Coordination: Christine Delory-Momberger, José Maria Siciliani & Manuel Alejandro Prada
Call for papers
The political situation at the global level represents another emergency. Market rationality and surplus value are now at the heart of all human economies, generating social norms but also subjective norms on which norms of life and existence are shaped and “fictionalized”. Wars and conflicts are on the rise, climate-related migration and forced displacement are on the rise, a weakening of democracies due to the emergence of extreme hate speech is jeopardizing the socio-political gains of history, and building a common world is proving increasingly difficult.
It is a question of thinking about how to get rid of the fiction of the figure of an autonomous neoliberal individual, “who makes himself”, who works on his own performance and his own realization, and seeks to surpass himself ever more, in order to think of a “connected being” built in otherness and concern for oneself, for others living and non-living, and for the world. We have much to learn from the ancestral knowledge of the first peoples who represent themselves as “collective subjects who weave social relations with everything around them” (Krenak, 2020, 31). The notion of “community”, which is the foundation of their societies, seems relevant to us to take up again in this context of the Anthropocene. In the West, humanist philosophers such as Mounier (1961); Ebner (1963); Levinas (1987; 1991; 2006), in their time, took up the question of the relational relationship with the other to redefine the social, political, ethical, and spiritual issues in the advent of a responsible otherness working to build human communities. This reflection has continued more broadly and imperatively in the human and social sciences in the face of the challenge represented by the Anthropocene. The awareness of the interdependencies of humans and non-humans (Descola, 2014; 2019; 2021; Jullien, 2022; Morizot, 2020; Haraway, 2020; Pierron, 2021) in an inhabiting Earth and the perspective of a finitude of the “Earth system” (Latour, 2015) have raised lively questions likely to shift the point-of-see and the point-of-view, revealing the urgency of taking care of the “worlds to come” (Descola & Pignocchi, 2022) in a doing together.
The awareness of the impact of human activities on terrestrial ecosystems and the discovery of a connected, interdependent and interacting world are shaping new forms of communities responsible for caring in a common history, that of an intertwining of living and non-living people sharing the same terrestrial habitation. These active communities are part of a new history of the Earth and it is our writings of life that are questioned, put to the test, radically reconfigured. What do these new stories tell us about a us inscribed in connections, alliances and interspecies belongings? What cognitive and pedagogical perspectives would categorizations such as “narrative community” or “community of memory” bring to the construction of active communities? What impact would narrativity have on community formation processes? Can training be a support in the construction of a “narrative of cooperation” (Pelluchon, 2020). How to build a narrative of “common histories” (Ozório, 2016; Delory-Momberger, 2014). Would narratives fertilize “resonant” communities (Rosa, 2021; 2022a; 2022b) creating a fertile relational space that would be in line with the idea of a “sensitive democracy” developed by Michaël Fœssel (2013). Let's take up this challenge and tell stories of active communities and with Ailton Krenak, let's bet that “if we succeed, then we will delay the end of the world” (Krenak, 2020, 30).
This issue 86 of the Revue Actualidades Pedagógicas (2025) proposes to reflect on this notion of community as an active community and the links it could maintain with narrativity in refigurations of the community model. This issue is carried by an interdisciplinary and international dimension with a presence of disciplines such as philosophy, educational sciences, pedagogy, political science, economics, religious sciences and theology.
Based on these considerations, we invite researchers from different disciplines and nationalities to contribute to this reflection that we want to share by sending us a proposal for articles according to the following categorizations:
- Educational communities
- Political Communities
- Economic Communities
- Narrative communities
- Communities of memory
- Spiritual Communities
- Interspecies communities
You can consult the instructions for authors at the following link: https://ciencia.lasalle.edu.co/ap/AP_Instrucciones.pdf or in the attached file.