Allene Lage, Postdoctoral Fellow in Human Rights from the Federal University of Pernambuco, Graduate Program in Human Rights (2016) and Postdoctoral Fellow in Education from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (2012).
The first time I spoke with Boaventura de Sousa Santos was in August 2000, through a daring e-mail in which, without knowing him, I wrote to him telling him of my desire to have him as my scientific advisor for an academic doctoral program at the University of Coimbra. A year later, I arrived in Coimbra with a scholarship from the Brazilian government to do my PhD under his guidance, which lasted four years. In May 2006 took place the presentation/defense of my thesis, a valuable research work on social struggles in Brazil and Portugal, entitled Lutas por Inclusão nas Margens do Atlântico (Struggles for Inclusion in the Margins of the Atlantic).
Since then, I have been studying and following the intellectual production of Boaventura de Sousa Santos, whose main characteristic is a distinctive way of thinking, which manages to make visible, explain and analyze, without subalternizing, the knowledge and social practices produced in the global South, within the framework of a new scientific paradigm, which includes the social and the political.
Boaventura de Sousa Santos is a prestigious social scientist who has been recognized internationally, beyond Portugal, in universities in Brazil and many other countries, by scientific associations, universities and public and private institutions, through the awarding of high academic titles, prizes and public distinctions. Among other distinctions, he has received more than 20 honorary doctorates in Brazil and in several countries around the world.
The work of Boaventura de Sousa Santos, in addition to adopting a broad and articulated approach to the production of knowledge on various dimensions of society, is extensive and requires the scholarly reader to enter into his sophisticated and groundbreaking rationality, which devours hegemonic concepts, while proposing to look at the world through new lenses and new categories. Therefore, to understand the theoretical thought of Boaventura de Sousa Santos it is necessary, first of all, to be willing, along with him, to break or at least be suspicious of all that is apparently safe in the realm of science.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Boaventura de Sousa Santos focused on the themes of citizenship, science, modes of production of social power, analysis of Portuguese society and globalization. On these last two themes, he developed research projects that brought together dozens of researchers from six countries and resulted in the publication of two collections, one with 5 books and the other with 8 books. The topics analyzed in this period fall into several dimensions, as he himself explains, such as epistemology (A Discourse on Science, 1988 or Introduction to Postmodern Science, 1989) and a scientific paradigm that is also a social paradigm, since it arises in a society that is revolutionized in turn by science (A Discourse on Science, 1988). And the political and cultural dimension (Alice's Hand: The Social and the Political in Postmodernity, 1994).
[1]In the 2000s, he further deepened his robust reflections by publishing the award-winning book The Critique of Indolent Reason : Against the Waste of Experience (2000), which addresses science, law and politics. In the following years, he published Grammar of Time (2006), Epistemology of the South (2010), The End of the Cognitive Empire (2018), and the latest, Knowledge Born in Struggle : Building Epistemologies of the South (2024).
In other languages, recent books published are: Law and the Epistemologies of the South. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2023), Postcolonialism, Decoloniality and Epistemologies of the South. Buenos Aires: CLACSO (2022), Theses on the Decolonization of History. Buenos Aires: CLACSO (2022), Conoscere per liberare. Rome: Castelvecchi (2021), Decolonising the University: The Challenge of Deep Cognitive Justice. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing (2021), Educación para otro mundo posible. Buenos Aires: CLACSO; CEDALC (2019), The End of the Cognitive Empire. The coming of age of Southern epistemologies. Durham and London: Duke University Press (2018).
In this line, we can note that, throughout his academic and intellectual career, Boaventura de Sousa Santos has published more than 150 books in the field of sociology, or in dialogue with other areas of knowledge, in various languages and countries, as well as hundreds of scientific articles, building a new scientific thought. His work also extends to the field of literature, with a poetic production of nine works.
Boaventura de Sousa Santos, in his vast academic work, has created several theoretical concepts that have supported studies in different areas of knowledge. Some of these theoretical concepts are the following:
Diatopic hermeneutics is an important concept of the 1990s. According to Santos (1997), it is based on the idea that all cultures are incomplete and, therefore, can be enriched through dialogue and confrontation with other cultures. According to Santos, this incompleteness is not visible from within the culture, since the aspiration to totality leads to taking the part for the whole. Thus, he subscribes that the aim of diatopic hermeneutics is not to attain completeness -an unattainable goal- but, on the contrary, to expand to the maximum the awareness of mutual incompleteness through a dialogue that takes place, so to speak, with one foot in one culture and the other in another. He concludes by saying that this is what makes it dia-topical.
Epistemicide is a term used by Boaventura de Sousa Santos since his book Pela Mão de Alice (1995). Epistemicide is the process of creative destruction of knowledge, knowledges and cultures not assimilated by the white/western culture, promoted by modern science in defense of its privileged status in essence.
The Sociology of Absences and Emergence (2002) are two vigorous concepts from the work of Boaventura de Sousa Santos, originally published in an article in English. In his terms, the Sociology of Absences (2002) seeks to demonstrate that what does not exist is, in fact, actively produced as non-existent, as a non-credible alternative to what does exist. The question of non-existence then centers on a produced invisibility, a discredit constructed in such a way as to point to scenarios without alternatives. At the heart of this framework, the Sociology of Absences aims to transform impossible objects into possible ones and, from there, to transform absences into presences. The Sociology of Emergencies (2002) consists, as Boaventura de Sousa Santos says, in carrying out a symbolic expansion of knowledge, practices and agents in order to identify in them the tendencies of the future (the Not-Yet) on which it is possible to act in order to maximize the probability of hope in relation to the probability of frustration. From this perspective, Santos defines the sociology of emergencies as acting on both possibilities (potentiality) and capacities (potency). The Not-Yet makes sense (as possibility), but has no direction, as it can end in hope or disaster.
Another theoretical perspective developed by Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2007) refers to modern Western thought, which he calls Abyssal Thought, which, according to him, consists of a system of visible and invisible distinctions, in which the invisible ones support the visible ones. For Santos, the invisible distinctions are established through radical lines that divide social reality into two distinct universes: the universe “on this side of the line” and the universe “on the other side of the line”. The division is such that “the other side of the line” disappears as reality, becomes non-existent and even occurs as non-existent. Thus, in his terms, Santos states that the fundamental characteristic of abyssal thinking is the impossibility of the co-presence of the two sides of the line. This side of the line only prevails to the extent that it exhausts the field of relevant reality. Beyond it there is only non-existence, invisibility and non-dialectical absence.
Finally, but without exhausting the creative and profound potential of his work, there is Epistemologies of the South (2010), one of his most widely disseminated theoretical frameworks. According to Boaventura de Sousa Santos, an epistemology of the South is based on three orientations: learning that the South exists; learning to go to the South; learning from the South and with the South. His reflection on the epistemology of the South began in 1995, when he proposed this concept, and since then he has been deepening it based on his realization that the vast field of issues covered by philosophical reflection far exceeds modern rationality, with its areas of light and shadow, its strengths and weaknesses. Over the past 20 years, he has worked extensively on this concept in research both in the Global South and in Europe, such as the project “Alice, strange mirrors, unforeseen lessons” (2011-2016), funded by the European Research Council as principal investigator.
This solid theoretical framework has served as a reference in scientific research in graduate programs in Brazil and abroad. Boaventura de Sousa Santos' work has been used as a consistent and appropriate theoretical framework in the scientific production of theses and dissertations conducted within the scope of these programs, in his master's and doctoral courses, as well as for research projects funded by national and international funding institutions.
In Brazil, his work has served as a theoretical basis for a significant number of master's and doctoral theses in several Brazilian universities.
[2]In a study of the database of the Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (BDTD) of the Brazilian Institute of Information in Science and Technology (IBICT) , we collected the following data.
Influence of Boaventura de Sousa Santos' theoretical production on Brazilian graduate scientific production.
Search terms | Number of mentions in the title | Number of mentions in the fields title, author, subject and abstract) | |
thesis | disertation | ||
Boaventura de Sousa Santos | 02 | 09 | 650 |
Diatopic hermeneutics | 01 | 01 | 10 |
Sociology of absences | 01 | 04 | 704 |
Ecology of knowledge | 13 | 15 | 2.406 |
Epistemicide | 02 | 05 | 125 |
Abyssal thinking or line | 04 | 05 | 164 |
Epistemologies of the South | 04 | 07 | 2.036 |
TOTAL AMMOUNT | 27 | 46 | 6.095 |
Source: IBICT data, collected on 06/Jun/2024(https://bdtd.ibict.br).
This demonstrates the confidence of thousands of Brazilian scientists and researchers in the scientific quality of the theoretical framework elaborated by Boaventura de Sousa Santos. This figure of more than 6,000 theses and dissertations is broken down into a much larger number of scientific articles presented at scientific events and published in journals in Brazil and other countries.
Furthermore, in the context of graduate programs in Brazil, the large number of bibliographical references to Boaventura de Sousa Santos in the subjects taught by Brazilian graduate professors in the social sciences and humanities stands out.
References
SANTOS, Boaventura de Sousa and MENESES, Maria Paula (eds). Knowledges born in the struggle: building epistemologies of the South. Coimbra: Edições 70, 2024.
SANTOS, Boaventura de Sousa. The Critique of Indolent Reason: Against the Waste of Experience. São Paulo: Cortez, 2000
SANTOS, Boaventura de Sousa. The Grammar of Time. Towards a new political culture. São Paulo: Cortez, 2006
SANTOS, Boaventura de Sousa. Introduction to a postmodern science. Porto: Afrontamento, 1989
SANTOS, Boaventura de Sousa. The end of the cognitive empire. The affirmation of the epistemologies of the south. Coimbra: Almedina, 2019
SANTOS, Boaventura de Sousa. Towards a sociology of absences and a sociology of emergencies. In: Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais. nº 63, October, p: 237 - 280. Coimbra: CES, 2002. Coimbra: CES, 2002.
SANTOS, Boaventura de Sousa. La mano de Alicia: lo social y lo político en la posmodernidad. Porto: Afrontamento, 1994
SANTOS, Boaventura de Sousa. A discourse on the sciences. Porto: Afrontamento, 1988
SANTOS, Boaventura de Sousa. A multicultural conception of human rights. In: Lua nova: Revista de Cultura e Política, São Paulo , v. 39, p. 105-124, 1997.
SANTOS, Boaventura de Sousa; Meneses, Maria Paula (eds.). Epistemologías del Sur. Coimbra: Almedina, 2009
[1] Jabuti Award in 2001. This annual Brazilian award is the most traditional literary prize in Brazil, granted by the Brazilian Book Chamber, created in 1959.
[2] Launched in 2002.
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