I gotta say the bone she specifically has to pick with "the colonialism of sources" feels like she learned the wrong lesson from her experience being unable to cite her own grandmother.

Either Bolivian academia has different standards than their American counterparts or these guys made up rules to fuck her over specifically, either way I know for a fact that you can actually cite individual testimony in western academia, because I literally did it not too long ago, citing an interview I conducted with my arabic teacher on Wasta (the culture of business in the Arabic speaking world) and her experiences teaching western business people on how to best engage with it.

Not to mention how, especially anthropological studies like feminist study, have become especially sensitive as of late to how to incorporate oral histories into academic writing as the margins push into communities and societies that have either not developed or rejected the written word for a variety of possible reasons, and also to account for spaces where written sources aren't available.

Like seriously she has an overall good message but the details of her story about abandoning her thesis over that source requirement feels incredibly distracting, like as if she's omitting what the full issue was, like if her grandmother was her only source for the entire paper or something. Also if she was able to get an entire academic book published about her theories, why couldn't she use the sources she must have cited for that to write her thesis?