Critical Methodological Approaches for Social Research: A Tool to Cope with Field Challenges and the Contributions from Latin American Thought.

To deal with the colonial past that founded social research, disciplines such as anthropology and sociology have developed strategies to call for committed research. In this process, the contributions from Latin American thought are crucial. During the 1960s and 1970s, Latin American social research led the analysis of difference and diversity from critical perspectives (Krotz, 2005).

One of the markers of this phenomenon was the Barbados Statement. It focuses on the colonial structure that shapes research and proposes a call for liberation, altogether with social and political commitment. This statement embraces a wide spectrum of critical thinking: Popular Education, Liberation Theology, Alternative Communication, and Participatory Action Research, among others. This shows a disciplinary convergence of social sciences aiming to produce knowledge in favor of subaltern sectors. Hence, the basis was understanding socio-cultural complexities and a serious commitment to reality transformation. As Gustavo De Oliveira Figueiredo (2015) explains, these academic efforts were named the ‘emancipatory paradigm’, a reference that highlights a relationship with political takes.

This proposal aims to vindicate the ‘emancipatory paradigm’ as a tool to face the researchers’ challenges in the field and as a mechanism to use subjectivity, defeating the modern perspective of individuality and, rather directing it to the assurance for two sides communication, exchange, and knowledge production. This approach contributes to materializing the differences between a social researcher and a natural observer recognizing the researcher not as a neutral knowledge source but as a part of the social landscape explored.

Focusing on the questions of how critical social research and decolonial perspectives dispute the role of subjectivity directing the researcher’s character into a constructive play in favor of political and socio-cultural affirmations, this proposal wants to reflect on ethical criteria analyzing methodologies such as committed anthropology, public anthropology, militant ethnography, participatory action research, or cooperative research.