GIRA's Project
The GIRA is a group of scholars from various national and disciplinary backgrounds within the social sciences who collaborate together, on a voluntary basis to question - taking from their respective national, institutional, and disciplinary backgrounds - their identity as well as their individual and collective responsibilities as scholars. This identity and those responsibilities are characterized by the way researchers are involved in:
• a national space on the way to globalization, and, across the Americas, on the way to continentalization;
• an academic institutional space on the way to de-compartmentalization, characterized by higher expectations of governmental policy-makers or social groups and movements with regards to the social and cultural "relevancy" of knowledge production;
• a disciplinary space increasingly exposed to various viewpoints of analysis and of understanding of the phenomenon being studied.
The members of the GIRA define themselves as reflexive actors, that is to say, they consider themselves as taking part in and partaking of the predominant cultural and social frameworks. They acknowledge that reality is constantly exceeding the established frameworks, and dispute the latter’s validity and often normative aspect. They are hence trying to move off recognized frameworks and spaces, whether they be national, institutional or disciplinary, in order to help transform views and outlooks for action.
To do so, they are trying to experiment, in the most systematic way possible, the encounter of the other, of an otherness defined as much by its national (hence the desire to prioritize international scientific contacts), institutional (referring to the diversity of social expectations expressed by users of knowledge with regards to the "relevancy" of the knowledge produced), and disciplinary (by the multiplication of disciplinary views on a given object) difference. In other words, GIRA researchers are striving in their research to cross national origins and roots, historic experiences, sources of knowledge require and disciplines.
They are also trying to actualize this encounter of otherness by choosing approaches and research methodologies which are based on :
• a questioning of the legitimacy of scientific knowledge as it is confronted with the diversity of practical and experiential skills;
• a questioning of the role and status of scientific expertise (which generally presupposes the possession of a specific knowledge which is independent from the conditions of its production or implementation);
• a development of comparative research methodologies, between countries, institutions, and disciplines;
• the promotion of international, inter-institutional and interdisciplinary debates and exchanges, or, better : transnational, trans-institutional, and trans-disciplinary, in terms of specific research objects or themes, of a research striving to be directly engaged with specific cultural and social issues ;
• the desire of each of the participants to submit their research production to the views of otherness (national, institutional, and/or disciplinary) and to review it, to "revisit" it according to those crossed views and, more broadly, to the research orientations developed by the GIRA.
Lastly, as reflexive actors, GIRA members are involved in a cultural and social change project aiming for the promotion and consolidation of humanist values based on the recognition of rights and citizenship within a "democratic public space" partly constituted, but even more so to be constituted through the Americas.