The Coloniality of Cognitive Capitalism: Regeneration through Decolonization of S&T

• In Event: Reimagining and Remaking the World: Decolonial and Indigenous STS

Abstract

Science and Technology (S&T) is the hegemonic system of knowledge of modernity. Val Plumwood and Enrique Leff proposed that the global ecological crisis is derived by the effects of dominant global culture over reason in the past 300 years. Therefore, recovery and/or visualization of other forms of knowledge it is required to address the present S&T crisis as a knowledge system. We evaluated how socio-environmental issues are linked to S&T and/or other forms of knowledge by analyzing the entire collection of the most important Journal of political ecology in Hispanic America (the Spanish Journal “Ecología Política”). We found that S&T as a topic is underrepresented. From a total of 803 papers in a 25-years study period (1991-2015), the Latin American contributions were 267 articles, from which only 24 addressed S&T topics in a more or less explicitly way, representing 8,9% of the regional participation and 2,9% of the total. The strongest links were found in 9 papers addressing themes such as Intellectual Property Rights (IPR), biopiracy and biotechnology. In these articles, there is an explicit critique of the coloniality of cognitive capitalism: a process driven by IPR with the consequences of epistemic violence, ontological concealment, and logics of social hierarchy. Based on these results we propose, from a Latin American perspective, that thinking around commonalities defy the limits of modern politics and that solving the S&T crisis implies its decolonization by the reorientation of its rationality, the dialogue with other forms of knowledges and the deconstruction of its institutions.

Authors

• Marx Jose Gomez Liendo, Instituto Venezolano de Investigaciones Científicas

• Maria Victoria Canino, Instituto Venezolano de Investigaciones Científicas