Descolonização dos saberes e extensão universitária: tensõese contradições no contexto de uma universidade emergente

Abstract

This thesis analyses university extension at the Federal University of the Southern Frontier (UFFS) from the theoretical and methodological perspective of decoloniality, examining how it articulates movements of approximation with subalternized knowledges and ruptures with the power structures of coloniality in its relationship with the regional community. The UFFS is characterised in this work as an emerging university: founded in 2009 in response to the organised demands of social movements in the Greater Mercosur Frontier Mesoregion, the institution carries in its founding project an explicit commitment to the democratisation of access to higher education and to sustainable regional development. The research adopts a qualitative approach and takes as its empirical locus the University Extension Programme “Homeopathy in Family Farming”, at the Erechim campus, through which semi-structured interviews were conducted with faculty, students, graduates, and representatives of the regional community. The interview analysis was organised into three categories: University Extension, Regional Community, and Knowledges. The results show that the UFFS constitutes a space of productive tension between the reproduction of coloniality and the construction of decolonial practices, and that university extension is the field where this tension manifests most visibly. Extension proves to be both permeable to hegemonic logics and the space where the most concrete alliances with subalternized knowledges and the regional community emerge. The ecology of knowledges, appears not as a consolidated reality, but as a horizon under construction, perceptible in the practices of the investigated programme and in community participation in institutional bodies. The decolonial singularity of the UFFS does not lie in having overcome coloniality, but in not having given up on challenging it — a potency sustained, to a large extent, by the permeability the university maintains with social movements and with its territory.