Signatures: Bryan Vargas Reyes - Colombia
Eduardo Xavier Lemos - Brasil
Maria José Canelo - Portugal
Antoni Aguiló - España
Patricia Branco - Portugal
Lino João de Oliveira Neves - Brasil
Margarida Gomes - Portugal
José Luis Exeni Rodríguez - Bolivia
A book chapter has recently been published - "The walls spoke when no one else would. Autoethnographic notes on sexual-power gatekeeping within avant-garde academia" - accusing an unnamed institution and an unnamed "star professor" of behaviours of abuse of power, casualisation, academic extractivism and gender-based violence. Despite the attempt at anonymity, it is clear that these accusations are directed against Professor Boaventura de Sousa Santos and the Centre for Social Studies (CES) of the University of Coimbra.
Given that the CES has formally stated its decision to set up an independent commission to investigate such conduct, it is not for us to judge or pass judgement on the accusations of the various forms of gender-based violence referred to in the article. What does affect us and it is up to us to speak out is the "whispers" about academic extractivism, the abuse of power or the precariousness of work supposedly exercised against us, men and women, who at different stages of our lives have been research assistants to Boaventura de Sousa Santos.
We must be emphatic and forceful in saying that in our experience of working and collaborating with Professor Santos there was never any such form of expropriation or extractivism, we were never deprived of authorship, if we were entitled to it, and we never had to write any chapter or book so that Boaventura could put his name on it.
Throughout the different years of collaboration, our work revolved around the preparation of literature reviews with extensive textual citations, translations or style corrections due to the different languages we mastered. Never, in the different stages of our lives in which we have been in contact with Boaventura de Sousa Santos, have we encountered an autocrat who abuses his international renown to undermine or belittle our scientific capacities.
On the contrary, we have been faced with someone who has valued our opinion and our criteria, giving us the opportunity to disagree or disagree with his arguments as long as our opinions are duly founded. We are not unaware that the world of academia is corroded by bad practices and abuses of power, where students are the weakest link in the chain and the university benefits from this in different ways. Precarisation exists, but in the specific case of our work with Boaventura, we can affirm that it is not the typical case of a renowned professor who uses his students to steal his ideas and fill his curriculum vitae with thousands of published texts.
All his texts, in the different years in which we worked with him, without exception, were written by him. In the face of the allegations that exist on the subject, we, those directly involved as victims of academic extractivism, cannot ignore such claims. We are not, nor were we ever, passive subjects in an academic relationship. We have always been remunerated for our work and our name and authorship have always been acknowledged where appropriate.
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