BETWEEN SILENCE AND VOICE: DISSIDENT EPISTEMOLOGIES, DEAFNESS AND NUMERACY PRACTICES

Abstract

This critical review, of a theoretical, essayistic, and bibliographic nature, analyzes Edmara Carvalho Novaes's (2020) dissertation on the numeracy practices of deaf individuals at the Deaf Association of Governador Valadares (ASUGOV), in dialogue with Renata Pereira Lima Aspis's (2023) formulations on visceral epistemologies, Pierre Bourdieu's (2004) sociology of the scientific field, and Gayatri Spivak's (2010) critique of subalternity. The objective is to understand how Brazilian Sign Language (Libras), understood as a territorial and cultural marker, challenges Cartesian and logocentric rationality, reshaping the status of knowledge toward a situated and corporeal epistemology. Methodologically, an integrative qualitative literature review was conducted, based on crossing sociological, philosophical frameworks with the daily empirical context of ASUGOV. It is argued that the imposition of the written majority language and school mathematics operates an epistemic violence that disqualifies deaf visual-spatial experience. The results reveal that deaf territory unfolds into linguistic territoriality, visual-spatial knowledges, and dissident numeracy practices. It concludes that recognizing the epistemological legitimacy of Libras destabilizes the admission requirements of the scientific field, forming a political gesture of counter-colonization essential for an inclusive science open to insurgent knowledges.