Discussant | Moderation: Irina Castro (CES) 

Overview

The texts we are going to work on in this discussion are ongoing essays to be submitted for the consideration of scientific journals. The cross-reflections will result from diffractive readings between two researchers (Begoña Dorronsoro and Rita Serra) formatted in the wrongly so-called pure sciences (biology and ecology) to transit at the present through the fields of social sciences (anthropology and sociology).

The first part is focused on positionality and situationality. We will refer to the works of feminist epistemologists who also come from the natural sciences, such as Donna Haraway, Sandra Harding, Evelyn Fox Keller or Lynda Birke... as well as other researchers with critical approaches to science such as the works by Stephen Jay Gould, and other scientists who have reformulated and expanded concepts such as the Gaia Theory initially raised by James Lovelock, but which is widely and profoundly improved with the reflections of Lynn Margulis, just to cite the most known ones. And yet there are more people doing critical science inside and outside the academies allowing the co-construction of some interesting bridges and dialogues to be established with the critical social sciences too (Rita Serra will draw on some practical and critical experience here).

However, it happens that on too many occasions even today, many westernized researchers and academics are still locked in ivory towers without reading each other, without establishing dialogues and instead using those parts that are more convenient for their working hypotheses, leaving the rest out of the discussion, and the rest is huge. It is in this context that the second part focuses on fungi, those beings that most of us still think today closer to plants because of the old outdated curricula still taught in the majority of primary and secondary schools, and yet they are evolutionary closer to animals. There are some decades now that fungi are being object of reflections, metaphors, theorizations and practices from the most academic science until the most transgressive and popular knowledges. Here Begoña Dorronsoro (CES) reflects on the metaphor to address issues of interest for her thesis, but also to play with the idea of a metaphor, that must not be seen and read as the only possible one, but an alternative of alternatives as proposed by Professor Boaventura de Sousa Santos.

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This seminar is part of the Political Ecology Reading Group series 2020-2021 of the Oficina de Ecologia e Sociedade (CES). If you wish to receive a copy of this paper, please contact ecosoc@ces.uc.pt

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This activity will be provided through Zoom platform and doesn’t require registration. It’s limited to the number of places available. 
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