Epistemologies of the South: Interfaces Between Self-Management, Transconsciousness, and Transsustainability

Abstract

Industrial society (modern rationality) – governed by hegemonic logic – has produced a risk society: a society
of uncertainty and profound social ills, which, in the name of economic and scientific progress, has jeopardized life on Earth (modern rationality now faces exhaustion, disintegration, and disenchantment). Self-management is fostering a new epistemology – from the Global South – rooted in the complexity of interknowledge and transconsciousness (with its self-eco-organizing nature). This is a transdisciplinary knowledge that engages with the logics of ecosolidarity, theosolidarity, and anthroposolidarity. This triad of eco-theo-anthroposolidarities may revitalize the concept of development. Development anchored in sustainability cannot be reduced to market pragmatism—yet the market has appropriated the concept. Transsustainable development expresses the incompleteness of sustainability, as it enables not merely dialogue and interchange among economic, political, social and cultural spheres, but embraces the audacity of transcendence and transgression that carry hope and utopia. A hope that does not wait. A utopia that motivates action. It is a collective doing, unique
to the subjects of the process who are protagonizing and living other ways of doing science while building
another possible world. The Epistemologies of the South present infinite possibilities in this paradigmatic
transition/emerging paradigm toward the viable-unprecedented.