Ways of knowing and doing from the knowing of the subjects. Decolonizing minds and hearts

Abstract

We share our reflections on ways of knowing and doing in social research based on the narrative reconstruction of our own experience in training and in the profession of researchers. We propose that it is necessary to overcome rationalist training models that deny subjectivity and alienate the conscience of the social and the possibility of being honestly and sensitively involved with people. We rescue the subject-subject perspective, an involved and situated subject. A subjectivity, built or molded in a context, a territoriality that has a diversity that is distinguished in its physical-natural dimensions, but mainly in its cultural attributes. The work on our implications requires reference to third parties, goes through other views, through the mediating action of others, requires alterations. There is, then, no self-analysis possible at work on implication and reflexibility. We highlight the complexity and multidimensionality of the approach to the social and its construction. Construction that must recognize the multisignification of the facts, to produce a shared knowledge and a discourse, which in terms of Giroux (1997), must account for the itinerant language of differences, assuming that there is no neutrality in the investigative work. Which results in an ethical / political commitment.