Collaborative, situated, and critical methodologies in transdisciplinary agroecologies for life sustainability

Abstract

Abstract Collaborative, situated, and critical methodologies (CSCM) foster processes that provide dialogic and experiential working tools for emerging transdisciplinary agroecologies (TA). CSCM emphasize how local knowledge and practice (praxis) contribute to ensuring care for the common and the personal, safeguarding regenerative processes, actively protecting native seeds, and interweaving biodiverse life systems that support the multifunctional networks of agriculture. This work aimed to understand a selection of collaborative methodologies related to transdisciplinary agroecological processes. We identify these groups: 1. Agroecologies, 2. Popular and own pedagogies, 3. Engaged and transformative pedagogies, 4. Assessment of agroecological sustainability and incidence in public policy, and 5. Participatory marketing and guarantee mechanisms or systems. The CSCM contribute to understanding the relationships, times, meanings, and identities and the heterogeneity of context of each community. Thus, CSCM are essential positions and tools to strengthen the openness and respect required by intercultural spaces of praxis and shared dialogues between different epistemic communities while nourishing TA. TA are complexes of relationships and practices between humans and the diversity of life, and they delve into epistemological, ethical, ontological positions and heterogeneous praxis. These diverse methodological paths characterize the interactions that arise from the heterogeneity of knowledge, experience, and wisdom of interacting epistemic communities crossed by power relations. The shifts in positions and research journeys toward epistemological and environmental justice among biocultural diversities developed by the revised CSCM provide the tools to continue articulating processes, designs, and forms of organization of life networks converging with TA.

Keywords

• Experiential learning and knowledge
• Ancestral epistemologies
• Dialogues of knowledge
• Ethics of care
• Spirituality