Before presenting the critical location of research in Science and Society, it should be noted that a significant part of the lines of research and activities outlined for this group are a continuation of the Science and Society working group previously coordinated by Dr. Pablo Kreimer. Significant progress was made in the preceding three years, and new groups and networks were established at the national level in various Latin American countries. It is also important to point out that prior to this working group, there were two other initiatives that paved the way for the group's current strength: the Science, Technology, and Society in Latin America and the Caribbean Working Group, which operated under the auspices of CLACSO between 2005 and 2009, coordinated by Drs. Sanchez Daza and Martinez de Ita of the Benemérita Universidad de Puebla (Mexico), and in which several of the research groups included in this proposal participated. On the other hand, the successive CYTED networks “Ibero-American Network on the Use of Scientific Knowledge” (2008-2011), coordinated by Hebe Vessuri, and the “Network for Analysis on the Dynamics of Science and Society” (2012-2015), coordinated by Pablo Kreimer, of which an important part of the research groups of the present call were also part, along with other new ones that have joined.

This Working Group proposal aims to further consolidate existing networks and promote new ones. For example, the coordination of the current Working Group: Science and Society 2020-2022, is being led by a recently incorporated member and network of researchers from Chile. The Group has the dual objective of continuing to strengthen the field of social studies of science and technology (STS) in our region and generating critical knowledge to inform the processes of science and technology generation and use (Kreimer, 2015).

Science and technology policies recently implemented in Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries have yielded varying results, with greater or lesser financial support and clear differences in their share of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). However, what unites them is their inherently complex relationship with society. In this regard, noteworthy developments include the creation or strengthening of top-level government institutions, the increase in resources dedicated to the area (both in absolute terms and as a percentage of total expenditures), and the central role that science and technology play in the discourse of state agents and various social actors involved. Nevertheless, these quantitative increases have not helped to resolve some structural limitations related to the region's dependence/subordinate integration within the international division of scientific labor, nor have they addressed the effective utilization of locally produced scientific knowledge.

This leads to one of the main concerns of the Working Group: The great historical difficulties in directing scientific knowledge towards social, environmental and economic needs, as shown in the 60s and 70s by representatives of the so-called "Latin American thought on science, technology and development", such as Jorge Sábato, Amílcar Herrera, Oscar Varsavsky, Máximo Halty, or Marcel Roche, among others).

Currently, following a new wave of neoliberal policies and contrary to the mechanisms for legitimizing scientific knowledge based exclusively on internalist criteria (which predominated during the neoliberal period), a consensus is emerging in our region around the need for such knowledge, in addition to its academic rigor, to be justified based on its usefulness to the societies that fund it and, specifically, to the most vulnerable sectors of those societies, who are frequently excluded from the benefits of scientific and technological development. This is the ever-contested idea of ​​establishing the link that should exist between scientific and technological development and social inclusion.

On the other hand, scientific knowledge in the region has been viewed as a phenomenon specific to local societies. In this context, the reasons for the low effective use of knowledge produced in Latin America by its own societies have been attributed to the incapacities of those same societies, understood as peripheral in relation to the knowledge industrialization mechanisms available to the core countries (Vessuri, 2005). This is why, in general, the globalization of local scientific communities has been taken as a mere given.

This situation has been changing in recent decades, so it is necessary to take into account some elements of the globalization process that has affected Latin America in the sense of new conditions of global possibility for the generation of scientific and technological knowledge.

Indeed, while Latin American scientific communities were highly internationalized from their institutionalization in the most advanced countries of the region towards the end of the 19th century, this process currently has some particularities that must be analyzed from a critical point of view:

a) An exponential increase in the number of researchers in the world, and consequently an ever-increasing centrality of scientific and technological knowledge in the development of societies, and in the processes of functional interdependence;

b) The emergence of mega-networks, comprised of hundreds of researchers located anywhere in the world, that address “global” research problems and agendas. These so-called global research agendas, such as climate change and ocean pollution, tend to move away from the (scientific and social) issues of particular countries and regions (as is the case in Latin America; see Kreimer, 2006, 2011).

c) The availability of and access to international, non-local scientific and technological knowledge, which intervenes in local conflicts and problems through social movements and groups in Latin America. This aspect generates complexity in political decisions regarding social conflicts, tending to delegitimize the capacities already in place in the countries of the region. (Gibert, Gómez and Cacino, 2017)

d) Explicit competition among the major hegemonic blocs (North America, Europe, Asia) for scientific and technological dominance, which includes the exploitation of the knowledge and capabilities of Latin American researchers, who are recruited for global projects (particularly by the first two blocs). This phenomenon, which has been termed “subordinate integration” (references) or, even more so, cognitive exploitation (Kreimer and Zukerfeld, in press), has significant consequences for Latin American societies.

Given this context, it is crucial to investigate the emerging tensions between the formation of scientific research agendas—strongly influenced by the themes and approaches of the international mainstream in each discipline—and the development of knowledge aimed at addressing and potentially resolving the social, environmental, and economic issues of Latin American societies. Furthermore, considering the divergent nature of the interests, representations, and access to resources of different social groups within the same society, it becomes essential to study which local actors manage to appropriate locally produced scientific and technological knowledge, and which remain excluded from such knowledge (Sanchez Daza, 2009).

The above implies, at the same time, critically questioning the content of science and technology policies, their generation and articulation with global scientific agendas, as well as the instruments implemented in the countries of the Region, in relation to accounting for the degree of adequacy in the attempts to critically address the tensions mentioned above (Dagnino, 2009) and proposing critical perspectives on the development agendas in science and technology that are proposed in Latin America.

Most social science studies analyzing the situation of Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) in the face of the major transformations of the last quarter of the 20th century have focused on social, economic, cultural, and political dimensions. Generally, the literature on these topics assumes that the interplay of these dimensions is crucial for analyzing issues such as LAC's peripheral status or role in the world, regional integration, the inclusion or exclusion of vulnerable social groups, the transformations of democracies, mechanisms of representation and participation, both symbolic and material, the role of education in these processes, and so on.

In these analytical traditions, issues related to the development of science and technology are analyzed in a haphazard and often biased manner. For example, the "technological" dimension has usually been the subject of studies originating from economics, focused on the analysis of industrial and/or service sector development. Meanwhile, critical analyses of scientific knowledge are concentrated in the social sciences and are understood as processes of meaning-making. However, the knowledge generated by the so-called "hard sciences" is often considered uncritically, as if its production process were not strongly determined by the same social, economic, or cultural dimensions that permeate other social processes. At most, in some cases, the unintended consequences of the applications of certain knowledge are analyzed, leaving out important aspects such as its context of production, the shaping of research agendas, the policies that regulate its conditions of production, the international relations that frame it, the dynamics of the institutions in which it operates, and, finally, the social, economic, or environmental uses of that knowledge.

Research in this field indicates that in recent decades the importance and influence of scientific knowledge has increased for different agents and social networks (Law, 2006; Casas, 2009; Baumgarten and da Costa Marques, 2008), and it is a crucial element for understanding the dynamics of modern societies, particularly Latin American societies. This implies a shift in perspective and the way in which the traditional approach to analyzing public problems is approached. According to this approach, public problems follow a sequence in which they are raised by various actors until the State adopts them, makes them the object of policies, designs strategies to address them, and often resorts to scientific knowledge to resolve them. Instead, a more interpretive model is adopted, in which scientific knowledge (from diverse fields and institutional spaces) is fundamental and, therefore, integral to the very definition of public issues (Gusfield, 1981; Kreimer, 2011 and 2015).

From Latin America, the issue of the relationship between knowledge production and use takes on specific characteristics, although similar in other contexts also shaped by the tension between the international visibility and legitimation of knowledge versus its legitimation through social uses in local societies. This results in a complex intersection between epistemic or cognitive aspects and political aspects (Arellano, 2007) that, far from remaining solely within the realm of intellectual debate, has direct consequences for various social actors who may, or may not, benefit from the knowledge that their own societies produce and, to a large extent, finance.

In conclusion, the Working Group we present will allow us to increase the theoretical framework due to the contribution that its results will represent for the understanding of three conceptual dimensions that strain the production and use of scientific knowledge in LAC, these are:

a) Production- Effective Use: which opposes, on the one hand, the production of scientific and technological knowledge and, on the other hand, the real uses of such knowledge to address and contribute to the resolution of issues defined as problematic by local societies and/or some social actors within them in particular.

b) Global Agendas: which confronts the local dimensions of knowledge production in Latin America and the trends to be part of global scientific research agendas and the effects of the international “mainstream” (Vessuri, 1996);

c) Autonomy-Heteronomy: which contrasts the scientific field and in particular the processes of production of scientific and technological knowledge, which are understood as spaces "not neutral or objective" with respect to other fields, particularly the political one, and the exogenous orientations of said processes.

All these approaches and a set of mid-range hypotheses (see Kreimer et al. 2014) are the reflective basis for strengthening a critical view from Latin America about the processes of scientific and technological development within the world stage, and their cultural, economic, political and cognitive dimensions.