Repensar el compromiso desde el quehacer etnográfico: incomodidades y potencialidades de la producción de conocimiento con organizaciones sociales

Abstract

Este artículo explora el quehacer etnográfico con organizaciones sociales, a partir de dos experiencias de investigación disímiles: con un sindicato urbano y con un proyecto de comanejo de un parque natural. Problematizamos la idea del compromiso como vínculo construido en nuestro trabajo y mostramos su carácter situado, moldeado en diálogo con los intereses y propuestas de las organizaciones, así como por las definiciones y sentidos locales del término.

On Conversation and Authorship: Legal Frameworks for Collaborative Methodologies

“…Collaborative methodologies, at least in their participatory versions, aim to recognize the significant contributions of nonacademic social actors in the construction of knowledge (Aluwihare-Samaranayake, 2012;Evans-agnew & Rosenberg, 2016;Held, 2019;Porter, 2016, Rappaport, 2018Sinha & Back, 2014;Sletto et al, 2013;Trentini & Wolanski, 2018). This means that the people involved in social processes are not considered external, passive, or lacking of agency for the construction of knowledge.…”

“…Workshops, meetings and training activities are central in this endeavor because they allow for the interaction between researcher and social actors to be more collaborative as they share and construct knowledge. However, even if a commitment to social movements has been widely discussed in anthropological research, the methodological strategies for the collaborative construction of knowledge are mentioned but rarely described (Trentini & Wolanski, 2018). There are also other methodologies that attempt to highlight the voice of participants such as ethnographical narration (Yaselga & Jara, 2013) or photovoice research (Evans-agnew & Rosenberg, 2016).…”

“…There are different ways for a collaborative research to begin. Trentini and Wolanski (2018), for example, started doing research in the context of their respective PhD degrees. Their research turned into a participative research because of the expectations of the people involved the social movements they worked with.…”

“…Another concern (Alonso et al, 2018;Leyva et al, 2018;Trentini & Wolanski, 2018), perhaps more founded, is that collaboration can be a mere simulation; that the people involved in social movements or organizations are incorporated in the research as mere apprentices, or even used instrumentally without really being taken into consideration. In the work I carried out in Cherán, the community was concerned that researchers go to the community with an agenda and that they take their observations in a biased manner without truly listening.…”

“…This approach has been gaining popularity in Latin America, especially in the field of anthropology (i.e. Aragón Andrade, 2019;Hale, 2006;Hernández Castillo & Terven, 2017;Trentini & Wolanski, 2018). As I will further explore, these methodological efforts develop in different ways but they all challenge the way academic knowledge continues to prevail over other forms of knowledge, and question the typical role of social actors as simple sources in empirical social research.…”