The boat and the abyss: Notes on a pedagogy of socioenvironmental listening

This article reflects on the possibilities of a pedagogy of socioenvironmental listening grounded in land-based struggles and inter-epistemic dialogues. Drawing from encounters with three interlocutors in the Brazilian Amazon, I share reflections that address the entanglement between socioenvironmental crisis and the crisis of knowing within diverse institutional academic contexts. The article focuses on conversations and singing encounters that highlight tensions between academic knowledge systems and ancestral, territorial ways of knowing, sensing and responding to socioenvironmental pressures in the Volta Grande do Xingu and Lower Tapajós regions. Centering the relationship between listening, belonging, and pedagogy, I explore the challenges that arise when moving between territories, academic spaces, and places where struggles for land shape everyday life. Thinking-feeling my dialogue with these interlocutors and engaging with scholars of colonial histories of listening and counter-colonial archives, I argue for the centrality of sustained attunement to belonging in decolonial research. Belonging here is not a fixed position, but a complex web of reciprocal relations, limits, and commitments.