Paper short abstract:

This presentation will describe the challenges of a symmetrical effort of promoting dialogues among multiple knowledge-practices between local people and an interdisciplinary team in an educational and environmental project realized in the Brazilian northeast seaside.

Paper long abstract:

The aim of this presentation is to discuss how to promote dialogues between knowledge-practices related to environmental experiences. Empirically we will describe a process of multiple engagements in a research, educational and environmental interdisciplinary and international project realized in two communities living on the Itapicuru estuary area in the State of Bahia, north-east Brazil. This project intends to promote a collaborative inclusion of local expertises in school activities, associated with the inhabitants’ inclusion in the planning of a patch of protected areas in the region. The most part of the local people dedicate their efforts to fishing activities, harboring a wide knowledge of local biodiversity and related skills. This implies the necessity to promote a symmetrization of local and academic knowledge-practices in order to make the dialogues between the local people and researchers engaged in the project effective. Meanwhile, this project, due to its focuses, is composed by a interdisciplinary team, demanding a complementary symmetrization of the relative knowledge-practices involved. Starting from this panorama, the presentation will discuss how effective dialogues between these diverse subjects, both between local people and researchers, and among the researchers are being attempted and developed. The thesis is that taking into account “controlled equivocations” emerging in the encounters as well as an attention to situated practices of subjects involved are crucial for both empowering local people in the educational and environmental project and concomitantly pluralizing the subjects involved.