Established in 1985 – then with the name Intellectual Itineraries and Ethnography of Knowledge – this line of research has been dedicated to training and research with scientific and non-scientific knowledge, from the standpoint of its practitioners, the temporality of their practices, relationships and conceptions, and the configuration of this knowledge as differences. Pioneering in research with ethnography of science and knowledge, intellectual trajectories, and biographical and ethnographic narratives, this line aims at the theoretical invention and methodological experimentation, promoting non-disciplinary research with: 1) practices and experiences that make up different modes of knowledge and 2) procedures, techniques, languages ​​and materials involved in their modes of expression or, in a broad sense, their writings.
Thematic axes:
- Knowledge, experience and their writings: this thematic axis aims to stimulate research in the following areas: (1) the status of description and narratives in different aesthetics and combined writings, comprising (auto-)biographies, ethnographies, journals, travel reports, collections, and archives; (2) the devices, narrations, aesthetics and technologies of life and death.
- Knowledge and their expressions: it reflects on the modes of perception, understanding and symbolization of the world and life through its fictional, non-fictional and/or hybrid narrative expressions, productions in image, sound and/or in audiovisual format, as well as achievements within the scope of new art media.
- Images, writings and expressive forms: this thematic axis incorporates research that combines methodological experiences in its topics, which are capable of enhancing the modes of knowledge. The theoretical and research proposals of this axis are located in the conceptual challenges of displacing the boundaries between writing, images, sound and artifacts under different supports and/or languages, and in the creation of intersections, assemblies and combinations as heuristic potentialities and expressive modes of knowledge.
- Socio-anthropological studies on (techno-)sciences: it incorporates research focusing on assemblages between contemporary sciences, their areas and diverse topics (technologies, communication, body, health, environment). It questions the paradigms of technological development and innovation in the context of capitalism, as well as the diverse social practices that (re-)produce social inequalities in articulation with the state and the market. The theoretical and political propositions of this axis are inspired by practices of producing knowledge that is situated and committed to the decolonization of thought and ways of acting and existing in the world.
- Arts of living in the Anthropocene: it welcomes research that is engaged with new thought practices, contemporary processes of subjectivation, compositions and ways of existence that assert themselves in light of the exhaustion of anthropocentrism. It involves the materiality involved in cosmopolitical alliances and critical zones between human, animal, plan, mineral, supernatural and digital worlds – including arts, sciences, philosophies, and technologies. It seeks to work with research that promotes encounters between differences, and which require the Social Sciences to experiment with new ways of researching, imagining, and writing.