Rehearsing strategies of the literate arts in the safe houses: trajectories of academic literacy, affirmative actions and knowledge policies

ABSTRACT In this work, we analyze the academic literacy practices of afro-descendent and indigenous university students who entered their institutions through affirmative actions. This research consists of a qualitative study, which is composed of interviews with students and teachers, as well as the students’ undergraduate thesis in two Latin American universities. In the scenario of intercultural policies in higher education, we emphasize ways in which students employ creative strategies to subvert power relations and the coloniality of knowledge, through strategies such as autoethnography, transculturation, criticism, collaboration, bilingualism, mediation, denunciation, vernacular expressions, alternative proposals and reconstruction of the imaginary. The analysis of these strategies identifies processes of appropriation, subversion and re-existence, in which ways of using the language created by students were constituted to subvert the coloniality of knowledge in their trajectories of academic literacy.