Indigenous students’ agency vis-à-vis the practices of recognition and invisibilization in a multilingual university

Abstract

This study addresses the role of Indigenous students in higher education regarding the practices of recognition and invisibilization of linguistic, ontological, and epistemic identities. We focus on a Colombian university and examine how Indigenous students contest and reshape the legacies of coloniality that permeate cultural, academic, and organizational practices. We draw on principles of a critical intercultural view in combination with elements from a decolonial perspective to explain the ways students’ intersectional subjectivities, languages, and communities are represented and positioned and how students engage in agentive action to reshape and contest colonial practices. Data collection included a sociolinguistic survey, field notes, interviews, a Círculo de Palabra, and documents. Findings show that Indigenous students engage in counterhegemonic agentic enactments through processes of material and symbolic reterritorialization. Indigenous students' agency on campus, more than an individual trait, appears a collective enactment of their social, cultural, and political aspirations and historical struggles.