Educating in Times of Pandemic: Images as Micropolitics of Epistemic Disobedience to the Modern and Humanist Epistemologies of the Global North

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this article, we take the risk of reading the contemporary world based on images that have been published on social media during the pandemic crisis. By questioning the abyssal lines (SOUSA SANTOS, 2007) imbued and naturalized by the projects of Modernity and Humanism, the article discusses the ways in which nature invaded, in the middle of the pandemic, “this side” of modernity. The following section explores the undemocratic virus by problematizing the abyssal lines of social class differences. Then, in order to further complexify the stark differences between white supremacy and black genocide, the next section demonstrates that we have not overcome this historical crisis of humanity. Section five investigates the abyssal lines between access to education and the perpetuation of a project for education that secures the denial of its existence. In the conclusion, we explain the reasons that make us conceive of these images as procedural micropolitics that have the potential to construct “new modes of subjectivity” (GUATTARI; ROLNIK, 1996, p. 30) and suggest a pedagogy of visual literacy and its micropolitics and an epistemic turn in the notions of “crisis”.

Keywords

• pandemic
• modernity
• humanism
• education