Coordinators: António Sousa Ribeiro and João Arriscado Nunes

A central concern of the work carried out in this area is the current transformation in knowledge production and the emergence of new areas and configurations of knowledge which have led to three main developments:

• the reconceptualisation of society and culture on the basis of the centrality of knowledge;
• the relevance of knowledge as a resource and a condition for active citizenship and participation;
• the need for a global perspective on what counts as knowledge, how different kinds of knowledge are produced, distributed and socially appropriated, and how issues of justice come to be formulated in relation to the capacity for knowledge production, access to knowledge and the relationship between forms of knowledge.

Research developed in recent years within this framework has focused on:

• public debate and regulation in areas including genetics, medically assisted reproduction, biotechnology, environment and health;
• the production of knowledge in biomedicine and the life sciences;
• the mapping of research and training in medicine, health and society in Europe;
• the governance of science and technology and of scientific citizenship;
• the relationship between literary discourses and the problematics of knowledge in modernity and postmodernity;
• the uses of language, in particular in diasporic situations;
• questions of intercultural translation;
• memory, construction of identities, and cultural representation;
• indigenous and peasant knowledges and biodiversity;
• rival knowledges in postcolonial contexts;
• issues in intercultural education.