Mértola, 14 and 15 October 2022
Ongoing Research Process(es)!
‘In the context of the current epistemological and political transformations, highlighted by Edgar Morin (De l’URSS à la sainte Russie, 2022), and in an era marked by permanent ungovernability, as Éric Sadin warns (L’Ére de l’individu tyran: la fin d’un monde commum, 2020), the aggregating dimension is assumed as a form of knowledge and a tool for action in future agencying. In the Collaborative Laboratory, research is understood in an expanded way, with scientific areas having permeable borders to which we invite external looks that instigate discussion and critical experience of consolidated concepts, topics and approaches, and that simultaneously accompany new approaches and challenges.
The Research, Teaching and Dissemination seminars of the Collaborative Laboratory Urban Dynamics, Heritage, Arts, allow an exploratory and critical discussion of the research developed in several disciplinary fields, combining the competencies of different Research Centres in academic and extra-academic dissemination. The discussion of research experiences promotes the sharing of theoretical and critical frameworks of the research developed, seeking to encourage and strengthen researchers’ forms of questioning, as agents of knowledge construction and as knowledge activists. In this democratic space of sharing new challenges and approaches, we seek to build bridges, design relationships and set up coordinations among multiple spatial and temporal platforms, enabling active citizenship and a reinvention of the ongoing research process’ (ANDRÉ, Paula (coord.), Anthology of Essays – Collaborative Laboratory: Urban Dynamics, Heritage, Arts. VIII Seminar on Research, Teaching and Dissemination Lisbon, DINÂMIA’CET-ISCTE, October 2022, page 2).
Community, knowledge and research for local development
‘The Mértola project began almost 45 years ago, emerging from the base, an initiative of the local authorities in the years following the 25th April, from a development model that placed community and knowledge at its centre. This plan was accompanied by a series of urgent initiatives to collect and safeguard heritage, understood as a precursor in all its expressions, from traditional arts and crafts to documentary collections, from sacred art to vernacular heritage, or from monumental groups to the intramural urban centre, with particular emphasis on archaeology. It is from this moment on that the integrating dimension of the project is consolidated on different and inevitably converging lines, for sustainable local development, affirmed by continuity, despite the progressive changes in the institutional framework. The study and safeguarding of the cultural heritage and the museum organised in several units from the village to the landscape; the natural park and research in natural sciences; the preponderance of the community and local development initiatives.
It is to fulfil this project that the Mértola Archaeological Site, a non-profit cultural and scientific association, has developed its activity in an integrated perspective, combining scientific research, academic education and heritage safeguarding with continued practice of sharing with the community, and museum dissemination often associated with participation in built heritage rehabilitation and conservation projects. And it is also with these motivations that Campo is associated with the VIII Collaborative Lab: Urban Dynamics, Heritage, Arts, collaborating in its organisation, together with ISCTE-IUL, the Centre for Studies in Archaeology, Arts and Heritage Sciences and the Mértola City Council, and promoting this meeting place between academia and society: first Évora, then Lisbon, Olhão, Madrid, Porto, Seville and now Mértola. We welcome and congratulate the laboratory for the convergence of different disciplines while bringing together distant territories, and the sharing of research and knowledge processes that are as relevant indoors as they are within communities (ANDRÉ, Paula (coord.), Anthology of Essays – Collaborative Laboratory: Urban Dynamics, Heritage, Arts. VIII Seminar on Research, Teaching and Dissemination Lisbon, DINÂMIA’CET-ISCTE, October 2022, page 1).
See the Anthology of essays at: https://repositorio.iscte-iul.pt/handle/10071/26169