Afrostemy: Insurgent Epistemologies in Science and the Decolonial Reinvention of Knowledge

This article introduces Afrostemy as a Black and decolonial call for epistemological justice, aimed at restructuring science from the insurgent cultures of the Global South. Rather than seeking mere entry into existing structures of STEM, Afrostemy demands their reconstitution as plural and liberatory spaces. It denounces the complicity of modern science in epistemicide and in racial, gender, and colonial exclusion, while reclaiming the knowledges, memories, and practices systematically silenced by Eurocentric hegemony. Emerging at the crossroads of ancestral memory, pedagogical praxis, and epistemic insubordination, Afrostemy proposes a science that listens, resists, and reimagines. Grounded in Afro-Brazilian, Latin American, and Global South epistemologies, it fuses theoretical inquiry with pedagogical experimentation, engaging schools, laboratories, and quilombos of thought. Drawing from concepts such as cognitive justice, Exu’s pedagogy of the crossroads, and embodied methodologies, Afrostemy insists on the centrality of ancestral knowledge systems, spirituality, and collective practices in reconfiguring scientific production. Methodologically, the article weaves together critical analysis of coloniality in science with examples of decolonial pedagogies in Brazil, particularly in biosciences education. These cases illustrate how scientific curricula can be redesigned to incorporate Afro-diasporic philosophies, Indigenous cosmologies, and alternative ontologies of nature. In doing so, Afrostemy does not simply critique exclusion, but actively articulates modes of epistemic repair and insurgent imagination. Ultimately, Afrostemy is proposed as a living methodology of resistance, creativity, and epistemic plurality—an invitation to rethink science not as a neutral and universal enterprise, but as a contested field that must be decolonized in order to become truly diverse, just, and transformative.