“Alterscience research project: the new political subjects of knowledg” presented by Matuck, Bobilho, Ernst and Rodrigues
Symposium:
Session Title:
- Practice-based Artistic Research
Presentation Title:
- Alterscience research project: the new political subjects of knowledg
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Abstract:
The limitations of scientific thought, restricted to rigid paradigms, prevent new proposals from being conceived, devised, or absorbed.
Alterscience designates a confluence of philosophical perspectives, aesthetic, spiritual, moral, and physical; it combines emerging theories, such as ecology, feminism, decolonialism, class struggle, negritude, anti-racism, and anti-speciesism, resituating the science in a process of theoretical, experimental, philosophical, moral and paradigmatic reconstruction, breaking with its ideological territories and unquestionable epistemologies.
It aims at an investigative stance open to a different knowledge construct, with continuous reflection, sociopolitical engagement and consequential pedagogical practices. It institutes a paradigmatic revision, intending to interweave logic, philosophy and spiritual traditions, current and potential modes of intelligence.
Alterscience is proposed as a science that respects life implying the acceptance that living beings, whether human or non-human, are sacred and therefore have inalienable rights. This vision creates an inevitable confrontation with the foundations of the dominant science, historically governed by positivism, determinism and technological rationalism and mechanisms of colonization and control that allowed the subjugation of a multitude of beings, the manipulation of animals, plants, and the planet itself.
This behavioral logic of exploitation of life, implicitly validated by science, is insidiously extended to the treatment of human beings, tacitly considered as machines, devoid of sacredness, without rights to life, dignity, respect, and therefore available to be controlled, experimented, exploited and exhausted. The proposal stimulates a broad reflection on Sciences and Alterciences, for identify new topics of knowledge, alternative objectives, modalities or methods of knowing; to unveil other objects and dimensions; to experiment with different languages, agencies, instruments, modalities; to conceive multi- and inter- visualities and dimensionalities; to examine new forms for knowledge legitimation, to implement non-proprietary processes of information dissemination, application and transformation; to absorb additional subjects of knowledge and to reach and augment the beneficiaries of science.
