Projects

Pluricultural perspective

Our research interests centre on issues relating to cultural and conceptual evolution, epistemology, and multicultural and interdisciplinary approaches within humanities and the (social) sciences, as we believe, it is at the limits of the Western’s notion of knowledge that the comprehension of our conceptual language can be unveil.

To explore what happens at the margins –wherever those margins are physically allocated in Latin America or in Europe or in USA- we need to work on the border areas, at the limits of the meaning and the languages. What is required is to go where the meanings are negotiated, where the set and ensemble of concepts and parameters is established. In this sense nothing is more far away from this that the traditional notion or ‘politics’ and/or ‘ideology’.

Our projects have then their focus on the exploration of the unknown understood as the domain that does not yet have a language and/or a concept to be nominated/indicated.

Independently of eventual publications, projects keep going, sometime for years, as a way to explore new areas independently of those results that can be measured by publications. Projects can refer to abstract or imaginary explorations or, also, to empirical or concrete subjects. Here we briefly present 5 projects within which we have been working in recent years.

Material Development

In academic terms Canaparo has been working in four areas of research which, according to the projects and periods, generate alternated publications in all these areas. The entanglement of these different areas of research is grounded in an interdisciplinary approach. For a full correspondence between the four areas of research indicated before and the total of publications up to 2006, as well as for an indication of the rational behind it, please see the research diagnosis made for the period 1995-2004 and for the period 2004-2006. Following this pattern a hypothetical set of new projects for the period 2007-2012 have been also established.

Project/Events

Peripheral Condition

The current proposals of multidisciplinarity/interdisciplinarity within academia can only be effective for peripheral areas –or for people working in/about those areas- when also a multilingual and pluricultural approach is in place, which is not always the case. The current monolinguism that dominates science, academia and the media is certainly far away from being the right platform to consider marginal or peripheral cultures or domains. Similarly, the conceptual monopoly about thinking itself, about societies, culture, etc. that dominates the Western hemisphere cannot be useful, cannot offer a natural space to think about what is happening in peripheral areas.

Project Development

All intellectual projects have three parts. First, there is a development part when the project is drawn and written; second there is a part where the project becomes a physical entity and acquires a value within the market; finally, there is a period where the project, if effective, acquire a symbolic and historiographical, or even ‘cultural’ dimension. The aim of all projects, even for those dedicated to peripheral areas, is then to achieve and fully develop those three parts.

The Intellectual Continuum

The meaning of 'project' acquires, within peripheral areas/subjects, an status much more expanded and relevant that than of the one that is operating within the Western academic paradigm of science/scientificity. It is around this situation that our perspective is also deployed.