Trajetória insubmissa, memória insurgente: guiança de uma mestra das culturas populares nos caminhos da educação

Abstract

This thesis is dedicated to understanding how the experiences, practices, and knowledge of Ana Maria Carvalho — a Black woman and guardian of Afro-Brazilian popular culture — announce conceptions of education that transcend the limits of formal schooling and affirm themselves as formative practices rooted in the body, the territory, spirituality, affection, and collectivity. The research emerges from attentive listening and living alongside the mestra, adopting oral history as its central methodology and weaving it together with Afro-diasporic, Black feminist, and decolonial theoretical frameworks to reflect on educational processes in dialogue with traditional Afro-Brazilian cultures. Anchored in the pedagogy of enchantment and guided by the principles of critical and liberating pedagogy (bell hooks, Paulo Freire), as well as by the epistemologies of the sensorial and the crossroads (Luiz Rufino, Luiz Antônio Simas, Leda Maria Martins), this research proposes an expanded understanding of education. To conceive it as wandering, as a viandança, as a crossing between knowledges, bodies, times, and territories, is also to recognize it as a practice of resistance, reinvention, and belonging. Oral tradition, memory, the body, ritual, and song emerge here as epistemological foundations that challenge colonial logics and affirm alternative ways of producing and sharing knowledge — ways that persist in the histories of Black women and popular cultures, as guardians of life and wisdom. The trajectory of Mestra Ana Maria is not understood as an isolated experience but as part of a communal and ancestral network that produces knowledge through oraliture, performance, and everyday living. This work recognizes the pedagogical value of cultural practices — embroidery, singing, drumming, dancing — as living pedagogies that resist epistemicide and mobilize Afro-diasporic cosmoperceptions rooted in belonging, affection, enchantment, and the struggle for social justice. Interweaving memory, body, spirituality, and politics, this thesis affirms the urgency of repositioning education as a loving, collective, and insurgent practice, inspired by Black feminist epistemologies, decolonial pedagogies, and ancestral Afro-Brazilian wisdoms. Along this path, it proposes the idea of education as viandança: a journey made in circles, in movement, in listening, in song, and in the constant reinvention of the meanings of world and community, as a continuous reaffirmation of life. By highlighting the community-based and traditional educational practices of Black women, especially of the mestras of popular culture, this research expands the reflections on counter- hegemonic and decolonial epistemologies, reaffirming the centrality of historically silenced knowledge in building futures that are more just, sensitive, and plural. This is, therefore, a work that defends education as a territory of enchantment, of struggle, and of love — as a space where it is possible to weave, with dignity and beauty, the existences that, for so long, have continued inventing new ways of affirming life.