Pedagogies to “hold on to life”: practices of body-territory care in the midst of the armed conflict in Buenaventura, Colombia

Abstract

In this article I analyze the practices of defense of the body-territory of teachers working in schools affected by the armed conflict in the city of Buenaventura, in the Colombian Pacific. Through ethnographic research work, I show how the armed conflict and the capitalist depredation of the ethnic territory of Buenaventura have affected the schools and the reproduction of life of the black communities that live there. In the face of the practices of terror, dispossession and deterritorialization promoted by the armed actors, female black teachers of Buenaventura have responded with “pedagogies to hold on to life”. These pedagogies articulate teaching strategies, care relationships and ancestral knowledge that allow them to sustain their bodies and school territories in the midst of despair. I conclude that care is a form of political-pedagogical agency to recover and heal the territory, but it is also an ambivalent practice full of pain, injustice and contradictions. In this sense, care is highlighted as a central analytical key to understand the possible relationships between education, resistance and the defense of ancestral Afro-Colombian territories.