peer-review to ensure the highest standards. The textbook comes with additional teaching resources including review questions and lecture slides.

Why critical pedagogy and popular education matter today

by Joyce Canaan, Dr Gurnam Singh, Sara C Motta, and Stephen Cowden