The fracturing of women in academic spaces: transdisciplinarity for community care

Abstract

From the Pedagogies of the South, we have learned about the importance of our territory and how it permeates every step we take as women. We decided to take action from the Faculty of Higher Studies Iztacala – UNAM, because it is the space we move through daily, at the crossroads of communities filled with violence, danger, and the aftereffects of an overwhelming necropolitics that haunts us. Therefore, from the perspective of community psychology, we convened an encounter with the arts, feminist self-defense, dialogue with mothers who are victims of femicide, voluntary termination of pregnancy, embroidery, and first aid. Art was our guide, and the result was a transdisciplinary gathering of us—academics, administrators, and students—placing our bodies as territories at the center of our struggle, sharing care and collective knowledge for dignified resistance within academia, but above all, beyond its walls. We conclude that these spaces of openness are necessary and we must enhance them from an ethical-political, relational-dialectical and complex position, in order to visualize and build an emancipatory horizon.