From Margins to Pluriversality: Refusal, Reconstruction, and Decolonial Futures
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This document examines the interplay between Audra Simpson's “politics of refusal” and Subcomandante Marcos' “pluriversalism”—both emerging from postcolonial discourse on Turtle Island—as frameworks aiming for self-determined governance that authentically acknowledges Indigenous knowledge(s) and ways of being. Simpson advocates for an emancipatory refusal to accept settler-state recognition, which often marginalises Indigenous perspectives and relegates them to a “peripheral” or “deviant” status within educational institutions and policies. In contrast, Marcos' pluriversalism, while also challenging the state's homogenising force, promotes a dialogical engagement that incorporates Mesoamerican knowledge(s) to enrich mainstream discourses, fostering “border thinking” or “border epistemology.” This analysis proposes that Simpson's approach effectively deconstructs prevailing hierarchical knowledge structures within education, while Marcos' method seeks to reconstruct more inclusive paradigms where diverse epistemologies coexist without perpetuating colonial dominance. Thus, the thesis advocates for a two-step decolonial process with significant implications for educational practice, policy, and pedagogy: (1) Implementing Simpson's politics of refusal to critically dismantle the dominance of colonial epistemologies in curricula, teaching methods, and educational policies, effectively breaking down hierarchical relationships between colonial and Indigenous knowledge systems; and (2) Employing Marcos' pluriversal approach to reconstruct educational paradigms, fostering policies and pedagogical practices that support the equitable coexistence of different, and often competing, epistemologies and ontologies. This dual strategy aims to transform educational systems, preventing the perpetuation of colonial imbalances and promoting a truly inclusive, pluriversal educational landscape. Keywords: politics of refusal, pluriversalism, postcolonial discourse, indigenous knowledge, inclusive pedagogy
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.044 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".