Grande Sertão: Veredas – Wandering Through Loneliness and Rewarding Academic Encounters

In “Grande Sertão: Veredas,” the “sertão” is a dry, harsh land crossed by vital streams called “veredas.” My path through European academia as a Brazilian scholar has followed a pattern of marginalization, where my knowledge, language, and presence were constantly contested, interrupted by rare, nourishing collaborations. To change academia built on colonial hierarchies, we must create our own “veredas,” spaces of collaboration and shared growth.

As in many other postcolonial contexts, being in Portugal as a scholar from a former colony meant that my presence in academia was constantly contested. Chandra Talpade Mohanty  (1984) insightfully discusses these mechanisms of domination, exposing how women from the Global South are rendered invisible in knowledge production processes rooted in colonialist logics. Brazilians are often not seen as knowledge producers; instead, they are treated as objects of study – reproducing a colonial logic in which individuals from the colonies were positioned as barbaric and uncivilised, incapable of producing knowledge, and perpetually in need of scrutiny and examination by the coloniser’s gaze (Ahmed, 2002).

Navigating the Sertão: Surviving and Thriving in Portuguese Academia

I completed my PhD in a research centre that claimed to follow a decolonial approach, attracting many students and researchers from the Global South who were seeking alternative ways of engaging with academia. Although precarity was everywhere, looking around, it was clear that those with more stable careers and greater opportunities to develop their work were almost exclusively from the Global North. Scholars from the Global South, by contrast, were often treated as temporary presences that Sara Ahmed (Ahmed, 2006) identifies as „diversity workers,“ invited to signal institutional openness, while remaining structurally marginalized.

When I was building my career in Portugal, much like navigating the winding paths of the „veredas„ through the „Sertão,“ the knowledge I brought with me was often undervalued because it was unfamiliar to those reviewing my work. As I delved into decolonial studies, I learned to identify this experience as what Aníbal Quijano (1992) calls the „coloniality of knowledge“ – the ongoing devaluation of ways of knowing that don’t come from Europe or North America.

Knowledge from people and regions formerly colonized is often devalued, dismissed as unscientific, traditional, or even „magical.“ This reflects a persistent coloniality of knowledge, in which what is considered valid is centred around Eurocentric standards, while scholars from outside these dominant spaces are often seen as inferior. At the core of this lies a presumption of epistemic superiority, grounded in a culturalist worldview that positions Western, Eurocentric knowledge as the universal norm while pushing indigenous and other ways of knowing to the margins (Mignolo 2002). I experienced this first-hand. Repetitively.

Conversely, it is true that working with Brazilian immigrants gave me some legitimacy to be there. Because I was studying a topic tied to my own background, I was “allowed” to conduct this research – effectively becoming a token within the academic space (Ahmed, 2006). However, my investigation of Brazilian migration did not follow the dominant script of Portuguese academia. Portuguese scholarship has long reproduced a narrative of the country’s supposedly benevolent colonial past, while conveniently erasing colonial violence (Araújo, 2013). By highlighting how racism, sexism, and coloniality shaped the experiences of Brazilian immigrants in Portugal, I found myself pushed to the margins once again. This experience made me reflect on what Grada Kilomba (2008, p. 21) describes as the discomfort that emerges when colonial subjects speak, an „uncomfortable confrontation with „Other“ truths. Truths, which have been denied, repressed and kept quiet, as secrets.“

When Language Becomes a Barrier

My Portuguese was also constantly contested. The colonial legacy operating within Portuguese academia reproduces and legitimizes language hierarchies, marking my Brazilian Portuguese as a different, “inferior” language – another way of othering me within the academic space (Makoni & Severo, 2022). Unsurprisingly, my English was also repeatedly contested. Reviewers often suggested that my articles needed to be proofread by a native English speaker, even when this had already been done. Perhaps, because I was working on topics related to Brazil and Portugal, this automatically implied that my English was not good, illustrating how race, geography and language intersect to shape knowledge production (Kubota, 2020).

Creating Life-Giving Watercourses

The longer I stayed in academia and learned more about its nuances, the more I felt that I did not belong. It was a constant space of estrangement. But the longer I stayed, the more I learned to see beyond what was immediately visible. Gradually, I began to map out spaces where knowledge production and academic work were imagined and practiced differently. Often led by scholars like myself, from the Global South, inspired by decolonial theories, and committed to rethinking how we inhabit academia, these spaces offered alternative ways of being in academia, grounded in care, collaboration, and mutual support.

Some of these “veredas” emerged in informal reading groups on decolonial feminism, collective writing workshops among migrant scholars, or South–South research networks that prioritized mentorship and horizontal collaboration. Within them, I was able to grow and begin to shape my own path. Even under the constant pressure of neoliberal academia to remain “productive,” we managed to foster meaningful collaborations, build bridges across different forms of non-mainstream knowledge, and mentor one another by sharing our experiences.

Cultivating solidarity, to welcome and support others who, like me, have navigated academia from its margins, has become my way of challenging the coloniality embedded in academic structures. When we support each other, value knowledge that institutions dismiss, and create spaces where our ways of knowing matter, we directly confront the colonial logic that positions us as exceptions rather than legitimate knowledge producers. These “veredas” – built through mentorship, collaboration, and care – are acts of resistance against a system designed to keep us isolated and marginal. They do not replace the need for institutional transformation, but they challenge the reproduction of colonial hierarchies every day, insisting that our knowledge is not peripheral but essential.

Thais França is an assistant researcher at CIES-Iscte, Iscte, Portugal. Her areas of expertise include student mobility, gender studies, and decolonial theories.

References:

–Ahmed, S. (2002). Racialized Bodies. In M. Evans & E. Lee (Eds.), Real Bodies: A Sociological Introduction (pp. 46–63). Macmillan Education UK.
–Ahmed, S. (2006). Doing Diversity Work in Higher Education in Australia. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 38(6), 745–768.
–Araújo, M. (2013). Challenging Narratives on Diversity and Immigration in Portugal: The (de)politicization of colonialism and racism. In J. Capetillo, G. Jacobs, & P. Kretsedemas (Eds.), Migrant Marginality: A Transnational Perspective (pp. 27–46). Routledge.
–Kilomba, G. (2008). Plantation Memories. Unrast Verlag.
–Kubota, R. (2020). Confronting Epistemological Racism, Decolonizing Scholarly Knowledge: Race and Gender in Applied Linguistics. Applied Linguistics, 41(5), 712–732.
–Makoni, S., & Severo, C. (2022). Southern perspectives of language and the construction of the common. Language & Communication, 86, 80–86.
–Mignolo, W. (2002). The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference. South Atlantic Quarterly, 101(1), 57–96.
–Mohanty, C. T. (1984). Bajo los ojos de occidente. Academia Feminista y discurso colonial. In A. Hernández & L. Navaz (Eds.), Descolonizando el Feminismo: Teorias y praticas desde los Márgenes (pp. 407–464). Catedra.
–Quijano, A. (1992). Colonialidad y Modernidad-racionalidad. In H. Bonillo (Ed.), Los Conquistados (pp. 437–449). Tecer Mundo Ediciones.
–Rosa, J. G. (2001). Grande Sertão: Veredas (19ª. ed). Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira.

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