“To renew a critical, pluralistic, democratic, and diversified way of thinking”

At the launch of the “Dialogues” segment on CLACSO TV, the Executive Secretary of the Latin American Council of Social Sciences, Karina Batthyány, had a one-on-one conversation with the Portuguese academic Boaventura de Sousa Santos.

Batthyány opened the talk by recalling one of the great definitions of De Sousa Santos, PhD in Sociology of Law from Yale University and Professor of Sociology at the University of Coimbra: "We have the right to be equal when differences make us inferior, and we have the right to be different when equality deprives us of our identity."

The meeting took place at the end of July 2019 in the Juan Carlos Montoya Montoya Municipal Library in Medellín, Colombia, anticipating the presentation of a new book by De Sousa Santos, “Education for another possible world”, a joint publication of CLACSO, CEDALC (Corporation for Education and Development of Latin America and the Caribbean) and the Center for Pedagogical Thought.

Drawing a parallel between his own trajectory and that of CLACSO since its founding in 1967, Boaventura de Sousa Santos stated: “We have been fighting forTo renew critical, pluralistic, democratic, and diversified thinking, free from dogmatism and sectarianism, always welcoming researchers from different orientations, while maintaining a crucial distinction for all critical thought: objectivity in our methods and the rigor of our working hypotheses. But we must not confuse objectivity with neutrality. And in such an unequal society, this distinction is truly essential.