Knowing from conflict: interculturality as a space of interaction for the production of knowledges

ABSTRACT

This article problematizes the interaction between diverse actors for the production of knowledges. From a phenomenological approach of three different experiences, I argue that the concept of interculturality and the practice of knowledge production based on it, will allow more symmetrical processes, with better knowledges, with a greater empowerment of non-academic communities, and with a more inclusive knowledge production from academic communities. I rely on political ontology to show that interactions cannot aspire (only) to dialogue and collaboration as a normative horizon, but that the production of knowledge requires the recognition of conflict. I consider interculturality can help to produce an interaction that incorporates conflict as an expression of ontological difference, which enhances its transformative character by recognizing asymmetries, establishing meeting points, and rethinking the methods used in interaction.

RESUMO

Este artigo probematiza a interação entre diversos atores na produção de conhecimento. Com base em uma abordagem fenomenológica de três experiências diferentes, defendo que o conceito de interculturalidade, junto com uma prática de produção de conhecimento baseada nele, permite processos mais simétricos, melhor conhecimento, maior capacitação das comunidades não acadêmicas, e uma produção de conhecimento mais inclusiva das comunidades acadêmicas. Eu recorro à ontologia política para mostrar que as interações não podem (apenas) aspirar ao diálogo e à colaboração como um horizonte normativo, mas que a produção de conhecimento requer o reconhecimento do conflito. Defendo que a interculturalidade pode ajudar a produzir uma interação que incorpora o conflito como expressão da diferença ontológica, o que reforça seu caráter transformador, ao reconhecer assimetrias, estabelecer pontos comuns e repensar os métodos usados na interação.

RESUMEN

Este artículo problematiza la interacción entre actores diversos para la producción de conocimientos. A partir de un acercamiento fenomenológico de 3 experiencias distintas, argumento que el concepto de interculturalidad y una práctica de producción de conocimiento basada en él, permitirá procesos más simétricos, con mejores conocimientos, con un mayor empoderamiento de comunidades no académicas, y con una producción de conocimiento más inclusiva desde las comunidades académicas. Me apoyo en la ontología política para mostrar que las interacciones no pueden aspirar (solamente) al diálogo y la colaboración como horizonte normativo, sino que la producción de conocimiento requiere reconocer el conflicto. Considero que la interculturalidad puede ayudar a producir una interacción que incorpore el conflicto como una expresión de la diferencia ontológica, que potencia su carácter transformativo al reconocer las asimetrías, establecer puntos de encuentro y repensar los métodos usados en la interacción.

KEYWORDS:

• Interculturality
• knowledge systems
• conflict
• knowledge production

PALAVRAS-CHAVE:

• Interculturalidade
• Sistemas de conhecimento
• Conflito
• Produção de conhecimento

PALABRAS CLAVE:

• Interculturalidad
• Sistemas de conocimiento
• Conflicto
• Producción de conocimiento

1. Introduction

Latin American scholars in STS have been concerned with the production of scientific knowledge in terms of power relations, social inclusion (Arocena and Sutz 2009), center/periphery dynamics (Kreimer 2015; Monteiro 2022; Rodriguez Medina 2014), and the participation of other actors in such production (Goñi-Mazzitelli, Zeballos-Lereté, and Bianco-Bozzo 2022). Producing knowledge requires skills (Polanyi 1983) in processes of interaction between stakeholders, whether among scientists or among ontologically diverse actors (Robinson and Wallington 2012). It also has a material, situated, and political character (Parra-Romero 2020). Thus, knowledge production includes scientific knowledge but is not restricted to it. Knowledge systems associated with social movements, communities, and ethnic groups can also converge in this space (Callon 1999; Carroll 2015; Casas-Cortés, Osterweil, and Powell 2008; Choudry 2014; Conde 2014; Corburn 2005).

The interaction between diverse actors for the production of knowledge can have different characteristics and scopes depending on the context, the involvement of the actors, and the stage within a project where the interaction takes place (Goñi-Mazzitelli, Zeballos-Lereté, and Bianco-Bozzo 2022). In these spaces, knowledges can be exchanged or hidden, worldviews can be expanded or entrenched, and scientific research can be welcome or rejected (Toomey 2016). The perspectives from which these spaces have been assumed are public participation (Rowe and Frewer 2000), dialogue (Santos 2009, 2010), and trade zones (Collins, Evans, and Gorman 2007; Toomey 2016). However, less frequent is the reflection on the possibilities of conflict as a social interaction that promotes new arrangements in society (Parra-Romero 2020) and that can also be a space for the production of knowledge.

In this text, it is interesting to emphasize that all interaction, and more so between diverse actors, is already a space of conflict. Therefore, I wish to reflect on the possibilities offered by a knowledge production that recognizes conflict and its ontological irresolubility (Cunha 2007). I start from political ontology to illuminate why encounters between actors should not only aspire to consensus, dialogue, and collaboration but must recognize the places, practices, and worlds that are enacted in the meeting space (Meurer 2021). As reported by Nogueira, Bjørkan, and Dale (2021), attention to consensus is an elusive goal, and this can lead to superficial results. This is because consensus-based approaches seek to overcome conflict and ignore the fact that conflicting power relations are only temporarily stabilized. In general, criticisms to these approaches are related to the imbalance of power between actors and asymmetries in discursive resources (Genus and Coles 2005).

Focusing on dialogue to bridge knowledge assumes that knowledge is accessible and easily shared (Tengö et al. 2017). This can result in ignoring the complexities around indigenous, activist, and local knowledge systems; perpetuating power asymmetries and ignoring the richness of these knowledges that are place-based, practical, oral, tacit, and with a local, ethical, ontological, and political context (Parra-Romero 2020; Tengö et al. 2017). Spaces that take for granted the positive values of dialogue run the risks of not achieving an inclusive and collaborative knowledge production (Moreno-Cely et al. 2021), given that they maintain the conditions of asymmetry and epistemic injustice (Fricker 2007), do not recognize the difference and do not make the adjustments that interaction requires for recognizing the asymmetries of power, the coloniality of knowledge, and the preconceived ideas about knowledge systems.

My point of departure is culture as an expression of the ways of making worlds, that is, of ontological differences, to argue, based on fieldwork on three different research projects and a literature review, that the concept of interculturality and the practice of knowledge production based on it, will allow more symmetrical processes, with better knowledge, with greater empowerment of non-academic communities, and with a more inclusive knowledge production on the part of academic communities by recognizing the ontological place of practices and actors, and conflict as a transformative potential. Interculturality is based on a relational idea of identity, it is language, culture, and territory, and the bodies that experimented them, but also it is an agreement with other members that this is what is shared and, at the same time, it is what differentiates them from other groups (Cruz-Rodríguez 2013).

Interculturality is a political space of encounter enacted in the constitutions of Ecuador in 2008 and Bolivia in 2009. In Chile, 2019, with the new constitution, the debate of an intercultural and plurinational territory was opened. In Colombia (1991), through multiculturalism, we protect the ethnic diversity of the national territory in the constitution. Interculturality is found in these countries' reforms, not only constitutional but also in public policies, education, and international relations/cooperation (Walsh 2012). As proposed by Tym (2023), interculturality is about recognizing and mobilizing cultural and ontological differences in the public sphere. In this text, beyond a specific practice, I use it as a concept that allows tensioning the space of interaction and encounter between groups, challenging science in its place of privilege and transferring the assumption of the search for consensus to an idea of producing knowledge from conflict.

2. Producing knowledge otherwise

As stated by Latour (1994), in the modern world, our practices constitute a dual ontology of Cartesian Euro-logo-anthropocentric origin, where there is only one nature and multiple cultures. According to this ontology, what exists are diverse perspectives of a single reality and the political work consists in determining the best way of knowing this reality, giving rise to a conflict between the technical rationality of experts and the socio-cultural orientation of citizens (Fisher 2000). However, as Santos (2009) points out, the paradigm of modern science was instituted under this dual ontology. With it, problems, phenomena, and issues of nature could be divided, observed, and analyzed with different methods. According to Santos, this allowed mathematics, as the central place of knowledge, to help establish in the modern paradigm the idea that knowing means quantifying based on the reduction of complexity, establishing another dichotomy: science on one side, belief on the other; with devastating consequences on the territories produced by hegemonic knowledge and practices, which ignore other systems of knowledge and practices. In this same way, feminist authors showed that the processes of demarcation between those who know (expertise) and those who do not (laypeople) contributed, not to the production of better knowledge, but to maintaining the hierarchies and values of exclusion and domination masked in an idea of progress, universalism, and benefit for all (Mies and Shiva 2014).

To overcome the science/belief dichotomy, political ontology (Blaser 2018) conceptualizes that the practices of social actors in relation to the environment constitute realities. These are not perspectives of the same world (Mol 2007). These worlds or pluriverses coexist. These concepts, pluriverse and practices that enact worlds, also highlight the impossibility of reducing this diversity to a “single world” and therefore to a “single epistemology.” Hence, the idea of incommensurability or ontological irresolubility of conflict. I argue that even in modern ontology, we can find diverse practices that become other possible worlds and that are reflected in the narratives used by the groups (Meurer 2021).

As presented by Tym (2023), the contributions of political ontology have allowed us to revisit the Andean-Amazonian debates on the interculturality of the State. It is from the ontological turn that we can stress in interculturality the concept of culture as the difference between worlds and not between beliefs. A criticism raised by Tym (2023) is that, although the ontological turn proposes to speak of indigenous “worlds” instead of indigenous “cultures” to contrast with the Western “world,” it can fall into the bias of homogenizing and generalizing the experiences of each person according to their ethnicity or world. In this paper, I propose that this problem can be resolved by bringing the experience and the body that experiences into the space of intercultural interaction, expanding the interaction of indigenous or Afro groups with Western groups.

Interculturality calls attention to the need to transform the structures, conditions, and devices of power that maintain inequality based on racialization, subalternization, and dehumanization of some groups over others, of some knowledge over others. This is what authors have called the coloniality of power and knowledge (Parra-Romero 2016; Walsh 2012). In this text I talk about interculturality and its potential to draw attention to these processes of epistemic justice, recognizing that, indeed, there is a difference in the ways of doing-world and inhabiting the world that is not the difference proposed by power groups. Interculturality recognizes the power of some groups over others which avoids equitable relationships and dialogue. It differs from multiculturalism;¹ whose logic of majorities and minorities promotes tolerance to achieve coexistence and respect. Dialogue does not include differences. Dialogue works in the multicultural key, but not in the intercultural one, where difference must be confronted both at epistemological and ontological levels.

3. Situating interaction: three experiences of encounters between groups

This text is a phenomenological approach that draws on three experiences located in Colombia, embodied in different moments between 2016 and 2022 (see Table 1). In the first, I did fieldwork between 2016 and 2019 studying the production of knowledge in a socio-environmental conflict. In this case, I followed closely the work of the social movement in defense of water and a local community fighting against the effects of conservation areas. My role in this process was as an independent researcher, carrying out a Ph.D. thesis. The second experience was the participation as project coordinator in the construction of a prospective vision of the future for the District of Buenaventura, during six months in 2021. The community-based process was part of an alternative plan, achieved by a social movement before the State, to reduce social, economic, and justice gaps suffered by the inhabitants of the district. With an Afro-descendant majority, Buenaventura, home to Colombia's most important commercial seaport, does not have decent housing, education, drinking water, and employment conditions for those who live in this territory.

Table 1. Characteristics of the three experiences.

	Santander	Buenaventura	Vaupés
Groups in interaction	Peasants, artisanal miners, government, academic groups and institutions	Afro-Colombian population Indigenous peoples,^a government, academic groups and institutions	Indigenous peoples,^b government, academic groups and institutions
Main topics	Water supply vs. gold miners	Territory planning	Women's rights Preserve native languages
Nature characteristics	Mountain named páramo, with gold and other minerals and rivers born of a great basin	Great biodiversity, main pluvial rainforest of Colombia, Pacific Ocean, main sea port of Colombia	Amazon rainforest, great biodiversity, rivers of Amazon basin
Kind of knowledge product	Public policy Books, Academic papers	Policy brief, prospective vision planning Academic papers	Science and technology projects Academic papers
Participation/observation dates	2016–2019	2021	2022

Source: author's elaboration.

^a Indigenous groups in Buenaventura are Nasa, Wounaan, Inga, Sia and Emberá Chamí. The indigenous people in Buenaventura have a representativity of 3% of total population. Afro Colombian people correspond to 85% of total population.

^b Some indigenous groups in Vaupés are Bara, Barasana, Cabiyarí, Carapana, Cubeo, Curripaco, Desano, Kakua, Nukak, Macuna, Piratapuyo, Pisamira, Siriano, Taiwano, Tariano, Tatuyo, Tukano, Tuyuca, Wanano, Yurutí.

The last experience was a research stay in the Department of Vaupés, in the Colombian Amazon, supporting the formulation and management of science and technology projects. The fundamental characteristic of Vaupés is its ethnic diversity. It has 26 indigenous groups and about 17 languages are spoken other than Spanish. My role in this stay was to support the relationships between local government actors, academia, and indigenous communities to generate projects that contribute to the maintenance and safeguarding of ethnic, linguistic, and environmental diversity of the department.

The knowledge produced and mobilized in these cases is the product of constant negotiations and positioning on who decides, how decisions are made, and what data, techniques, and referents are used. These negotiations were not explicit, but are the product of the interrelation, often in tension, to maintain the place of enunciation. From my point of view, this is a practice that is not conscious, but the result of enacting the place, position, or ontology of the group (Mol 2007). Can a public official make activist statements? Is it acceptable for an indigenous person to ask for more development and economic growth for his region? Can an activist be asked to follow institutional procedures and times? Groups are constantly forming and negotiating (Latour 2008). Other non-human actors are part of these collectives: water as a sacred being or as infrastructure to supply cities, the mountain as a unit in close relationship with its humans or divided into conservation areas without people, Buenaventura as the Afro-Colombian tradition or as a geographical point that allows the entry and exit of goods, the jungle ritualized or as a carbon capture device? Trying to solve these questions shows the limitations of rational politics (Blaser 2018; De la Cadena 2010) that fails to incorporate the rights of nature, earth beings, or Well-Being, as it explains the differences in conflicts as differences of cultural order and, therefore, usually reduces the demands of groups to ideological, irrational or radical issues, while defending more objective and scientific ways of dealing with them (Blaser 2018).

4. Interculturality as a space for the production of knowledge

Interculturality is a concept that can illuminate the space of interaction to move towards more symmetrical forms of knowledge production. Although the term is polysemic, interculturality denotes the character of cultural diversity in a given space (Cruz-Rodríguez 2013) that is not defined and, therefore, is not prior to practice (Molina-Andrade 2017). Interculturality as a concept “suggests an active and permanent process of negotiation and interrelation where the proper and particular do not lose their difference, but have the opportunity and capacity to contribute from this difference to the creation of new understandings, coexistence, collaborations and solidarities” (Walsh 2008, 141). This implies modifying the gaze: there is no horizon of agreement but of new learning and understanding of and with difference, which does not rule out the possibility of reaching consensus. Interculturality can help to produce an interaction that recognizes conflict as an expression of ontological difference, which enhances its transformative character by recognizing asymmetries, achieving points of encounter, and rethinking the methods used in interaction.

4.1. Recognizing asymmetries

Interculturality makes it possible to recognize power asymmetries. It is based on the recognition that there is no equality between ontologies and that power relations allow some to impose themselves over others, with apparently neutral policies. This is reflected in centralized science, technology, and innovation policies, that do not create regional capacities, and that perpetuate what happens in social conflict (dominant/subaltern groups²) in the modes of knowledge production: knowledge that privileges a type of economy and technology that follows North/South power dynamics, such as conservationist proposals for ecosystems and systems of economic dependence (carbon credits, payment for environmental services). These policies ignore the values and knowledges of native peoples, while maintaining productive and economic structures of a single way of “doing the world,” that produce the Amazon as a carbon capture device, Buenaventura as a port, and the mountain as a resource to exploit.³

This is one of the reasons why groups that have been invisibilized are distrustful of interaction processes and express concern about the way they are incorporated both in global policies and in scientific knowledge systems as well as in other systems such as local and indigenous (Briggs 2013; Hill et al. 2020). It is not about extracting and transforming indigenous, local, or activist knowledges, while forgetting that they also move in formal and informal institutions (Tengö et al. 2017) and that such knowledges are closely linked to the social and ethical rights of their holders. It is a matter of overcoming epistemic injustices (Fricker 2007) and enabling work with the key actors of the systems including the actors, institutions, and processes of the various knowledge systems (Tengö et al. 2017). Not to incorporate them instrumentally to the processes (Boswell 2009; Kullenberg 2015), but to recognize the privilege of the circuits of power (state, science) from an intercultural perspective and allow, in the process of knowledge production, to denaturalize hegemonic categories and explanations as the only possible ones. For this, it is necessary to have the opportunity to express the positions, the narratives, the differences. But this is only the first step to do the real work: to think the problem from the differences (Biset 2021), to generate exchanges and mutual learning that allow a more symmetrical knowledge production.

4.2. Cosmopolitics of the encounter

If we assume an ontological irresolubility of conflict, how can we make an encounter of worlds happen? If consensus is not the end, how can we make politics and knowledge in accordance with it? The concept of interculturality reminds us that learning relationships are mutual and that it is not the subaltern party who must adapt and learn from the dominant one (Cruz-Rodríguez 2013). The challenge is to maintain difference in conditions of symmetry so that such learning can be bidirectional. For example, the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) has been promoting dialogue between different knowledge systems worldwide. In 2017, IPBES member states adopted a local and indigenous knowledge approach (Hill et al. 2020). In IPBES assessments with a focus on local and indigenous knowledge, three types of actors are involved: knowledge holders (ILK-holders), experts within local and indigenous knowledge systems (ILK-experts), and experts in (on) local and indigenous knowledge systems (Experts on ILK) (Hill et al. 2020). Working with indigenous and local knowledge is vital for inclusive assessments of nature because indigenous peoples’ concepts of what constitutes sustainability, for example, differ markedly from dominant sustainability discourses (Hill et al. 2020). Drawing from political ontology, agreements or meeting points between worlds are always partial, or as Viveiros de Castro (2004) calls them, controlled equivocation. The equivocation does not occur between terms such as what knowledge systems understand by sustainability, but between networks of actants of which practices and associations speak/enact sustainability.⁴

In the case of Vaupés, the indigenous communities and even the local government have little space for interaction. It is taken for granted that the environmental policies of the central level are adequate for the territory without space for learning. This has allowed some communities to sign abusive contracts for more than 100 years with foreign companies in the carbon market, and neither the local nor the national government has provided support. In the case of Buenaventura, conflict and mobilization revealed that planning, in a territory with more than 85% of Afro-descendant population, prioritizes problems and needs always in relation to the port and that only experts on these issues (white men, business owners or academics who do not live in the region) are consulted. These examples show the importance of having a meeting space where people can learn. In the first case, the encounter between worlds is one of domination. In the case of Buenaventura, conflict allowed the incorporation of values, visions, and interests that had been traditionally invisible.

Finding these meeting points and even generating spaces for mutual learning is not always easy. In the case of Vaupés, the environmental issue is a topic that indigenous communities, universities, and local government are used to dealing with in their interactions. The case is different when the topic is violence against indigenous women and the production of knowledge that allows a public policy to simplify the problem. Talking about feminism and new masculinities seems to be an imposition of western concepts on traditional communities. Some elders say we need to remember the Law of Origin to know how to treat each other equitably. In the meantime, women continue to be murdered. How can a common space that reduces this violence, respects traditions, and incorporates discussions of equity be built? Is this possible? How can the identity and social cohesion of the indigenous community be preserved while discussing changes in the violent treatment towards women? From the intercultural point of view, it is not a matter of tolerating ontologies but of asking questions that allow us to find meeting points on which to build knowledge, in this case, on the tension between safeguarding cultural heritage, perceived as a relic, and protecting women's welfare, like any other society. This is why interculturality does not pre-exist as a normative horizon, but is given in the possibilities of mutual learning granted by interaction, always under the understanding that this kind of learning is a right for all groups (not only for the subaltern part as an obligation).

The assumption underlying the use of interculturality as a space for interaction is that knowledge systems and their ontologies have a common interest and that this will allow a “zone of exchange,” where local negotiations can take place despite irreconcilable ontological differences (Collins, Evans, and Gorman 2007). Interculturality also assumes that it is necessary to contemplate the social and power dynamics between those engaging in each knowledge system. This incommensurability does not imply the “impossibility” of establishing relationships, agreements, and common points (Robles-Piñeros et al. 2020). On the contrary, it starts from the conflict that it creates in order to produce a situated, negotiated, intercultural knowledge that allows understanding from and with all worlds. However, action without harm must be kept in mind, that is, that the transformations and collaborations, and in general the production of knowledge in intercultural contexts, do not end up affecting the most vulnerable populations both in the results and in a possible undermining of their knowledge systems (Tengö et al. 2017).

4.3. About the methods

How to create methodologies so that knowledge can be produced in another way (Harding 2016; Tengö et al. 2017)? In the case of Buenaventura, we are faced with the challenge of revising the methods of presentation, discussion, systematization, and analysis of foresight; focusing on formats, qualifications, and writing (foresight has generally been carried out by and with sectoral experts), while facing an Afro-descendant community that sings to the dead, composes songs, dances, likes to talk. In essence, its transmission of ancestral knowledge has been done through orality and experience. According to the experiences reported by Hill et al. (2020), dialogue spaces in an intercultural key to support the exchange of knowledge should have at least the following characteristics: to work in the place of the local, activist or indigenous knowledge systems, to follow and respect the uses and customs or community rituals that regulate the exchange of knowledge, the preparation of the space must be joint all the time, a safe space for reciprocity and sharing must be guaranteed, and finally, the use of boundary objects,⁵ such as maps, visual aids, posters or personally crafted items (Robles-Piñeros et al. 2020), which are connected through multiple knowledge systems. The power of concrete material will allow putting a problem in dialogue and focusing attention on that material. In the case of Buenaventura, workshops were held throughout the territory to build possible scenarios and a bet on the future, first, among community stakeholders, academia, government; and then, by calling on all of them for a common commitment. In all the workshops we worked with drawings, songs, and even theatrical representations. At the same time, the method itself, its content and result, was always under constant review, evaluation, and negotiation by members of the social movement (the values and visions behind each concept and proposal were always discussed). It was hoped to ensure that the prospective process would value and mobilize the accumulated and experiential knowledge of the actors, in this case mostly from the community. Although this case shows the progress made in recognizing the conflict and building knowledge from difference, it is still necessary to adjust and rethink the methods in an intercultural key.

Tengö et al. (2017) propose, as a methodology, five tasks (mobilize, translate, negotiate, synthesize, and apply multiple evidences) that allow integrating indigenous and local knowledge systems with the scientific knowledge system to improve governance for sustainability. One of the weaknesses identified by this work, and to which I would like to draw attention, is that indigenous knowledge was represented by indigenous people only in some stages of the process, and in the others it was represented by scientific experts in indigenous and local knowledge systems (Experts on ILK), especially in the negotiation stage. One of the contributing factors was the mobility of participants. The availability of resources was ensured only in the early stages. The text states that it is not a priority for the institutions to ensure the participation of all actors in all stages of the “collaboration” process. Toomey (2016) speaks of contact zones to highlight moments when encounters between different worlds occur. The characteristics he attributes to these spaces are asymmetries, conditions of non-neutrality, coercion, and intractability of conflicts. At the same time, the space of intercultural interaction, as a zone of encounter where difference is recognized, also provides the possibility of making new agreements, understanding that not everything can be anticipated or controlled, but that it has all the potential for connection, empathy, and trust building (Toomey 2016).

In any case, this type of proposals supposes the translation or the participation of mediators, for example, interactional experts (Reyes-Galindo and Duarte 2017; Robinson and Wallington 2012) who mediate between scientific expertise and expertise based on experience or activism, which would imply creating another type of expertise. To avoid this problem, and following Viveiros de Castro (2010),⁶ I propose that the methods used, under the assumption of interculturality, should be extended from logos to feeling, from the mind to the body, from discourse to experiencing the body on site (Noguera, Ramírez, and Echeverri 2020).⁷ It is necessary, then, to motivate, build, and think new methods of research-action-experience, and to problematize the production of knowledge and training of disciplinary researchers in universities.

5. Final remarks

The complexity of the problems and the need for a reflexive science, in Beck's terms (1998), make the integration, dialogue, and co-production of knowledge among diverse systems necessary. But it is not enough to recognize this need. We must start by recognizing difference, considering its ontological character. This is what I call producing from conflict; a production of knowledge from radical difference that implies recognizing that knowledge systems correspond to ways of enacting the world. It is not about relativism, nor is it about leveling science as a system of beliefs, like others (Boghossian 2009). What conflicts teach us is that, for many social, environmental, and even scientific problems, the scientific institutional system is not enough. Therefore, the interaction between science and other systems of knowledge production is required. In this same way, from conflict theory, we bring its transformative power and the potential to build encounter points (a common world?) from collaborations that respect the integrity of each knowledge system (Tengö et al. 2017).

A fundamental reason for producing from conflict is to recognize the role of knowledge in the establishment of public policies of all kinds: health, environmental, land-use planning, economic, etc. This knowledge is mobilized through different devices, including documents, articles, forums or statements widely accepted by all, such as globalization. Tsing (2005) had already proposed that the way to materialize the apparently universal globalization on local spheres was under the concept of frontier and friction. This friction is necessary because it is through friction that the global can materialize in the local. It is from this encounter between homogenization and resistance that practices, concepts, and ideas of universal character materialize. In this text, based on political ontology, I question such a thing as the universality of any concept and practice. As critical interculturality argues, the homogenization of apparently universal practices was given by the subalternization of some groups over others, through different processes, which did not end with colonialism but were internalized through the coloniality of power and knowledge (Walsh 2012). It is for this reason that political ontology proposes that science cannot be the one to settle conflicts, at least not in the way it was institutionalized in modernity. That is why I propose that before seeking consensus between groups, we start from conflict and its ontological irresolvability, to rethink those spaces of encounter and friction on which knowledge is built, and practices and concepts are materialized.

I propose spaces of intercultural interaction as spaces for thinking about problems from the ontological place, spaces for listening rather than speaking. A production of knowledge based on partial connections recognizing ontological differences, possibly irresolvable. In this respect, the models, tools, and concepts of STS can be used as a starting point for the space of interaction in an intercultural key, for example, the use of boundary objects or trading zones. But progress must also be made in a process of decolonization of all the groups involved, especially the groups most aligned with the dominant worldviews (hegemonic science, place of domination of men over women, and epistemic injustice towards indigenous and traditional communities) (Harding 2016). One difficulty is that scientists are not prepared to deal with these issues. Progress is required so that scientists know how to value knowledge from other knowledge systems and understand how and why it is produced (Nogueira, Bjørkan, and Dale 2021). That is, an intercultural education that incorporates different knowledge systems in the classroom (Robles-Piñeros et al. 2020). STS education is no longer enough; intercultural science education is required (Ludwig and El-Hani 2020). Both teachers and citizens should be able to understand the unequal relationships between different worlds, especially in intercultural contexts such as those in Latin America where indigenous, Afro-descendant, and peasant communities continue to resist this type of inequalities. New methods of research-action-experience including body experience must be adopted, not just traditional forms of knowledge such as discourse and text.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

Part of this research was funded by a postdoctoral grant (2021–2022) and a doctoral grant (2016–2019) from the Colombian Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation. The postdoctoral fellowship was completed during a research stay at Coporación para el Desarrollo de la Dignidad Humana-CORPODIHVA, in the city of Mitú, Vaupés.

Notes on contributors

Adela Parra-Romero

Adela Parra-Romero is Director of the Social Appropriation of Knowledge Unit (UASCU) of the Corporación Universitaria del Meta-UNIMETA. She holds a PhD in Science and Technology Policy from the University of Campinas, Brazil. She is a Member of the Laboratory on Technologies and Social Transformations (University of Campinas, Brazil). She has developed her research in ethnically and environmentally diverse territories in Colombia. She currently explores the production and social appropriation of knowledge in intercultural contexts and the challenges of researching from and with conflict, with the body and experience.

Notes

1 We can understand multiculturalism as an update of liberalism. Thus, instead of focusing on individuals, contemporary liberalism raises the question of cultures, groups, and communities. According to Charles Taylor (1993), we can find an example of multicultural politics in the Canadian state that proposes a relationship of recognition with the so-called “First Nations.” A relationship of tolerance is sought with the groups or communities, in this case with the indigenous nations. However, “critical interculturality” (Walsh 2010) goes beyond liberal tolerance and the recognition of rights towards a true intercultural dialogue that, ideally, will allow the transformation of the dominant, hegemonic culture in its interaction with subaltern cultures. We can also speak of “functional interculturality” when it is not a question of dialogue transforming us as a community, but as a sophisticated form of normalization or adaptation of subaltern cultures to the majority or dominant culture.

2 In this it differs from multiculturalism, which deals with difference in terms of majority/minority. In this regard, Cruz-Rodríguez (2013) draws attention to the white elites that hold power, who are really few in comparison to subalternized majorities: black communities, peasants, indigenous people, women, etc.

3 In the scientific system, as well as in the indigenous, local or activist system, there are also power and asymmetry relations that generate disputes and dissent on which knowledge is mobilized, produced, and transferred (Flórez 2007; Tengö et al. 2017).

4 It happens, even with indigenous communities, that sustainability is neither a practice nor a concern within their ontology.

5 From the STS field, Reyes-Galindo and Duarte-Ribeiro (2017) systematize four models for intercultural communication: trading zones, trust, interactional expertise, and boundary objects.

6 Viveiros de Castro (2010) states that Amazonian multinaturalism does not speak of multiple natures but of nature as variation. What makes a difference between what is perceived by the species is not the nature or the perceived category, but the body with which they experience it.

7 In this regard, we can review proposals such as the metodoestesis of Patricia Noguera, Colombian philosopher (Noguera, Ramírez, and Echeverri 2020). Also, the proposal on "more than-human participatory research" (Noorani and Brigstocke 2018).