Instituto de Estudios Sociales Contemporáneos – IESCO

Nómadas - Issue 29 – www.ucentral.edu.co/iesco

Nómadas 29
La práctica de la investigación:
poder, ética y multiplicidad

This Nómadas issue emphasis on the practice of research within the scientific work. We are trying
to address the academics subject of knowledge production as the main concern to be debated.
This practice it is understood as an articulation in the fabric of knowledge and power within the
academic fields, histories and associated communities to the research work. In that order, we do
not intend to propose an exercise of isolated self-reflexivity as a sort of biographies of scientists,
rather this issue will focuses on the complexity of all dimensions that would shape the context and
conditions of knowledge production for each research agenda. Following, you will find the three
topics of consideration based on which the papers could be developed.

1. Knowledge and Power: reading policy on research practices

This topic invites us to reflect not only on the researcher strategies to identify and present
explicitly what has been his o her theoretical position, the impact of their research as a reflexivity
exercise, but also encourages to considerer the implications of "collective / research groups"
positional accountability in terms of the political effects performed into society. Additionally, we
inquired for the positional played around the relationship established between communities /
groups / research centers in the south, in regard to the northern ones.

2. Ethics and communicability in researching practices

This second subject of discussion basically responds to concerns about the implications on what
we do, from an ethical dimension that puts us in two problematic arenas in research practice: the
communicability of our results and the political impact in our work. Here we are referring not only
to the clarity of language that allows the knowledge to implicate specific meanings, as available to
all, but how to incorporate the practical meaning of laymen, wondering why doing so, in what
extent and by whom such language can be used.

This question of a "communicative ethics" of research results concerns the discussions based on
the language and its use and goes to the heart of the research process in regard to the problems
of academic language translation for larger audiences, while considering the capability of
understanding the language of each context of meaning, and in that order, the importance of how
converge will play a role on building joint senses.

3: The practice of research and the demand for "multiplicity"

This final component responds to concerns about with whom we do what? - in both terms
theoretical and practical - but not from an stereotyped solipsism of research practice, but from the
encounter and production in the sense of "multiplicity". This expression its trying to encompass
the concerns surrounding the interdisciplinary, the cross it, the non-discipliner and the counter-
discipliner. Notions no longer understood only as a possibility, but as a political demand.

Isseu coordination: Sandro Jimenez-Ocampo (sanjulan@gmail.com) y Sonia M. Rojas Campos (smrojasc@gmail.com)

Further information: revista.nomadas@gmail.com; nomadas@ucentral.edu.co 1
 Instituto de Estudios Sociales Contemporáneos – IESCO
Nómadas - Issue 29 – www.ucentral.edu.co/iesco

This leads to take a critical position in the culture of research, regarding the ways in which we
build it, how we seek legitimacy and how we promote preferentiality to certain conceptual fields
and research communities, not only from the stable world of discipliner knowledge, but from the
abysmal world of what we have named here as the "multiplicity".

We provoke to assess further this production of knowledge outside of the traditional institutions,
exploring beyond the opposition or comparison with the disciplinary inquiry (which in fact, exist
and will continue to refine its own logic, methodologies and ways of production - circulation of
knowledge). For one thing, because since the investigation "edge" or "marginal" is being
generated today as more comprehensive, critical and alternative of today's globalize world, on the
other, because since it can offer a glimpse of the new directions that will be taken social science if
we want to emancipate the academics project from the center on the Modern Eurocentric Model.

References

Mills, D. (2003) “Like a horse in blinkers: a political history of anthropology´s research ethics”
En: Caplan, P (ed), the ethics of anthropology: debates and dilemas, Londres, Routledge.

Narotzki, Susana (2004). Una historia necesaria: Ética, política, y responsabilidad en la práctica
antropológica. Universidad de Barcelona, Relaciones 98, Vol XXV.

Narotzki, Susana (2002). Reivindicación de la ambivalencia teórica: la reciprocidad como

concepto clave, en : Endoxa, número 15.

Reid, Roddey & Traweek, Sharon (2000) Doing Science + Culture, Routledge, New Cork

Rouse, Joseph (1987). Knowledge and Power: toward a political philosophy of science. Cornell
University

Torrez, Alfonso (2006) La práctica investigativa en ciencias sociales. Universidad pedagógica

Nacional, Bogotá.

Isseu coordination: Sandro Jimenez-Ocampo (sanjulan@gmail.com) y Sonia M. Rojas Campos (smrojasc@gmail.com)

Further information: revista.nomadas@gmail.com; nomadas@ucentral.edu.co 2