Les TriCycles du CIRTES

Chaque tri-cycle du CIRTES se déroule en trois séances de présentations.
Ils sont organisés à tour de rôle par chacun des axes du centre.
L’objectif est d’approfondir la connaissance d’une thématique en étudiant ensemble les textes fondateurs d’un champ de recherche et d’échanger sur les recherches en cours au sein de l’axe de recherche.

Année 2024 : TriCycle Unlearning and critical approaches to Nature-based Solutions organisé par Andreia Lemaître et Ela Callorda Fossati, en collaboration avec le projet international de recherche Horizon Europe TRANS-lighthouses.

Webinar 1 : Unlearning Unsustainability

22 avril 2024 : 

LAURA VAN OERS 
Utrecht University

Titre : Unlearning spaces for sustainability transitions: insights from Community Supported Agriculture in the Netherlands

Résumé : Laura van Oers is a PhD candidate within the UNMAKING project at Utrecht University and she will present her ongoing work on ‘unlearning’ in sustainability transitions. Whilst considered important for organisational an societal change there has been limited explicit focus on how unlearning proceeds within and for sustainability transitions. In her PhD, Laura is particularly interested as to how unlearning may take shape within grassroots niches, or in her case: Dutch food communities. This presentation mostly focuses on the second paper of her PhD in which Laura studies the transition to solidarity payment schemes (SPS) in two community-supported agriculture (CSA) farms. In short, solidarity payment schemes are posited to make such farms more just by supporting social inclusion beyond white, affluent and educated participants and by ensuring a living wage for CSA farmers, who often engage in self-exploitation. After collecting ‘thick data’ on the processes of change, Laura used event structure analysis (ESA), a research method that portrays processes as successive series of key (see: Griffin and Ragin 1994) to reconstruct the transition process. Creating a graphical diagram of how these events are linked to each other helps visualise whether, when and how unlearning happens in transformations; and who unlearns. Laura welcomes discussion on the potential contributions of both the concept (unlearning) as well as the research method (ESA) to the study of sustainability transitions and transformations. In particular, she envisions a debate on how we might understand CSA and other ‘niches’ or ‘grassroots initatives’ not merely as spaces of alternative consumption/production but as “unlearning spaces”. How may unlearning be facilitated within such spaces, and ‘what’ is ought to be unlearned for more sustainable and just societies?

Webinar 2 : Unlearning Nature conservation

13 mai 2024 :

BRENDAN COOLSAET
UCLouvain

Titre : Nature, biodiversity, and the politics of difference

Résumé : In this session, we ask how biodiversity conservation incorporates concerns for social justice. Based on nearly a decade of research and drawing on a diversity of approaches and disciplinary insights, we will explore the plural ways in which cultural difference has been understood in the context of conservation, both in theory and in practice, and will relate this to contemporary conservation conflicts. We will focus in particular on the knowledge-producing role of place-based practices for conservation and discuss what this means for conservation practice and its effectiveness.

Webinar 3: Unlearning through participatory co-production knowledges

21 octobre 2024 :

SWATI BANERJEE 
TATA institute for social sciences (Mumbai)

Titre : Deconstructing Epistemological Hierarchies: Unlearning and Relearning through Participatory Co-production of Knowledges (A Southern perspective)

Résumé : Post-development and decolonial theorists (Escobar, 1992; Sachs, ed.1992; Santos, 2016) articulate a dissatisfaction with the epistemological foundations of current development processes. The question, therefore, is how do we build counter knowledges of the people, especially marginalised people at the grassroots, as a critical strategy in knowledge-making and epistemic justice? Participatory methodologies and approaches inspired by alternatives in development thinking (Chambers, 2008) and People-Centered Social Innovation that centre people-led solutions and their local context (Banerjee et al., 2020) envision the deconstruction of epistemological hierarchies. This session, therefore, tries to uncover alternatives and plural methodologies and approaches that centre people and their voices, as well as their representation and participation in the development and social innovation processes from a people-centered perspective. While this focuses on unlearning the decontextualised discourse of elitist cosmopolitan callings (Banerjee et al., 2023), it reimagines a new sociality that opens up new democratic spaces at the grassroots, expands people’s intersectional knowledges and provides an epistemological alternative. This positioning and approach are explored through grassroots examples from the South of participatory knowledge-making and solidarities.