Assessing the career of such an important figure in the social sciences scene, such as Boaventura de Sousa Santos, is a challenge. There are many productions by this author and also numerous works that collect and analyze his epistemological relevance. Both are available to the reader's judgment.
For this reason, when writing about his work, rather than summarizing his merits, I prefer to transmit to you an assessment contextualized in the university environment from my own perception. Professor Santos represents the university I imagine, a broad idea, not restricted to the purely academic. An open university that is concerned with human formation, with critical culture and university social commitment, which aspires to equality and social justice and which is at a great distance from the reactionary institution that we often come across. An ideal of a university that is increasingly absent in an environment governed by economic neoliberalism, in an institution that, far from being transformed, loses the capacity to react to censorious political abuses, as is happening in the 21st century. The absurd idea of an apolitical university, enclosed in the ivory tower of the purely academic, is spreading as a euphemism for what will be a university prey to hegemonic powers that has lost its own raison d'être, that of free thought.
The professor expresses, through his work at all university levels, that hope that I still have, perhaps because I am optimistic or persevering, in this old institution. An institution that is an expression of the socioeconomic contexts in which it lives, but also at the same time can, and must, develop that transformative capacity. The university has to be a pillar of creative change.
That is my idea of the university and Professor Boaventura de Sousa, in his extensive career, embodies it by coherently weaving everything that the university can be. He has contributed to the development of knowledge in a masterful way; to the growth, openness and renewal of the institution with great commitment and has been accompanying social movements in their struggle for social justice. Their work is remarkable in all the areas in which we are biased by the university: in research and teaching, in management and in transfer. But in his case, the different planes become permeable layers connected to each other, as is only possible to achieve by those who act from a strong conviction capable of sustaining the work of a lifetime.
In the research dimension, their contributions reach a wide projection and recognition, circumventing the low consideration of social disciplines in the hierarchies of scientific assessment and in the relevance granted to them by the policies of regulation of science. Occupying a place in the scientific field is not easy, given the different starting position for the trajectories of the social area, always exposed to the suspicion of the lack of objectivity and usefulness that would characterize the pure or exact and technological sciences; as if the latter were characterized by a neutrality that kept them on the margins of political interests and had no relationship with the legitimities that justify wars, genocides, femicides, homophobias, inequalities and other shames of our history.
Even taking into account these difficulties, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, with his research, has contributed to and promoted the growth of the social sciences, elevating them, making them emerge, given the quality of his analyses and studies that have earned him numerous academic recognitions(more than four dozen) that we decline to list. And it has done so with a multidisciplinary approach, from the fields of sociology of law, political sociology, epistemology and postcolonial studies; to address in depth issues such as social movements, globalization, participatory democracy, State reform and human rights, fleeing from the sad disciplinary pigeonholing, acting against the fragmentation of thought that so afflicts the scientific panorama and that neutralizes the emancipatory project that a renewed university could promote.
This methodological approach, comprehensive and broad, has allowed him to analyze contemporary contexts without disregarding history, so sometimes ignored in the social sciences in favor of the fiction of a synchronic objectivity. Not only is he deeply aware of it, aware of the absences in its different hegemonic and subordinate versions, but he also develops a broad handling of space-time coordinates. Being a thinker versed in the global, with a global projection, he was concerned with the knowledge of local experiences to contribute to the emergence of groups and peoples excluded by cognitive non-existence.
If the fragmentation of theory and practice, which breaks the necessary rigor in the production of knowledge, is present in university contexts more frequently than desirable, in the case of Professor Boaventura, the overlap between one and the other is complete. The most subtle creative developments of his portentous imagination, capable of putting together the most complex theories, accompany social experiences by dialoguing with them. In such a way, the most complex is apprehended in the light of what has been experienced, hence the communicative force of his theories that illuminate the shady areas for a large number of students, teachers and research staff who, aware of the usefulness of his contributions, come en masse to listen and dialogue with the professor. filling the classrooms and auditoriums as few thinkers and social activists manage.
To the lucidity of the analysis experimented is added, as a value that explains the broad projection of his contributions, the propositional capacity to offer alternatives, to outline lines of action necessary to imagine and build other futures of real utopias, which fill the heads and hearts of those who are in search of social justice. It is about politics, of course, the sciences are not produced outside of it, but in Professor Boaventura, the impulse and capacity for involvement, action and activism come from the great proposals for revolution and epistemic renewal, as he himself proclaims: there is no social justice without cognitive justice.
Boaventura de Sousa knows his trade, as a good craftsman he handles all the elements involved in the piece of craftsmanship, moving with great mastery from the foundations. At the beginning, the pertinent questions of an epistemological order were asked, putting together a critique of the modern project by clearing its internal limitations. To transcend it then, in favor of addressing the external limits of European knowledge, a Eurocentric thought that imagines itself as unique and universal. He continues with innovative theories about the decolonization of thought, the sociologies of absences and the sociologies of emergencies, the ecology of knowledge and the epistemologies of the South, composing the trajectory of what is undoubtedly one of the most relevant scientists in the panorama of contemporary social sciences.
Santos' work reveals, as the figures emerge on the photographic paper in the developing basin, the being of groups, classes and peoples who are victims of capitalism and colonialism. But this revelation is in color and in the foreground, on an equal plane, in the encounter. The south, a geopolitical, not a geographical, concept, emerges in his works from the knowledge of other epistemologies, other knowledges and experiences that break the monoculture of cultural uniformity with which the global village was conceived by the north.
The recognition of the plurality of epistemologies in the world, the calls for transcultural dialogue, with the subjects, not objects of study, fit with the anthropological gaze, being its fundamental contribution in this discipline. But there are many other fields of the social in which the work of the teacher is of depth, a transforming seed. Let us see, for example, how he defines in his own words, from his commitment to the decolonization of knowledge, solidarity, a core concept in the field of social intervention: "Solidarity as a form of knowledge is the recognition of the other as equal, whenever the difference brings inferiority to him; and as different, whenever equality puts their identity at risk" (An Epistemology of the South. The reinvention of Knowledge and Social Emancipation. 2009: 85). I imagine the beginning of the course for Social Work students. The conclusions that could be drawn when confronting these lines with the understandings of solidarity as religious charity or from mercantilism and utilitarianism (as a former president of the government of Spain declared "it is one thing to be supportive and another to be in exchange for nothing" radio cope 23/06/2024)The reflection based on the proposal of Boaventura de Sousa Santos, it provides other epistemic instruments to rethink social action from equality and cultural diversity, being fundamental in the training of these professionals.
The abundant and relevant contributions to science run simultaneously with an active work of social projection of knowledge, essential in the university mission. But in the case of Boaventura de Sousa, this mission goes beyond the limits, it is much more than regulated academic transfer, more than expected. From the beginning he has worked extensively with social movements, beyond providing a framework of analysis on their emancipatory significance. He has actively shared his knowledge, from the commitment to interepistemological dialogue, with the most significant social movements in the world. Since his participation in the World Social Forum (Porto Alegre, Brazil) in 2003, he proposed the formation of the Popular University of Social Movements (UPMS). A very special university where social movement activists, social scientists, researchers and artists meet to self-educate, sharing and dialogue. A paradigmatic project of the ideal of a university committed to social transformation, which materializes the propositional lines launched in its theories from the commitment to the decolonization of thought to the epistemologies of the South, showing the coherence between theory and practice that we have pointed out and the permeability between the different dimensions of university performance.
Boaventura de Sousa Santos has also dedicated his efforts to rethinking the university, to the critique of an institution exhausted and suffocated by the weight of the parameters of economic liberalism, without ignoring the necessary involvement in the approach to university management. He envisioned a center for social studies--CES founded in 1978--dedicated to the dynamic production of knowledge, to research innovation in confluence with teacher training and innovation. The Center for Social Studies achieved the confluence of financial and human support to grow as a benchmark of recognized prestige at an international level, contributing to the placement of the University of Coimbra and the social sciences on the map. Within it, projects such as ALICE - Strange Mirrors, Unforeseen Lessons: Defining for Europe a New Way of Sharing the World's Experiences, funded by the European Research Council (ERC), which manage to make visible and materialise the revolution of thought proposed by Boaventura de Sousa Santos. His good knowledge and work also define that dimension of management that is as essential as it is reviled in the university.
As we have pointed out at the beginning of these lines, always insufficient for the assessment of such a large career, Professor Santos embodies the university that I imagine: centers of irradiation of thought, democratic, participatory, open and at the service of society. Renewed institutions that break with elitism and reach out to other forms of knowledge from the disposition to exchange, interaction and mutual growth. A university in which a cosmopolitan "we" flows in the face of localisms and individualisms, a utopia perhaps, but achievable in view of what has been achieved in his career by the professor, or rather, teacher, Boaventura de Sousa Santos.
Of course, a public servant with the capacity to criticize and offer counter-hegemonic alternatives can be dangerous. Only from the courage and continuous effort of a prodigious mind governed by the most absolute empathy and generosity can a trajectory like hers be built. We hope to continue enjoying their contributions for a long time.
댓글