Latin America and the world are shaken by the ruthless, unrecognized impacts of the transformative processes and pandemics that accompany predatory and expansionist neoliberal globalization in times of climate change (Rojas and Dõrre, 2022). Human life and the modern world, severely affected by the COVID-19 health crisis, pressured and manipulated by the destructive individualism of the neoliberal market, and simultaneously challenged by the demands of socio-ecosystem sustainability, which are overwhelmed in their capacity to provide the planet's life-support services, show clear signs of exhaustion with symptoms of global collapse. Increasingly frequent, intense, and disastrous extreme events occurring in different parts of the world bear witness to this grave reality. These multiple crises produce serious problems of political and social stability in various countries, threatening coexistence, institutions, values, nature, and democratic life.

The Covid pandemic was the most significant socio-health event of recent years: it exposed new inequalities and reshaped the global geopolitics. It is a multidimensional phenomenon that triggered a global crisis with impacts in diverse areas (health, education, environment, economy, labor, politics, etc.), affecting broad sectors of society, especially the most vulnerable, and social relations (Palermo, Erramuspe, Manni, 2022; Botero, Palermo, 2022). For García Linera (2021), these are self-reinforcing crises: medical, economic, environmental, and sociopolitical. López Hernández (2020) proposes a framework of critical, sentient geopolitics that allows for the construction of arguments about how the multifactorial reach of the pandemic has played, is playing, and will play a decisive role in the struggle between states, governments, and corporations in the new scenarios and zones of geopolitical influence in terms of space, time, and power.

Neoliberalism weakens public institutions, which, in a democratic sense, have contributed to advancing the establishment of citizens' rights related to education, public health, housing, public infrastructure, labor rights, and human and political rights. The reactions of multiple social sectors, communities, and socio-ecological movements, which feel threatened by the various processes of exclusion and expansion by old and new powers, accentuate these narrowing margins for diversity, limiting the spaces for emancipation that had emerged so vitally in recent times. The radicalization of these confrontations represents a return or intensification of old practices of political violence, which threaten the democracies of the region, already challenged by de facto hegemonic powers.

These new processes of globalization represent a new expansionist strategy of large state and private capital, which destroys solidarity and competes for the planet's scarce resources: productive soils, water, biodiversity, new minerals, energy, new planets, and artificial intelligence. The existing asymmetrical relationship between the global and the regional/local threatens to destroy or displace the positive social, ecological, gender, productive, human, and political practices that social struggles and positive relationships with nature have achieved throughout the history of modern societies by Indigenous communities, traditional agricultural practices, artisanal practices, community/neighborhood networks, and public vocational schools. Decolonization processes in general are threatened by this new strategy of capital. However, local traditional practices and cultures that defend the commons remain emancipatory trends; they can even develop further within the framework of the multifaceted crisis affecting the world and its regions. Historically, crises represent opportunities for transformation (Rojas et al., 2021).

The agents of globalization operate with internal allies: multinational corporations and national elites. They dispossess communities, increase extractivism and rent-seeking, and criminalize social protest. These sectors, in conjunction with populist far-right policies, foster a rollback of labor rights, civil rights, and many other historically acquired rights. Meanwhile, anti-liberal Pentecostal and evangelical churches, along with neoliberalism, contribute to breaking down bonds of solidarity and represent setbacks in the rights of women and diverse sexual groups, exacerbating existing grievances.

With our colonized corporeality (Quijano, 2002; Lugones, 2008; Sosa, 2020) we obstruct the capacity of enunciation of the different otherness that interferes with and disrupts the hegemonic discourse that prolongs privileged situations and to which we often unconsciously adhere, via socialization, without critically questioning ourselves.

The social processes unfolding in Latin America and the Caribbean during this third decade of the 21st century entail a reconfiguration of the political landscape in the region and the world, framed by the global economic and pandemic crisis, as well as international armed and trade conflicts, which threaten the progress achieved, the quality of life, and the security of individuals. Added to this is the neo-conservative offensive—from various right-wing groups undergoing radicalization processes that represent a setback to the social gains made under progressive governments elected through democratic processes. Increased socioeconomic marginalization, concentration of wealth and precariousness of work (in the sense of Castel and Dörre, 2009), migration crisis, ethnic and gender intolerance, have led to the dismantling of citizens' rights and the strengthening of right-wing and even far-right, xenophobic and nationalist political groups and parties in Europe, the United States and also in Latin America (Muddle, October 2022). Emancipatory practices oriented towards Buen Vivir face different challenges today, but we hope they will be able to overcome them.

From the subordinate position in which the colonial world places us without asking and with the blatant purpose of domination, our challenge as intellectuals who accompany and choose to commit ourselves to the lives and sufferings of our peoples, is to destabilize and deconstruct the epistemologies that legitimize hegemonic powers.

In Latin America, recent years have seen significant mobilizations led by producers in the public sphere. These movements, through their demands, challenge the hegemonic collective intellect, and their intellectual pronouncements socially propel the ideological and sociocultural fractures and contradictions of the system to become visible. The main demands relate to intellectual, feminist, youth, class-based, and environmental movements, among others. Similarly, the movements during and after the pandemic, particularly the COVID-19 contingency, have presented a genuine health, economic, productive, social, and epistemic obstacle, as they condense into public expressions the effects and social fractures exposed and existing within the capitalist system of domination. (Garita; Schmukler; Botero-Gómez; Cárdenas Tomazic; Ruiz Uribe (2022).

Addressing the complex processes described requires a multidimensional, interdisciplinary, and interknowledge-based analytical perspective (De Sousa, 2010; Rojas, 2016), encompassing relevant aspects such as educational, environmental, political, economic, gender, ethnic, and multicultural factors. We begin by recognizing that social life is a multidimensional phenomenon, whose concrete interpenetrations and dialectics must be analyzed according to each particular process, even when adopting a broad spatiotemporal perspective (Domingues, 2009). Likewise, this approach also demands new practices from social researchers, grounded in a perspective that recovers, values, and acknowledges the relevance and social connection of knowledge within a social understanding of the production of science and technology. Among the elements that characterize this new research model are the use of pluralistic and group methodologies, dialogic approaches that include the perspective of others, collaborative interpretation or co-production of research, and the reinterpretation of knowledge produced through participatory and comparative analysis within the cultural and social contexts in which the lives of the studied social actors unfold. Innovating in critical social thought necessarily implies questioning the traditional epistemological foundations that underpin it.

For this reason, we will continue to contribute new insights to the narrative of the Epistemology of the South (De Sousa, 2009), within which we are situated. This involves formulating the content of the ecologies of knowledge, temporalities, recognitions, and trans-scales of productivity, so that the sociologies of absences and emergences become recognizable to critical thought. Thinking about originality from the South requires a holistic and comprehensive critique of the modernity-coloniality of power (Quijano, 2000, 2012; Mignolo, 2001; Walsh, 2004); it means questioning the Anglo-Eurocentric model, the categories of instrumental rationality, racism, discrimination, and patriarchy that reproduce inequality, neocolonialism, and social exclusion. This leads to liberating thought, as proposed by Dussel (2000) in his critique of neoliberal modernity, with his concept of transmodernity, in which philosophy and politics are oriented towards liberation from neocolonial ties through a praxis that integrates ethics and the principle of otherness in law and the recognition of difference from interculturality.

One of the GT's fundamental contributions is opening new paradigmatic horizons from the perspective of social subjects within the context of everyday life, challenging traditional forms of domination and knowledge, and creating a space for the reconstruction of knowledge based on the recognition of practices, their emancipatory tendencies, and the voices of those historically absent and repressed, who are now subjectively emerging in the unfolding of history. This also represents a major challenge in the field of social sciences and from the perspective of Reflexive Sociology: how to reconstruct new methodologies from a creative, dialogical, participatory, collaborative, and multidimensional perspective, with an ecology of knowledges, opening new horizons in the shared production of knowledge as a common good, socially constructed and shared throughout history.

To fulfill the emancipatory objectives of the Working Group, methodological processes will continue to be developed that aim to deconstruct hegemonic social representations anchored in inequitable systems that serve the perverse interests of the neoliberal economy. This involves reconstructing and adopting emancipatory practices that restore to the individual a sense of freedom and social well-being within their context and territory, not only objectively but also subjectively. In the new contexts we face, this task entails resisting the authoritarian manifestations of conservatism and the emerging neofascism in the world and in Latin America.

Our proposal focuses on developing cognitive strategies that de-individualize the sciences and place them at the service of emancipatory biopolitical processes within human communities. This means overcoming the tendencies toward the fragmentation of knowledge, stemming from the separation between the recognized dichotomous pairs that modernity hierarchized: reason/emotion; instrumental rationality/value-oriented rationality; mind/body; objective/subjective; masculine/feminine; white/black; universal/particular; neutral/partial; global/local; local knowledge/scientific knowledge. This implies democratizing and humanizing knowledge at its various levels of production and application.

The production of individual and collective knowledge is inseparable; consequently, it is not only a matter of how knowledge is produced, but also, and simultaneously, of nurturing dialogical forms of collaboration to generate co-production of research both within and outside academia, and especially collaborative research. This undoubtedly stems from struggles to achieve "cognitive equity," such as respect for and dignity of popular knowledge that resists the vertical arrogance of unilateral expertise. In this way, we can pave the way for vital and decolonial critical thinking, enabling us to develop as communities of knowledge and as intellectual forces committed to service and as communicative links between peoples and territories of life.

Hence, we insist on the importance of delving deeper into readings, dialogues, and encounters with those experiences of collectives and movements that, through their existence, propose to us to promote a new epistemic matrix already underway in different Latin American and Caribbean countries and, in general, in the world undergoing transformations.

We also maintain the importance of co-producing tools whose matrix challenges the hegemony of the "normal", traditional scientific paradigm, with dominant, classist, ethnic-racial, androcentric, ableist and individualist biases, in order to configure an epistemic shift that comprehensively includes theory, methodologies, pedagogies and epistemes.

Based on the development and progress from 2019-2022, it is projected to move to a higher level in its co-productive praxis by strengthening collaborative links, also between Axes as in the inter-GT productions programmed 2022-2025, in its thematic aspects: Productive forces and producers, Movements to social intellect and Epistemic turn, method and methodologies, Education, by intensifying the instruments of a dialogical, holographic and recursive nature.

From a multidisciplinary and multidimensional perspective, we will continue working together with social movements that carry out emancipatory struggles from four axes:

Axis 1. Transdisciplinarities, theoretical-political decolonizations, transformations with peoples, land and territories of life Coordinators: Patricia Botero, Alicia Naveda, Rebeca Yanis Orobio and Janeth Calambás.

Axis 2. Plural feminisms, diversities and dissidences. Coordinators: Ruth Sosa, Martha Zarina Uribe, Fátima Flores and Gerardo Larreta.

Axis 3. Co-production, producers and methods. Movements towards social intellect. Coordinators: Alberto Bialakowsky, Ana Cárdenas, Luz Montolongo and Francisco Favieri.

Axis 4: Teacher training, critical thinking, and emancipation. Coordinators: Juana Erramuspe and Ruth Milena Páez Martínez.

There will also be an area of ​​Articulation with other networks or associations that will be made up of Nora Garita, Alicia Itatí Palermo and Martha Nélida Ruiz.