Indigenous Universities As Comunal Public Sociology: Decolonial Challenges to Sociological Knowledge Production

In Latin America, the emergence of Indigenous Universities marks a historical step towards autonomous and alternative knowledge production that challenges Western discourses of epistemic decolonisation. This paper shows how Indigenous Universities can reframe sociological concepts by grounding their knowledge production in the lived experiences of indigenous anticolonial resistance.

The paper first traces the dual history of Indigenous education policies in Mexico as strategies to "civilize" Indigenous populations and a nation-state tool for modernization to demonstrate that these efforts are connected to broader processes of racialisation, colonisation, and patriarchisation, revealing how the suppression of Indigenous knowledge became foundational to global knowledge hierarchies that shape sociological thought.

Secondly, it examines the Universidad Autónoma Comunal de Oaxaca as Indigenous University that navigates silenced histories and disrupts hegemonic academic practices. Centring on indigenous discourses of Comunalidad (Communality) through their horizontal organizational structures, communal learning, and research grounded in local fights for indigenous rights, they offer a new vision of academic knowledge production grounded in indigenous cosmologies.

Thirdly, drawing on pluritopic hermeneutics as a place of negotiation between different forms of knowing, it advocates for understanding Indigenous Universities as Comunal Public Sociology that put epistemic decolonisation into practice by using the locally emerged indigenous reality of Comunalidad to re-signify Western sociological concepts. Additionally, it highlights the necessity of epistemic humility in professionalised sociological discourses and emphasises that recognising the practices of anticolonial movements as theories in their own right is crucial to engage meaningfully with historically absent and invisible forms of knowledge.

Lastly, the paper maintains that by engaging in a systematic dialogue with Indigenous Universities, the discipline can contribute to new forms of thinking and imagining sociological terminologies, the dynamics of academic knowledge production, and in broader terms, much-needed societal transformation.