Preface

Résumé fourni par la source

When the two of us began collaborating eight years ago, we did not anticipate a learning journey that would lead us to a monograph on community-based philosophy. On the contrary, our initial collaboration had a much more restricted focus on philosophy and ethnobiology. Ethnobiologists study how people relate to the biological world, often with a focus on Indigenous and local knowledge. Both of us were puzzled that philosophy of science had largely ignored the intellectual challenges emerging from ethnobiological research. Many philosophical questions arise when recognizing that biological expertise is not exclusive to academic researchers but globally distributed across communities with vastly different practices, values, and worldviews. While we initially focused on developing a “philosophy of ethnobiology” (Ludwig and El-Hani 2020), our research aims and methods gradually transformed through our collaboration with the Brazilian fishing communities of Siribinha and Poças. Charbel first established this collaboration for a much more restricted project on ethnobiology and science education, but synergies with our wider philosophical interests soon became apparent. A thriving team of master’s students, PhD candidates, and postdocs joined us in the communities to explore philosophical questions about a wide range of issues from epistemology to ontology to political theory. While there was a lot of intellectual progress, there were also many challenges that we had not anticipated and that we were not prepared for. Doing philosophy in Siribinha and Poças meant leaving the safety of philosophical thought experiments or secondary data. Doing philosophy in rural and disenfranchised communities in Bahia situated us in daily livelihood practices and community struggles regarding economic exploitation, environmental destruction, and conservation measures enforced in a top-down manner. The humbling experience of doing philosophy in fishing communities far away from the philosophical armchair puts a spotlight on many limitations of academic philosophy. Philosophers are trained to talk about people, not to talk with people. And they are usually even less prepared to work with people in creating something valuable together. Even when philosophers address issues at the center of community struggles such as climate change, economic exploitation, food security, or public health, they often opt for abstract framings that are not informed by local realities and may therefore mislead about places like Siribinha and Poças. We’re not pointing out these limitations to criticize academic philosophy from the outside. On the contrary, these limitations have been very much our own limitations. When trying to explore local epistemologies and ontologies in Siribinha and Poças, the practices of our research team inevitably mirrored our academic training. We always showed up with new philosophical questions and new methods for data collection. Sometimes community members were exhausted by our interview questions and workshops. Sometimes they were suspicious about our intentions and what we would do with all this information. And, to be completely honest, many of these suspicions were justified. Even with all of our critical reflections and good intentions, the data still often served our own goals: finishing master and PhD theses, publishing articles, and completing “work packages” of our grants. Indeed, philosophical reflection and ethnographic documentation of local epistemologies and ontologies can still remain deeply extractive in treating communities as a source of data for academic consumption rather than as an equal partner in the collective struggle for a better future. Our learning journey in Siribinha and Poças has therefore led us on an unexpected path that turns back toward us and the very ways we are doing research. Transformative Transdisciplinarity is the result of this learning journey that has changed how we see ourselves as philosophers and how we see the role of science in society. At the core of the book is an optimistic message about philosophy and its significance in a messy world of intersecting environmental and social crises. Addressing such crises requires transdisciplinary research that brings diverse actors together: anthropologists, artists, biologists, economists, engineers, community elders, extension workers, farmers, fishers, medical practitioners, policymakers, science communicators, social activists, teachers, union workers, and so on. Collaboration among such actors, however, is commonly marked by epistemological tensions between different ways of knowing, ontological tensions between different ways of being, and political tensions between different agendas and positions of power. Insofar as philosophers can help to navigate this thicket of intricate relations, they have a fruitful role to play in transdisciplinary research and societal transformation.

Ce résumé expose les affirmations des auteurs. BNTIC ne l’interprète pas comme une validation indépendante des résultats.