5.1 Discussion Forum II

Students will be asked to choose from and represent in a forum a different variety of organizations with contrasting cognitive and culture maps around a subject selected by the instructor in consensus with students.

Due: Discussion Forum II

5.2 Science and Politics.

Expert scientific knowledge has been vindicated as a key element for supporting policy decisions in highly sensitive issue areas like the environment and minimizing possible adverse effects. The session discusses the complex relationship between science and politics by analyzing tensions between the normative ideal of objective science as source of solutions based on the authority of knowledge and the prerogatives of politics and power. The main approaches revolving around this interdependence (complex thinking, post-normal science, interdisciplinarity, epistemic communities) will be presented and discussed.

Reading:

Haas, Peter(2004) 'When does power listen to truth? A constructivist approach to the policy process', Journal of European Public Policy,11:4,569 — 592

5.3 Plural Knowledge: Expert Discourse / Traditional Knowledge. SITE VISIT. With Guest Speaker: Ezequiel Filgueira Risso, coordinator of JAC, La Voz Ciudadana, Jornadas de Arte y Comunidad (https://www.facebook.com/jac.lavozciudadana/) and of the Environmental promotors team of the Slum n° 20, Buenos Aires Environmental Protection Agency.

The relation between science, knowledge, politics and power is in the center of the critics. In Latin America, in particularly, these critics are also related to the emergence of different social movements and to the alternative visions to sustainable development presented in Week 2.

The project of a plural knowledge questions the division between expert and traditional knowledge and subordination of the latter. This discussion has relevant implications for rethinking the relationship between science, public policy and power and the evolution of controversies and socio-environmental conflicts.

Territorial struggles can be understood as a (meta-) physical space for collective organization, selfdetermination, identity, and belonging. To varying degrees and qualities, this applies not only to indigenous communities (or nations), but to peasants and suburban slum-dwellers. We will focus in a case study within the Urban context, where traditional knowledge is in tension with public policies. We will visit a group of young students in a Slum neighboorhood, to explore how this group is shaping the government vision of Sustainable Development, by using their local knowledge to co-design public policy with local impact along with members of the Buenos Aires Environmental Protection Agency.

Reading:

Perreault, T., Bridge, G., & McCarthy, J. (2015). Speaking truth to power: a personal account of activist political ecology. In The Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology (pp. 53-63). Routledge.

Visit to the Slum N°20, ("Villa 20") neighborhood