Indigenous autonomy and participatory science: from epistemological and political analysis to epistemological-political

Abstract

This presentation focuses on indigenous movements of territorial autonomy that maintain environmental conflicts with states due to extractive activities, and has the purpose of identifying obstacles on the strategic path of autonomy. The participatory science program (CP) will be analyzed, which motivates incipient public policies in different Latin American countries for the treatment of environmental problems in conflict scenarios. In its most substantive form, the CP is presented as a response to increasing demands by citizens and communities of political participation and democratization of decisions about territories, now in the activity of knowledge production, putting science to service to service of the problem defined by an expanded community. The CP has contextual advantages and disadvantages that cannot be reduced by a single approach. In this work I focus on a specific aspect. I show that any translation between the environmental representations of the different actors appeals to "logical equivalence" that allow the problem to be taken to their cognitive-scientific treatment. These logics grant a certain range of agency to what we can mean and perform collectively, and in this line, it is shown that there is a specific and systematic rooting between the language of scientific naturalism and the liberal institutionality of European origin. In certain cases, these opaque equivalences can impact substantively on "epistemic" or "hermeneutic" injustice, and in the achievement of epistemic autonomy related to territorial autonomy. To map these impacts I present the “epistemology-political” approach as a strategic input for critical social theory.