The construction of critical thinking and the craft of interdisciplinary research:

minutes to enter the study of development/underdevelopment dialectics.

Abstract

The objective of this article is to relate studies on development with the exercise of critical thinking, the profession of interdisciplinary research and theoretical / methodological pluralism, based on the deconstruction of conventional knowledge and knowledge that outlines a hegemonic thinking endowed with concepts and absolute, eternal, dualistic, linear, universal and, therefore, ethnocentric values, around the development / underdevelopment dialectic. In addition to understanding the relevance and usefulness of critical thinking for the construction of new development theories, it is pertinent to destabilize this notion and understand its two edges - as a process and as a pregnant ideology of a rhetoric of good intentions. In the face of historical ruptures and crises, there is a gap or a de-anchoring between the theoretical / conceptual systems and the phenomenal world that forces us to track the epistemological challenges facing development studies and that impose the need to build new concepts that emphasize the sui generis features of societies and territories. Since the notion of development is not neutral, but is fraught with axiological, ethical, normative, ideological and prescriptive assumptions, it is also pertinent to understand the contradictory relationship between knowledge (academy) and power (political praxis).