Biocene Program - for a New Era Centered on Life - Universidad Nacional de Rosario

Biocene Program – For a New Era Centered on Life

Approved by Rector's Resolution 5710/2024 of September 27, 2024 and 5853/20 of September 30, 2024

Program members

Coordinator:

Claudia Andrea Gotta

Teachers/Researchers:

Cecilia Arias Morales
German Ezequiel Giordano Porati
Patricia Lorena Lujan
Victoria Mariani
Maria Belen Molinengo
Mauro Matias Torales
Jose Alberto Tranier
Agustín Randisi González

Student members:

Franco Emanuel Arce
Melina Ayelen Ascariz
Mariana Andrea Duarte
Juana Espinosa
Antonella Fanucci
Roger Christian Perez
Augustine Maria Reyna
Emilia Victoria Rial Godoy
Ramin Roushani Oskui. Santino Valenti Galano

The name BIOCENO raises the need to reformulate the ways of constructing knowledge that have led us to the current environmental crisis, while also calling for a new era centered on life. Furthermore, we have named this Academic Program in this way, proposing a breakdown of the term which means: B (asses) I (intercultural) O (organized indigenous) C (as alternatives) E (epistemic to those of) NO (global art).

Central theoretical perspectives/Analytical frameworks: Interculturality, decoloniality and environmental approach from Latin American Environmental Thought (PAL)

Additional lines: decolonial feminism, history, aesthetics and ethics for liberation.

:: RATIONALE:

Faced with the environmental crisis, as a civilizational crisis that characterizes the time in which we live, and with the firm conviction that it has its roots in the ways in which we continue to build knowledge and know-how, we have decided to take on the task that, as teaching members and students of the public university, we consider to be our responsibility. In this sense, we propose to rethink, dismantle and supplement those postulates, which are far from revealing and responding to the challenges we face, when we choose to prioritize a dignified life and the dignity of life. (Grosfoguel 2022).

As the breakdown of the concept with which we have named our Program postulates, we start from intercultural bases, so it is unavoidable to outline some initial lines regarding how we think about interculturality, because it appears as an analytical and multidimensional term, simultaneously positioning itself as an ethical-philosophical, epistemic, pedagogical, methodological, social, political and legal perspective.

Focusing on the relationship between interculturality and education, we propose an intercultural education “from below” and within the framework of decoloniality as a critical Latin American perspective, based on dialogue and in search of interaction, and not reduction, as expressed by hegemonic Western rationality. We aspire, in this way, to an alter-globalization vision that considers interculturality as a right, and a means, to achieve the reproduction of cultures that have been subalternized.

From this position, we have formed a team of research teachers with diverse disciplinary training who, together with a group of students in training, have decided, in response to what they consider an epistemic/political need, to enable training spaces aimed at establishing decoloniality as a practice, as a living process rather than a closed theory or an established school of thought. Since, unlike decoloniality, which limits itself to recognizing that we are colonized, decoloniality invites us to decolonize ourselves.

In this context of analysis, we propose to draw on these subalternized and/or denied knowledges as epistemic alternatives to confront the unsustainable and biocidal modernity that has ravaged the territories we inhabit for centuries, secularizing community life, invalidating other ways of life, imposing racial, geopolitical, and gender hierarchies as a system of order that affects our imaginations, our bodies, and our wills.

Through various strategies (critical readings, situated research, open debates) we aim to build a new categorical framework that enables us to understand the specificity of the problems inherent to the prevailing reality (racism, colonialism, exclusions, oppressions, etc.), which cannot be addressed by the concepts and categories with which hegemonic science thinks or thematizes, since they never conceived them as part of their problems.

In other words, it is about dismantling the modern categorical framework and building another from which we can rigorously think about our problems within the framework of the global south and ultimately those of modernity as a whole, in order to generate "another vision of the history of humanity from the perspective of the oppressed, condemned and denied by all totalizing systems" (Bautista Segales and Colmenares Lizárraga 2021)

Therefore, as a work team, which has opted for the Dusselian trans-modern project (Dussel 2016), we project, from other knowledge, new possible futures [for the recording and conception of the past, biology and educational training] as well as diverse cultural supports [actions from the Museum and other spaces] that allow us to build, in the face of the epistemicide of capitalist modernity, new categorical frameworks and research production accordingly.

Within the framework of this epistemic liberation, we hope to be able to generate community actions that claim, dialogue and put into practice knowledge and experiences from the global South, as a critical response to the sociocultural paradigm of Eurocentric modernity.

:: GOALS:

General:

To generate a space for training, research and outreach that contributes to the establishment and consolidation, within the scope of our University and in other educational institutions, of the central theoretical perspectives that inspire and guide this programmatic proposal (interculturality, decoloniality and environmental approach from Latin American Environmental Thought), as well as its related lines (decolonial feminism, history, aesthetics and ethics for liberation).

Specific:

Promote the creation of our own research teams and at the same time enable participation in projects of other programs, institutes and/or study centers with similar epistemic lines and positioning.
Consolidate the training of student members through reading cycles and their inclusion in research teams.
Reactivate and strengthen the Free Chair: “Knowledge, Beliefs and Struggles of Indigenous Peoples” (linked to this Program and based at the CEI-UNR), as a space for reflection and debate.
Generate and coordinate various training, transfer and advisory strategies, aimed at the training of trainers, as well as others aimed at educational institutions open to the entire community.
Establish links for shared actions with other local or foreign programs.
Promote academic events, conceived as spaces for meeting and exchange, with colleagues from the various epistemic fields involved in our proposal, as well as activities to disseminate the results achieved by our team.

Guidelines/Actions:

Education

Internal reading cycles.
Reactivation and strengthening of the Free Chair: “Knowledge, Beliefs and Struggles of Indigenous Peoples” (linked to this Program and already based at the CEI-UNR), as a space for reflection and debate
Teaching courses, workshops and seminars

Investigation:

Critical and propositional review on the approach to native cultures of Abya Yala
Environmental Knowledge as an axis to revisit the teaching of History and Biology
The Ancestral Present of decolonial feminism and other current epistemic/political struggles.
Worldviews and spiritualities. The role of beliefs in the liberation and self-determination of peoples.

Extension:

Local plan