Indigenous and black women in the internationalization of research in Latin AmericaAbstract
This article stems from the Brazil–Bolivia Indigenous science research project,1 developed under the Abdias Nascimento Program of the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES).2 The analysis focuses on the contributions of Indigenous and Black women to science, their ethnic-racial and academic profiles when in study missions abroad, problematizing their underrepresentation within the scientific system. The findings indicate that the participation of these women in the internationalization of research diversifies scientific canons, strengthens their scholarly work, and impacts the knowledge connected to their territories and to South–South cooperation networks.
Keywords
Indigenous women; Black women; internationalization; research; Latin America
Resumo
Este artigo é resultado do projeto de pesquisa1 em ciência indígena Brasil-Bolívia, no âmbito do Programa Abdias Nascimento da Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)2. No centro da análise, a contribuição de mulheres indígenas e negras na ciência; o perfil étnico-racial e acadêmico das mulheres em missão de estudos no exterior, problematizando a realidade da sub-representação no sistema de ciência. A análise aponta que a participação dessas mulheres na internacionalização diversifica o cânone das ciências, qualifica os seus estudos e impacta os conhecimentos vinculados aos seus territórios e às redes de cooperação Sul-Sul.
Palavras-chave
mulheres indígenas; mulheres negras; internacionalização; pesquisas; américa latina
Resumen
Este artículo es fruto del proyecto de investigación sobre ciencia indígena Brasil-Bolivia que se desarrolló en el marco del Programa Abdias Nascimento de la Coordinación para la Mejora del Personal de la Educación Superior (CAPES). El análisis se centra en las contribuciones de las mujeres indígenas y negras a la ciencia, así como en sus perfiles étnico-raciales y académicos durante sus estancias de estudio en el extranjero al cuestionar su subrepresentación en el ámbito científico. Los resultados indican que la participación de estas mujeres en la internacionalización de estudios diversifica los cánones científicos, fortalece su labor académica e impacta el conocimiento en torno a sus territorios y a las redes de cooperación Sur-Sur.
Palabras clave
Mujeres indígenas; mujeres negras; internacionalización; investigación; América Latina
Do Indigenous and Black women produce science? Initial questions
When Indigenous and Black women enter scientific spaces, they position their bodies as epistemological territories within the academic environment. Their trajectories reveal that Indigenous and Black people have historically been excluded from graduate programs. Despite quota policies, these women remain at the margins of institutional research dynamics, and their authored works are excluded from mandatory lists of theoretical references even when they produce intellectual work aligned with established requirements, given their underrepresentation among faculty members of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), where the dominant worldview is shaped by sexism and Eurocentrism.
We argue that the invisibility of Indigenous and Black women is a product of sexism and structural and institutional racism, justified by the hegemonic modes of knowledge and science production. Based on this premise, we affirm that Indigenous and Black women produce science and that their scientific work encompasses intellectual production and the struggle against institutional racism and sexism and for the democratization of higher education, expressing both the denunciation and the possibility of constructing another public space for science and knowledge production.
The access of Indigenous and Black people to Brazilian universities and the scientific field is an evident challenge. The Brazilian Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (MCTI), in a 2023 article published through its official communication channel, used the term “scientific racism” to mention the phenomenon responsible for establishing Western thought during the period in which the Enlightenment flourished, when slavery was one of the pillars of the economy, politics, and social life, guided by the belief in the intellectual, moral, and cultural superiority of the White race over the Black race (MCTI, 2023).
The Parent in Science Movement published a survey in 2023 demonstrating that, of the 16,108 active productivity research grants in Brazil in the middle of that year, 64.4% were awarded to men and only 35.6% to women (0.1% to Indigenous women and 0.8% to Black women). Only 27.2% of Level 1A grants, which are awarded to researchers with at least eight years since completing their doctoral degrees, were granted to women, none of them self-identified as Black or Indigenous (Dias, 2023). At the global level, the reality is no different according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). In thirteen G20 member countries, only 37% of scientific grants were awarded to women in 2022 (UNESCO, 2024). This scenario, defined by exclusion structurally rooted in racism and sexism, is also reinforced by the high financial and social costs imposed by the internationalization of research, given the colonialist barriers that hinder flows and collaborative networks, in the face of which Indigenous and Black women from countries such as Brazil find themselves at a greater disadvantage, relying almost exclusively on public funding.
Overcoming the invisibility of Indigenous and Black women in science and knowledge production should be understood as an issue that transcends geographical, political, and cultural boundaries, as this dimension is currently incorporated into the evaluation indicators for the training and qualification of graduate programs. The inclusion of Indigenous and Black women in science has become a strategic component of efforts to overcome racism and sexism in science, promoting the epistemic visibility of their research and impacts on the preservation of territories and the protection of the planet. These forms of mobility can also foster innovative practices in the field of collaborative sciences in areas such as education, the environment, and territorial management, directly linked to the living conditions of Indigenous and Black women.
We understand that Latin American thought, as an emerging matrix of science, with the potential to produce counter-hegemonic epistemological foundations in relation to Western science, can also contribute to efforts to overcome racism and sexism in science, giving visibility to epistemologies historically silenced by racism, sexism, and prejudice.
Our objective in this article is to highlight challenges that are articulated within the historical process of exclusion of Indigenous and Black women from science, highlighting an experience based in Brazil aimed at strengthening the internationalization of research in the context of Latin America, particularly in Bolivia, involving Indigenous and Black faculty members affiliated with and students enrolled in graduate programs in both countries.
We conducted the discussion from a dialectical perspective, addressing themes of colonialism and patriarchy and considering their implications for the production and hierarchization of territories and social groups according to a Eurocentric logic, highlighting resulting consequences and forms of resistance in the broader social context, and specifically within epistemologies, the university, and science. The dialectical conception that guides the discussion and analysis encompasses dimensions of the historicity of the phenomenon, in its belonging to a reality that unfolds amid permanent tensions and contradictions, and that, in order to be understood, requires a theoretical understanding of its main constituent elements, forming totalities subject to modification (Gadotti, 2001). We conducted a bibliographic and documentary survey using the databases of the Políticas de Gestão Territorial e Ambiental em Terras Indígenas e Quilombolas no Brasil e Bolívia [Territorial and Environmental Management Policies in Indigenous and Quilombola Lands in Brazil and Bolivia] Project to present the systematized data.
The study begins with the reality of graduate education and the conditions of access to spaces of scientific production in Brazil, problematizing them based on parameters of the Western colonizing project and the challenges of participation faced by Indigenous people, Black people, and women. Next, we highlight the key role of women involved in the internationalization project, establishing points of convergence with the principles of Popular Education and, finally, detailing the purposes, actions, and members of the Brazil-Bolivia Project, returning to a reflection on the results and challenges initially presented.
Indigenous and Black women in the South-South science field
It is essential to construct a line of thought that challenges Eurocentric science and its colonialist power project, not only as scientific superiority, but also as a pattern of global domination in geopolitics and in the invention of the colonized “Other.” This narrative was analyzed in detail by Enrique Dussel (1993), in his publication The invention of the Americas: eclipse of the “other” and the myth of modernity, by demonstrating how the philosopher Hegel analyzes the term “development” to define colonized territories and peoples: “[…] our information indicates that its culture expires the moment the Spirit draws near (sowie der Geistsich ihr näherte)… The inferiority of these individuals in every respect is entirely evident” (Hegel cited by Dussel, 1993, p. 17). What colonialism, within the logic of the Eurocentric paradigm of science, describes as conquest or discovery—a narrative read and reread as an absolute truth—becomes a justification for the domination and subordination of Latin American peoples.
The concepts of race are constituted within the context of this logic, revealing that scientific neutrality was, above all, a rationality at the service of colonization processes, in which truth, as exact knowledge, was not merely disregarded, but served to fully justify the system of domination of Indigenous peoples. Fals Borda (1981) criticizes Western science for its monopolizing character, determining what is and what is not scientific; he argues that scientific neutrality does not exist and that this science cannot be “fictional.” This counter-hegemonic analysis presents another interpretation of the fallacy of “scientific neutrality,” whose purpose is to maintain the process of assimilation and domination justified by Eurocentric science.
The necessary rupture with this paradigm requires processes of strengthening and visibility of the knowledge of people and groups rendered subordinate, through active participation in the formulation and implementation of research committed to academic and scientific integration. In this sense, the Latin American academic context is a space for necessary encounters, capable of generating mutual recognition based on shared realities and, at the same time, distanced by the borders defined within the colonial project.
This type of encounter can enable the development of strategic projects based on a rationality grounded in the experiences of the continent, such as the affirmation of an autonomous line of thought capable of uncovering the face of colonialism and its consequences for colonized territories, as represented by one of Bolivia’s leading Indigenous intellectuals, Fausto Reinaga (2014, p. 78), in his book La Revolución India [Indio Revolution], in which he analyzes the effects of the Western invasion of Indigenous territories, stating that “The West, by conquering and dominating other continents and other peoples, has plundered their physical, artistic, and spiritual wealth, and taken it back to its metropolis as ‘spoils of conquest’” (our translation)5. Western ideas in Latin America continue to seek to determine our political and administrative directions, with constant threats of invasion, as occurs in Venezuela (Campos, 2026).
In the colonial project, the West invented indigenismo—which was and has been the legalization of colonialism and the colonialist power by the State to ensure the continuity of the process of assimilation of Indigenous peoples into the colonizer’s Western culture. In the world of science, this process is revealed through White people speaking among themselves and about Indigenous peoples, without allowing their voices to be articulated and fully heard.
Indigenismo uses categories to undermine the Indianist identity, making the Western model prevail as the shaper of a single identity, which points to the abandonment of the scientific rigor that determines the search for truth, based on the understanding that “Science is knowledge of reality, a set of principles and laws that express a truth. Science is certainty. Consequently, to call the Indigenous person ‘peasant class’ or ‘peasant’ is not science; it is an antiscientific hallucination”6 (Reinaga, 2014, p. 112, our translation). Thus, the category of indigenismo, as a construction of the colonizer’s imagination, was legalized by the colonialist State via legal forms of domination and the invention of subordinate and inferior identities. It is, therefore, a matter of the sequestration of a wealth of resources that need to be liberated through encounters among the victims of this system.
Indianism is the Indigenous thought about themselves and the political consciousness of their ancestors. Despite the hegemony of Eurocentric science, for Indigenous peoples, Indianism represents the persistence of Indigenous identity that has survived attempts at assimilation: “The Indio, even if he dyes his skin, even if he bears the title of ‘doctor,’ remains an Indio ‘forever.’ Therefore, think, feel, and act as a natural part of your society, Indian society.”7 (Reinaga, 2014, p. 67, our translation). The idea of race, as synonymous with White and civilized superiority, as an identifier of Europeans and as a marker of inferiority used to define Indigenous peoples, mestizos, and Black people, serves to justify the domination, enslavement, and subordination of their bodies, as well as the denial of their ancestral matrix of knowledge and culture.
The concept of patriarchy was also invented, based on an idea of male superiority and domination over women, providing support for social, economic, and cultural inequalities between men and women. The participation of women in academic and scientific environments is a notable expression of this subordination, while Indianism is a form of thought originating among Indigenous peoples in their struggles against colonialism, in response to everything that colonialism erased, silenced, and exterminated from Indigenous nations and to everything that the colonialist power has represented as a system of domination and subordination of peoples who do not operate within the scientific logic of the Global North. Race is also a colonial construction for the domination of Black and Indigenous populations.
Lélia Gonzalez (2020, p. 31) discusses the history of the enslavement of Black people in Brazil, highlighting the “ruses of Western reason.” The author argues that bodies, territories, and cultures were subjected to Portugal’s legal and institutional apparatus, legitimizing servitude and the exploitation of labor and bodies in the face of the legally imposed requirement of passive submission. In independent Brazil, an attempt was made to establish the myth of racial democracy, with the purpose of concealing social, racial, and socioeconomic oppression. Gonzalez (2020) emphasizes that Black women were central to the colonial enterprise and to the processes of struggle and resistance by Black people. In Por um feminismo afro-latino-americano [For an Afro-Latin American Feminism], she argues that any process of liberation requires discussing and seeking to overcome racial discrimination and the de-alienation of an identity captured by a system of practices and forms of thought, a universalized and abstract rationalism in which Black people, Indigenous peoples, and women were rendered inferior.
Indigenous and Black women challenging scientific meritocracy and its systems of exclusion
The research by Cida Bento (2022) sheds light on Indigenous and Black women in the university, as it calls into question the fallacy of the ego cogito of Whiteness. Her studies reveal the idea that a pact of Whiteness exists and that this narcissistic agreement has secured privilege for White people and the exclusion and subordination of the “non-European other.” This pattern sustains a long process of exclusion of Indigenous and Black women from access to the knowledge production system, which has been fully justified by a type of North-Eurocentric science. “As Europe expanded throughout the world and Europeans gained access to and appropriated the material and symbolic resources of the ‘others,’ the narrative of Whiteness was constructed”8 (Bento, 2022, p. 18, our translation). The hegemony of the scientific system and its markers of exclusion can be observed, among other mechanisms, through the predominance of languages in scientific production: English, French, and Spanish.
The construction of strategies and cooperation networks aimed at ensuring greater inclusion of historically excluded peoples and overcoming the academic meritocracy celebrated by Whiteness is among the challenges faced by Indigenous and Black women who occupy places in Brazilian universities. This “concerns positioning oneself and publicly strengthening the recovery of the constitutional rights and protection networks secured by Black, Quilombola, and Indigenous women”9 (Bento, 2022, p. 82, our translation), such as the right to access scientific knowledge through reparative measures and affirmative policies at the university; likewise, access to investments from national agencies that fund science and technology.
The historical struggles of the Black movement in Brazil have led, in recent years, to important achievements, including the Quota Law (Law 12.711/2012) and Law 10.639/2003—later amended by Law 11.645/2008—to ensure the inclusion of Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous history in the official curriculum of the education system. Likewise, the struggles of Indigenous peoples run throughout the history of Brazil and, in recent years, have intensified through different uprisings, protests, and demonstrations, such as the Acampamento Terra Livre [Free Land Settlement], highlighting the defense of territories against climate change; this process led to the creation of the Federal Indigenous University, whose Law 15.418/2026 was enacted on April 29, 2026.
These are advances in the field of policies and affirmative actions that have contributed to the inclusion in the education system of populations subjected to violence through processes of racialization; nevertheless, as a space marked by power relations (Gomes, 2009), the prevalence of hegemonic thought that dominates its institutional structure through Whiteness remains. Access to higher education remains a challenge because of the neglect and lack of attention to Indigenous and other forms of knowledge, as well as the recognition of epistemologies organized according to other logics, rationalities, and causalities distinct from hegemonic ones. This scenario also provides compelling evidence of the reasons for the underrepresentation of Indigenous and Black women in the graduate education system.
The foundation of an autonomous body of knowledge and an emerging science within the framework of South-South epistemologies situates the authors of this article: both share an ethnic identity as Black women, based on a self-affirmed identity that extends beyond phenotypical characteristics and is grounded in their ethical and political commitments. In this capacity, they are faculty members in stricto sensu graduate programs (master’s and doctoral degrees) at public universities in the state of Piauí—Universidade Federal do Piauí (UFPI) and Universidade Estadual do Piauí (UESPI)—conducting research on educational issues within the field of public policies. They also prioritize activities aimed at the qualification of faculty members, researchers, recent graduates, and professionals, enabling them to act with theoretical, political, and technical competence in the fields of teaching, public policy, and knowledge production, considering their research central to the affirmation of knowledge historically situated within their territories and to innovative processes rooted in ancestral foundations.
At the initiative of one of the authors, a professor and researcher at UFPI, two projects that constitute the policy of inclusion and affirmative action were approved and are currently being implemented: the research internationalization project focused on Indigenous, Black, and Quilombola peoples, funded by the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES), with scholarships for master’s and doctoral students undertaking sandwich programs (Brazil–Bolivia), expanding the partnership beyond the provision of master’s and doctoral sandwich scholarships for Brazilian students to conduct their research activities in Bolivia, on the Brazilian side. We are receiving master’s students from Bolivia whose research is supervised under the research entitled Violência Política de Gênero contra Mulheres Indígenas na Bolívia: desafios para aplicação da Lei 243/2012 [Political Gender-Based Violence against Indigenous Women in Bolivia: challenges in implementing Law 243/2012]; and Governança política e gestão indígena para equidade: capacitação técnico-científica em política educacional para educadores indígenas [Political Governance and Indigenous Management for Equity: technical-scientific training in educational policy for Indigenous educators], an university extension project funded by the Secretariat for Continuing Education, Literacy of Youth and Adults, Diversity and Inclusion (SECADI/MEC). Both aim to provide training for Indigenous students and their leaders for qualified engagement in spaces of social participation. This recently culminated in our proposal for the creation of the first Indigenous Academic Development Program (PDAI), according to CAPES Ordinance No. 150, of April 7, 2026, which aims to expand access to and ensure the retention and successful completion of studies by Indigenous students in stricto sensu graduate programs. Initially, 100 full scholarships will be awarded for doctoral studies and 200 scholarships for academic master’s studies, through a specific and differentiated selection process throughout Brazil, beginning in 2026 with the launch of the call for applications.
Notably, the category “Black,” alongside others such as pardo (Brown/mixed-race), reveals significant tensions related to different conceptions; however, this issue will not be addressed in this article. This does not prevent us from emphasizing that, when we use the term “Black” we synthesize a political identity positioned against structural and intersectionally situated racism.
At UESPI, the research conducted under our supervision and guidance supports undergraduate and graduate (master’s and doctoral) theses and dissertations focused on gender issues, Indigenous peoples and traditional communities, ethnic-racial relations, and rural education, with emphasis on themes addressed in master’s and undergraduate research projects, such as O povo Warao em Teresina: acesso à educação para comunidades indígenas em situação de migração e refúgio na cidade de Teresina, Piauí [The Warao People in Teresina: Access to Education for Indigenous Communities in Situations of Migration and Refuge in the City of Teresina, Piauí]; Práticas socioespaciais e educacionais na comunidade quilombola Mandacaru dos Pretos em Matões (MA) [Sociospatial and Educational Practices in the Mandacaru dos Pretos Quilombola Community in Matões (MA)]; Políticas de cotas e permanência de pessoas LGBTQIAPN+ [Quota Policies and the Retention of LGBTQIAPN+ People]; O curso de pedagogia e a formação para a educação escolar indígena, quilombola e do campo [The Pedagogy Program and Training for Indigenous, Quilombola, and Rural Education]; Modalidades territorializadas (indígena, quilombola e do campo) na política educacional do Piauí [Territorialized Modalities (Indigenous, Quilombola, and Rural) in the Educational Policy of Piauí], among others. At UFPI, there are master’s, doctoral, and undergraduate research that addresses the following themes: Educação antirracista na formação de professores na educação superior na UFPI [Anti-racist education in teacher training in higher education at UFPI]; Educação Popular como prática de pertencimento de mulheres negras Ayabás [Popular Education as a practice of belonging among Black Ayabás women]; Escolarização de indígenas da etnia Warao em Teresina (PI) [Schooling of Indigenous people of the Warao ethnic group in Teresina (PI)]; Políticas de demarcação de comunidades tradicionais quilombolas no contexto dos marcos regulatórios do Estado [Policies for the demarcation of traditional Quilombola communities within the context of the State’s regulatory frameworks]; Política de combate às violências contra mulheres indígenas na Bolívia [Policy to combat violence against Indigenous women in Bolivia]; Política de educação escolar indígena com foco nas lutas do povo Gamela pela realização da pedagogia intercultural indígena no território Gamela [Indigenous school education policy, focusing on the struggles of the Gamela people for the implementation of Indigenous intercultural pedagogy in Gamela territory]; Políticas de formação de professores para professores indígenas [Teacher education policies for Indigenous teachers].
The studies and research are organized, for the most part, around ethnic-racial, gender, and class dimensions, as well as their intersections within the context of the working classes, their struggles, and the challenges involved in knowledge production within the Brazilian and Latin American political-scientific landscape. These studies reaffirm our position in the construction of insurgent university projects that challenge traditional conceptions of science as the sole and valid form of knowledge, grounded in the fallacy of the ego cogito of Whiteness, which frames the academic space as a site of privilege rather than as an educational policy conceived as a social right. In the field of scientific knowledge production, we propose a form of knowing, understanding, and doing situated in the lifeworld as a practice of territorial, social, and epistemological decolonization. We engage with institutional mechanisms and legislation to activate the implementation of educational policies that expand the presence of Indigenous peoples, Quilombolas, and peasants within the university and scientific environment, giving visibility to their research and non-disciplinary forms of knowledge—those connected to community life and to their educational processes of struggle and political engagement in the public sphere.
Our studies, research, and university extension activities are grounded in the principles of Popular Education, based on participatory methodological approaches from the Global South, inspired by Latin American Southern perspectives on “other epistemes.” We understand that the affirmation of identities and senses of belonging, by rejecting the social condition of being colonized and subordinated, mobilizes oppressed people toward the construction of an intellectuality of their own, grounded in collective historical memory, through which, rather than merely conducting science, one discusses how we live the research we undertake (Brandão, 2003), without losing sight of the social, political, and cultural relevance as a counter-hegemonic position, working toward the deconstruction of Eurocentric practices and modes of thought (Carine, 2025), understood as the sole and valid systems of knowledge production.
This process is guided primarily by a commitment to strengthening the knowledge, practices, and political engagement of Indigenous and Black women, grounded in the principles of Popular Education, with its theoretical, practical, and methodological frameworks, and in the strategy of building (re)connections between Latin American and Afro-Brazilian communities and their ancestral processes of struggle against past and present forms of violence. In addition to authors such as Paulo Freire and Orlando Fals Borda, we draw on Andean Indianist thought (Fausto Reinaga); scholars of colonial critique, such as those associated with the Modernity/Coloniality group (Quijano, 1992; Mignolo, 2021; Walsh et al., 2018); the Black feminism of Lélia Gonzalez; the countercolonial perspective articulated by Nego Bispo, and that of the Aymara Indigenous peoples developed through their Indianist struggles, among others.
We value the pedagogical dimension of the collective construction of knowledge, one of the foundational principles of Popular Education, as an educational practice grounded in knowledge that emerges from the streets, from the epistemologies of Indigenous and Quilombola territories, and from traditional communities; an educational practice that emerges from the struggles of community feminism and Black feminism, and from processes of affirming popular identities as they struggle for dignified living conditions. We are guided by the purpose of contributing to the opening of new epistemic horizons as a central issue for scientific institutions and the construction of a democratic dialogue of knowledge, which entails knowing/understanding “… how can we narrow the gap between the academic context and the reality from which our students come, a reality that I must come to know increasingly well, insofar as I am, in a certain sense, committed to the process of transforming it”10 (Freire, 2014, p. 244, our translation). We reaffirm the need to overcome the epistemic gap created by the Eurocentric matrix, which is constituted by the exclusion of other places and subjects from knowledge production.
We foster intra- and intergroup and inter-territorial dialogues as fundamental strategies, reaffirming practices aligned with struggles for the liberation of Eurocentrically oriented mindsets, while developing capacities to confront the geopolitics of power imposed by the voracity of capitalism, which produces dominants and dominated, nationals and foreigners, separates relatives, and supplants utopias shaped by colonial wars. We observe that this process is already producing tangible results, as exemplified by the discussions promoted within the framework of the international gathering entitled Ciência Indígena e Justiça Climática11 [Indigenous Science and Climate Justice], which is moving toward its second edition, alongside other dialogues among peoples of the Global South (Funai, 2024).
This process suggests that liberating education can read and understand the scheme of the rationale that guides this logic, which seeks to define not only the course of our lives but also our death, and, through movements toward overcoming naive consciousness, foster the viable unprecedented, the consciousness of self in relation to those with whom one belongs. This is our duty as intellectuals committed to the working classes.
This process requires the convergence of matrices of knowledge and sciences and the crossing of boundaries that prevent ancestral connections. It requires the affirmation of plurinationality as a counter-hegemonic state paradigm to the idea of nationality as a Westernized project. Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian science also resides in the matrix of the collective historical memory of struggles for colonial liberation, not merely administrative and political, but also epistemic.
This process requires the occupation of spaces culturally designated for the production of scientific knowledge. For this reason, we are also engaged with the agenda of projects and initiatives aimed at the inclusion of the working classes in the university and in the science system. Only the effective participation of these sectors in the production of epistemic and social alternatives concerning their own practices, existence, and resignification within the political sphere of the state can produce alternatives for reparative social justice and promote access to epistemic justice. This purpose leads to the development and submission of projects focused on affirmative action policies and initiatives, as exemplified by those that enabled participation in the Graduate Education Development Program (PDPG) – Affirmative Action Policies and Diversity, and the Abdias Nascimento Academic Development Program of CAPES, through which ideas and effective funding were mobilized to implement the aforementioned proposals, exercising the practice of action research as an ongoing process in response to the current demands of historically excluded populations. Our work as Black women in science, research, and teaching is intertwined with our own educational and scientific trajectories, but is also decisively linked to the inclusion, from the perspective of other Indigenous and Black women, of opportunities to access the university and to internationalize their master’s and doctoral research within the framework of South–South science.
Among the approved and funded projects currently under implementation, we highlight in our analysis the research project entitled Políticas de gestão territorial e ambiental em terras indígenas e quilombolas no Brasil e Bolívia [Territorial and environmental management policies in Indigenous and Quilombola lands in Brazil and Bolivia], funded by a sandwich internship scholarships for Indigenous, Quilombola, and Black master’s and doctoral students, with a view to strengthening the internationalization of their research within the Latin American context, specifically in Bolivia. The position of decolonization at the university is not merely a project of science and society, but a project of humanity, because, for peoples racialized within the colonial logic:
… the decolonization of knowledge, beyond an epistemological perspective, is a form of existential reproduction grounded in the subversion of norms imposed by the Global North, which represents more than a geographical and epistemic location; it entails a contestation of historical narratives and, therefore, a contestation over humanity12
(Carine, 2025, p. 77, our translation).
Decolonization is also an ontological position in the struggle against structural and institutional racism that claims spaces of power celebrated by the thought of Whiteness. For this reason, it becomes necessary to articulate projects and researchers through cooperation networks, as well as intellectual production through the growing articulation of counter-hegemonic forces grounded in the understanding that the university must fulfill its social responsibility and ensure inclusion policies for peoples whose knowledge has historically been marginalized and denied by hegemonic science.
The Brazil and Bolivia Project: Indigenous and Black women researchers challenging Eurocentric internationalization
Considering the growing debate on women in science and the opening of calls for proposals addressing Indigenous, Black, and Quilombola issues in the field of research internationalization by CAPES, we chose to present a research proposal situated in the Latin American South. Through this initiative, we seek to ensure greater participation of women in science, whose studies are linked to the global project addressing Latin American epistemologies in Territorial and Environmental Management in Indigenous and Quilombola Lands in Brazil and Bolivia. Within the scope of the project, the central problem concerns
Climate change and education for socio-environmental justice position Indigenous and Quilombola knowledge as emerging epistemologies of innovative practices in territorial and environmental management aimed at protecting and preserving traditional lands in Brazil and Bolivia. The decolonial and plurinational matrix of Indigenous and Quilombola peoples provides the foundation for ideas of an autonomous science based on the recognition of socio-environmental sustainability and the rights of nature in Latin America13
(Projeto de Pesquisa Política de Gestão Territorial e Ambiental em Terras Indígenas e Quilombolas no Brasil e Bolívia, 2024, our translation).
At the core of this matrix, Indigenous, Black, and Quilombola women assume strategic roles within their territories as producers of knowledge and practices for the management and protection of their territories, and these community-based, cultural, and environmental forms of learning constitute the central themes of their research projects in master’s and doctoral programs in Brazil and, consequently, in the process of internationalization through sandwich research placements. It is important to highlight the requirements concerning gender equity and women’s rights in access to science and technology, as well as the call requirements, which stipulated that 50% of the scholarship quotas should be allocated to “14.151. At least 50% (fifty percent) of the study missions shall be undertaken by women or by individuals who self-identify as Black, Brown, Indigenous, or as persons with disabilities, global developmental disorders, or high abilities/giftedness”14 (CAPES, 2023, p. 18, our translation). Within the project coordination team, the participation of women faculty members and researchers reached 100%. Interinstitutional organization is another CAPES requirement. In this context, under the leadership of UFPI, the network comprises partner institutions including the University of Campinas (UNICAMP), the Federal University of Amazonas (UFAM), the University of Brasília (UnB), the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN), and the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), with women playing a leading role in coordinating the thematic areas of the project.
For the project coordination team, both at UFPI (the lead institution) and at the partner institutions, the initial objective was for Indigenous, Quilombola, and Black women, during the internationalization of their research abroad, to achieve participation rates exceeding 60% in study missions. Likewise, the objective was for work missions to include the direct participation of representatives of Indigenous students through the União Plurinacional dos Estudantes Indígenas [Plurinational Union of Indigenous Students] (UPEI), which required a specific petition to CAPES to reorganize the financial planning for work missions.
We consider Latin America, particularly the Bolivian scientific context, an epistemic opportunity for a counter-hegemonic and decolonial approach to North–North or North–South internationalization, “based on the understanding that North–South internationalization between countries is unequal,”15 since exchange opportunities are not available to all students or across all fields of knowledge (Moreira & Ribeiro, 2022, p. 12-19, our translation). For this reason, the project prioritized ethnic and gender inclusion, as well as the intercultural dimension among Indigenous peoples and traditional territories in Latin America, with a focus on South–South knowledge exchange.
Below, we highlight the profile of Indigenous and Black women participating in academic mobility at the master’s and doctoral levels, in terms of gender, ethnicity, university, graduate programs, and research topics, exceeding the 50% quota for women in study missions abroad. In the first mission, in 2024, there were 10 students, seven women and three men, with eight students representing the North and two students, the Northeast—a criterion that took into account regional inequalities in access to research internationalization. Table 1 provides greater visibility for a better understanding of the profile of the women participating in the project.
As can be seen, 75% of the participants in the 1st study mission were Indigenous women, and the majority was from the state of Amazonas and the municipality of São Gabriel da Cachoeira. It is worth noting that these women belong to different ethnic groups and conduct studies in distinct thematic areas. Analyzing the data above, we can observe that the predominant areas were education, social anthropology, and interdisciplinary knowledge within the Programa Sociedade e Cultura da Amazônia (PPGSCA) [Amazon Society and Culture Program] at UFAM; although they come from different universities, most of the women are from Amazonas. In the other doctoral study mission under the sandwich program, all positions were filled by Indigenous women from the North and Northeast of Brazil, with 100% of the researchers being Indigenous and 75% being Indigenous women.
As the project coordination team, we remain committed to strengthening a network of support and empowerment for other Indigenous and Black women in accessing and remaining in the graduate education system and in the internationalization of research in Brazil and Latin America, particularly with Bolivia—a country that draws on plurinational and Indianist constitutional processes to protect territories and Indigenous epistemologies, especially the knowledge produced by the partner university, Universidad Pública de El Alto (UPEA). The internationalization project, while proposing more plural forms of inclusion, reaffirms that:
It is necessary to expand and improve the focus of these internationalization policies so that Brazilian and Latin American university systems can fulfill their educational and social mission of affirming epistemic pluralities, since “The presence of clear public policies in the field of academic exchange enables access to international programs for International Student Mobility (ISM), combating cultural racism and promoting accessibility”17
(Andrade et al., 2024, p. 4, our translation).
Considering this perspective, there is still much progress to be made in the Abdias Nascimento Program, particularly with regard to the eligibility criteria for faculty members applying to internationalization calls, which place them in conditions that make proposal submission unfeasible. In practice, the eligibility criteria intersect with conditions imposed by regional and ethnic inequalities, which concentrate opportunities for access to the resources and processes specific to HEIs and, consequently, to the inputs necessary for the production and dissemination of science and technology, creating greater difficulties for populations in the North and Northeast, particularly Indigenous faculty members, since the call requirements constitute barriers that prevent their participation.
One factor that limits greater Indigenous participation in the allocation of doctoral sandwich scholarships is the low representation of Indigenous women in doctoral programs in the country, confirming the reality of exclusion already highlighted; at the master’s level, this situation is beginning to change positively.
In the second master’s and doctoral mission, in 2025, Black and Indigenous students participated, with particular emphasis on Quilombola students; there were seven master’s scholarships and seven doctoral scholarships. Fourteen students participated, eight women and six men. Regarding the students’ racial identity, eight were Indigenous and six were Black; women accounted for 57% of the study mission positions. Of the seven doctoral positions, five were occupied by Indigenous and Black women, representing 70% of the women undertaking doctoral training and internationalizing their research (Table 2).
The encounter between Indigenous and Black women converges toward strengthening relationships among women in science, enhancing their research, lived experiences, and practices within the Brazil–Bolivia context. Objectively, there are barriers to be overcome by Afro-Indigenous women, understood not only in terms of the ethnic condition that confers specificities upon Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian women, but also as women who carry and share a dual ancestral heritage, rooted in struggles against coloniality, patriarchy, and their forms of subordination.
Indigenous and Black women occupy different positions within the university, as faculty members, researchers, or students in graduate programs at the master’s and doctoral levels, conducting research on themes that concern women themselves and are related to the social issues and tensions they face, among which we can highlight: languages as sites of ethnic affirmation; education and Indigenous schooling as educational practices that sustain projects of belonging; the matrices of Afro-descendant religions and shamanism as ancestral cultures linked to the historical memory of the past; Indigenous women and their relationships with Mother Earth as a territory connected to the sacred; and the denaturalization of the racialization of Indigenous and Black women’s bodies.
We observe that Indigenous women researchers develop methodological approaches in their work that move across contexts and forms of knowledge, producing new possibilities grounded in an “own creativity,” opening horizons for new epistemologies and for overcoming negative narratives that attribute an endogenous character to knowledge produced in the Global South, as if Eurocentric science were not, in essence, endogenous. Thus, from our perspective, internationalization from the presence of Indigenous and Black peoples contributes to
Promoting the participation of representatives of Indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples in the transformation of higher education institutions, ensuring the incorporation of these peoples’ and social groups’ worldviews, values, knowledge, traditional knowledge systems, linguistic systems, learning methods, and modes of knowledge production.
(Cres+5, n.d., p. 14, our translation)18.
Therefore, we consider that the research project on internationalization contributes to “achieving inclusion, diversity, and the role of women in Higher Education” (Cres+5, 2024, our translation), as well as to advancing the objectives of the Permanent Committee for Strategic Actions and Policies for Gender Equity and its intersectional dimensions, in accordance with CAPES Ordinance No. 215, of July 10, 2024. We consider that the encounter among women from the Global South is contributing to overcoming the reality of the loneliness experienced by Black and Indigenous women at the university, a loneliness socially constructed within the context of a matrix that imposes subordination, exclusion, and inferiority through racialization as a system within the academic environment: Carine (2025, p. 145) reports on this experience: “when I was in the master’s program, I was one of the very few Black students in my class. I did not have any Black male or female professors either. It was an immense experience of racial isolation, which generated a sense of non-belonging and a feeling of estrangement from that space”19 (our translation). This is the everyday life of Indigenous and Black women.
It is through encounters that the refinement of our knowing, being, and doing becomes possible, within networks of cooperation that extend beyond the colonizer’s science, denaturalizing it as the only valid form of knowledge, and making it necessary to overcome the fact that “cultural Europeanization became an aspiration” (Quijano, 1992, p. 1, our translation). For this reason, epistemic solidarity relations among Indigenous and Black women are fundamental, as strategic decolonial spaces within the academic and scientific environment, grounded in a South–South perspective whose aspiration is to overcome Eurocentrism in the system of scientific knowledge production.
Concluding remarks
Among the concluding findings, we can consider that the presence of Black women as faculty members and researchers in HEIs in Brazil opens doors for other Black women and, particularly, for Indigenous women to internationalize their research and cultures. Another concluding observation is that the trajectories of these faculty members are linked to epistemologies that underpin the construction of an autonomous science situated within the emerging paradigm of South–South knowledge production, as an alternative to the Eurocentric paradigm. At the same time, in their teaching practice, the researchers affirm Latin America as an educational territory that, by rejecting its historical condition as an object of knowledge within the framework of North–Eurocentric scientific rationality, assumes a position of global centrality in the field of science and technology.
It is essential to emphasize that, despite regulatory frameworks designed to promote regional internationalization along the South–South axis, the Eurocentric imaginary still prevails within Brazilian institutions, whereby the success of internationalization, in its elevated social and academic status, occurs only when study missions are undertaken in the Global North. Breaking with this social imaginary, which devalues Latin American universities, and incorporating Indigenous-led institutions into internationalization networks is an ethical and political obligation of our time, an action toward reparation and historical (re)connection.
Pursuing this aim through a gender and ethnic lens in the Global South adds another fundamental dimension, given the invisibilization of Indigenous women within the context of science and knowledge production at the university. The research project funded by the Abdias Nascimento Program establishes that interculturality among Latin American peoples is fundamental to strengthening a network of researchers, and the results presented here indicate significant steps in the development of studies and research connected to the local realities of Latin America, with a focus on scientific gender and ethnic equity and a clear contribution to achieving the objectives of the project.
By highlighting the challenges involved in expanding the key role of Indigenous and Black women in stricto sensu graduate education at the university and in science, the achievement of part of the call target became unfeasible, a fact that demonstrates, in practice, the reality of the underrepresentation of Indigenous women in graduate programs. If considered by research funding and financing agencies, this finding may contribute to breaking the reproduction of the Eurocentric mirror, encouraging the construction of a paradigm of an autonomous science for living.
Producing knowledge that highlights and updates everyday forms of knowledge, while simultaneously problematizing the challenges faced by territories, also entails relearning about the power of women’s bodies, which have historically been marginalized and constrained. In the experience presented here, women connect their research to bodies in movement that, by rejecting the culture of the colonizer, reaffirm their contributions to dissident thought in relation to the Eurocentric matrix.
Thus, this epistemological and cultural encounter in the Latin American South opens new possibilities for writing the self and presents innovative articulations between Indigenous community feminism and Black feminism as organizational spaces for researchers and for the development of new theoretical and methodological approaches. The presence of Brazilian and Indigenous women strengthens epistemic and territorial interactions from the perspective of overcoming the colonizer’s imaginary, which not only produced the invisibilization and internalization of their bodies, but also the patriarchal system that confined women to domestic activities and motherhood as their only possible paths. The participation of Indigenous and Black women in the internationalization of their research and studies shows that we can construct credible alternatives showing that we constitute fertile ground for producing knowledge according to another logic of science, grounded in forms of causality and rationality distant from Eurocentric metrics.
It is an encounter with an autonomous science grounded in the legacy of historical memory and in what has been a knowledge situated in the realities and aspirations of a life oriented toward living well. The historical contribution of Indigenous and Black women to science poses the challenge of expanding their presence in academic and scientific environments and in the internationalization process, challenging the fallacy of the ego cogito of Eurocentric Whiteness, which continues to hegemonize science and which, in many cases, views internationalization more as an indicator of positive evaluation for its graduate programs than as an investment in the development of lasting research networks and themes linked to an epistemic matrix oriented toward living well and the development through regional cooperation. It is necessary to move beyond the epistemic extractivism that has dominated centuries of exploitation and subordination of knowledge and experiences produced in the South–South context.
The main outcome clearly lies in the reciprocal learning between Black women and Indigenous women as a field that generates opportunities for partnership among them within universities in Brazil and Bolivia, while simultaneously enabling them to share knowledge and experiences related to the protection and preservation of their Indigenous communities, thereby giving social meaning to scientific knowledge. The educational and academic trajectories of these Indigenous and Black women researchers place issues of underrepresentation in graduate education at the center of the discussion. Despite affirmative action quotas, many graduate programs still face limitations in ensuring ethnic inclusion and gender equity, which constitute fundamental social dimensions in the formation of the Brazilian population.
Thus, we continue to place our trust in solidarity relations between Indigenous and Black women as powerful drivers of intercultural and regional South–South internationalization. Their epistemologies, as expressed in their current teaching and research practices linked to their contexts and experiences, function as strategies for confronting patriarchy and challenging the coloniality of power, which conflates rights with privileges, equity policies with welfare policies, and access with a domain exclusively reserved for the White population, sustained by a discourse of racialization to occupy spaces and environments of knowledge, science, and technology production.
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