Citizenship schools: creative practices that push boundaries? • Tomás R. Villasante

Citizenship schools: creative practices that push boundaries?

Tomás R. Villasante

Like many feminists, Haraway takes “situated knowledge” as her starting point, and in matters of self-formation in groups it seems particularly useful to attend to those aspects of life that are more immediate and everyday. For this reason, I begin this reflection by returning to the questions I continue to ask myself about the successes in which I participated in some way (discovering that something worked), as well as about how the failures we have experienced in our most immediate stories came about. History with a capital H moves in centuries, and I leave that to those who wish to debate the ideologies that justify each position (each of us has an education that provides a certain sense of assurance…). Instead, it seems preferable to begin by asking ourselves questions about certain successes that are nevertheless rarely acknowledged or replicated, that go beyond the realities that oppress us, but which over time become distorted and/or whose collective advances are forgotten.

What can we learn now about our “transitions”?

What did we learn from the so-called “political transition” from Francoism to alignment with European democracies? And how was the momentum that emerged from 1968 brought to a halt and gradually diluted during the 1980s? These questions provide a useful starting point for understanding the shift from years of sustained popular mobilization to what, for our generation, came to be known as “disenchantment”.

The strength of self-organized movements during the dictatorship, particularly among younger generations in the 1970s, was expressed through semi-legal or illegal activities in factories, neighbourhoods and universities, processes that are well known (despite claims by some that it was the king or the political parties who decided the course of change). Those in power were deeply alarmed by popular mobilization. Pacts were negotiated from above, but it was in everyday life that concern about the need for change was most keenly felt.

The “workers’ commissions” were not a trade union in the sense we understand today, but rather groups of local (non-legal) activists who used Francoist laws to overwhelm them from within. They convened assemblies around very specific issues, drawing on the “situated knowledge” through which we learned. We went beyond the legally recognized Neighbourhood Associations, and some groups of neighbourhood activists became genuine “schools of citizenship”. Organizations were built from below, while political parties (clandestine and marginal at the time) were learning from what was emerging in neighbourhoods and factories, not the other way around. Some parties knew how to learn from what was happening and were able to establish networks between different movements, including university movements, women’s movements, and the emerging ecological movements of the time, among others.

However, the differences between what was taking shape within the self-organized grassroots and the party leaderships are a fact that must be taken into account, and a number of consequences follow from this. The parties went on to form the Plata-Junta as a means of negotiating with the Government. By contrast, the “schools of citizenship” were located in neighbourhoods, factories, universities and the churches of progressive priests. The key distinction lay between leaderships, mobilizations and self-organization, since each element, and the relationships between them, is not the same.

Mobilizations were made possible from below through self-organization, often without seeking permission. Yet during the “transition”, particularly after the legalization of political parties, this began to change: electoral politics as the route to power came to be seen as decisive. The Commissions were transformed into a European-style trade union, while neighbourhood associations gradually declined as their leaders stood as candidates for local councils on behalf of different political parties, and so on.

Significant economic and social advances were achieved. Yet by the late 1980s the PSOE government no longer responded even to a major general strike across the state, and where the slogan “NATO NO” had once prevailed, Spain went on to join the US-led military alliance. The years in which one generation experienced “schools of citizenship” gave way to the disorganization of grassroots movements. Achievements won from below (often at great cost) came to be attributed by the media to singular figures. This is a story of successes, disappointments and subsequent abstention in successive elections.

What can we learn from the formation of these important practices and transformations? Some of us lived through the disarticulation of the popular bases and asked how these “response-abilities” might avoid being frustrated once again for an entire generation.

Across four books we reflected on what we learned and what we forgot. Los vecinos en la calle (Neighbours in the Street, 1976) addressed mobilizations and grassroots participatory democracies; Hacia una ciudad habitable (Towards a Liveable City, 1982) approached these issues from an eco-social environmental perspective; Comunidades locales (Local Communities, 1984), a doctoral thesis, introduced action-research methodologies; and Retrato de chabolista con piso (Portrait of a Slum Dweller with a Flat, 1989) was a collective work on the remodelling of shanty towns through major neighbourhood struggles, an experience that was not extended to other cities.

All of them capture what we experienced and valued in making these transitions alongside social movements, with real effort and tangible results: what those of us who participated were able to learn, but also the alternative version promoted by those in power who shaped the dominant historical narrative, which likewise needs to be taken into account in the media.

Do we also experience cycles of success and disenchantment in other countries?

Since the late 1980s (the mobilizations against NATO and the major General Strike in Spain), governments had already disenchanted some groups and neutralized others through their own narratives. From Latin America we were asked how socialism had been achieved without ruptures and in such an exemplary manner. We responded by drawing on the “methodology of networks and action sets” to explain that there was no socialism, and that if “participatory democracies” were to be built, we needed to learn from grassroots organizations. We also argued that even numerous mobilizations were not enough, because the key lay in sustaining the plurality of organizations that had emerged from below. Mobilizations tend to overwhelm movements that have become bureaucratized, but for new dynamics to emerge it is essential that the everyday life of “core groups” remains active (1994, Las ciudades hablan [Cities Speak], a collective volume on neighbourhood networks in Caracas, Bogotá, Lima, Santiago, Buenos Aires and Salvador de Bahía).

The vision that emerged from these Latin American self-organizations led to two books collected under Cuatro redes para mejor vivir (Four Networks for a Better Life, 1998), which presented methods for building forms of citizenship from below. At the turn of the century, several countries on the continent experienced successes forged by social movements and mobilizations, even under more democratic governments and constitutions that validated popular struggles (and without relying on traditional parties).

From 1996 onwards, a Master’s programme at the Complutense University of Madrid (later also offered in Barcelona, Bilbao, Seville, Tenerife, Ecuador, Peru and Chile) showed concrete results: participatory methodologies proved viable for self-organization in neighbourhoods, cooperatives, movements, municipalities, and even at regional and state levels. In the state of Kerala (33 million inhabitants, India), from 1996 to the present, the most successful experience of participatory democracy has been developed (2011, book with Rosa Pinto, La democracia en marcha [Democracy on the Move]). The World Social Forums in Porto Alegre came to affirm that “another world is possible” if it is built on “schools of citizenship”, “solidarity economies”, “participatory budgets”, and related practices.

The issue was that, at the turn of the century, the advances and successes that were being achieved did not endure over time. Certain factors linked to dominant economic and political powers succeeded in discouraging the “driving groups” within the social base, so that they ceased to be the fertile ground that nourishes change in societies. A two-year research project led me to ask, “Why did grassroots groups do what they did?” The first surprise, however, was that people were puzzled by the question, as they do not usually ask it and regard it as natural in their everyday activities to “enjoy and overflow” in what they are doing—hence the title of the book that emerged from this extensive participatory research (2006, Desbordes creativos [Creative Overflows]).

The “schools of citizenship” were, and continue to be, forms of informal education for popular self-organization in places as diverse as Salvador de Bahía, Montevideo, Cuernavaca (Mexico), Cuenca (Ecuador) and Madrid, despite their very different cultural contexts.

From the Participatory Budgets of Porto Alegre (with almost one and a half million inhabitants) and of the state of Rio Grande do Sul (nearly 12 million), this parallel form of democratic decision-making rooted in grassroots initiatives spread across the world. In our own case, we supported such processes in several municipalities, most notably in Seville, where they produced very positive results in neighbourhoods. We had to move from the initial district assemblies to around twenty motor groups and neighbourhood assemblies, as participation was so high that decentralization became necessary.

At a city-wide level, these processes secured the creation of a comprehensive cycle-lane network, along with numerous improvements in individual neighbourhoods. However, internal and external conflicts within political parties eventually diluted the progress that had been made. Those who claimed to control the keys to History ultimately caused the grassroots initiatives driven by committed citizens to fail.

Everyone proclaims participatory democracy in their programmes, yet in practice they neglect its consistent implementation. It was only in the later mobilizations of the indignados (Spain’s 2011 anti-austerity protests) that the imprint of these “schools of citizenship” became visible. We can learn from Andalusia, from the Andes or from India through very concrete practices, and when problems intensify once again, the “enjoyments and overflows” reappear through the work of the “motor groups”, which once more make it possible to address what lies within reach.

These processes are grounded in forms of trust that are forged through practice rather than through discourse. We learn that leaderships pass, but in the “rearguards” the desire for transformation is reawakened when concrete problems become pressing and when the ground has been cultivated through living practices that persuade us.

Is it so difficult to learn from what has been shown to work?

Crises have followed one another, from the collapse of the global economy (2007–08) to the pandemic (2020), from the evidence of accelerating climate change (with global summits that make few binding commitments in practice) to a neo-conservative international order marked by wars and threats of new imperialisms (including digital ones). New generations feel they are living worse than their families of origin. In various parts of the world, indignados movements have emerged, and once again it has been shown that social bases possess a capacity for resistance, protest and even small-scale organization as a result of mobilization (numerous driving groups linked to ecological innovations, feminisms, solidarity economies, and so on).

At the same time, we have also learned that the capacity to articulate grassroots initiatives with transformative potential at the level of countries and regions is still not sufficiently mature. Certain leaderships take advantage of these mobilizations and override attempts to build inclusive movements (with “schools of citizenship”?), tending to last only as long as their “characters”, who ultimately end up overshadowing their own people.

The books Redes de vida desbordantes… desde la vida cotidiana (Networks of Overflowing Life… from Everyday Life, 2014) and Democracias transformadoras (Transformative Democracies, 2017) were attempts to continue learning from grassroots practices and to put forward proposals for moving beyond them. In particular, they drew on what we were able to take part in through the municipalismos - grassroots, city-level political platforms that emerged from social movements and won local governments in Spain in 2015 - and which could have provided a solid basis for “schools of citizenship” capable of enabling transformations on a larger scale.

Yet once again, some failed to learn even from their own successes - which would have been the minimum - and no serious self-criticism followed the mediocre electoral results that politicians have continued to register since that experience. The sectoral “tides” that emerged as new movements initially opened up a promising path, and the circles that supported the early phase of Podemos had real potential for self-organization. This potential eventually coalesced in the municipalismos through which local governments were won.

There are “co-labour-active” methodologies for building participatory democracies that have been used for decades within some of the most powerful social movements in the world. In the case of the municipalismos, we were able to apply several of these on different occasions. One example was the drafting of the programme for Ahora Madrid: in the course of a single morning, all tendencies came together (people from Ganemos, with currents linked to IU, Podemos, independents, and others). From this meeting emerged the basis of a programme in which each thematic subgroup was able to agree on a set of minimum points that would serve as a platform for standing in the elections. Several of the elected councillors, who emerged from open voting processes, only became fully acquainted with the programme once they took office.

Coming from the tradition of classic political parties, it took time to understand and properly implement processes such as Participatory Budgets or Social Forums. We offered support in several municipalities, but there was little opportunity to take advantage of these experiences as spaces for learning through “schools of citizenship”. This was limited both by a lack of support from local government staff and by the inexperience of the councillors, which made it difficult to move beyond forms of personal prominence.

In the Canary Islands we launched workshops based on participatory methodologies across several islands, and on at least four of them we were able to carry out forms of “strategic mapping” to identify, from the grassroots, the key ideas to be mobilized and the alliances between movements (and parties) that could advance what had been agreed. Where they were implemented, “schools of citizenship” using participatory methods were well received by grassroots “motor groups”: people emerged from them energized and determined, only to find that party leaderships subsequently proposed different priorities. This has been our experience over many years with a wide range of parties of almost all political colours (and it is better not to single out any one in particular).

In the Canary Islands we also reached an agreement with four parties to hold meetings over a four-month period, with the participation of grassroots groups from social movements in workshops using participatory methods. We produced a Manifesto that was signed by more than 500 people, and we presented these methodologies in the cultural and political magazine El Viejo Topo. After the summer, however, disputes over candidate lists brought the initiative to an end.

Another concrete case that could have enabled participatory “schools of citizenship” through “generative listening” might have begun with Sumar, with its initial team and proposals. It was argued that the aim was to listen to civil society and that an inclusive front should consist of 70 per cent civil society and 30 per cent political parties. We presented the Canarian experience, and I prepared a briefing for the 35 groups with whom we met in September. However, generative listening was not pursued, either within these thematic groups or at the territorial level. A small number of groups carried out valuable work, but there was no continuity.

Participatory democracy features prominently in discourse, yet at the grassroots level practice relies almost exclusively on electoral mechanisms (polls, questionnaires, plebiscitary votes, and so on). Out of fear of people and their initiatives, the priority becomes remaining in power rather than governing, implementing policies and being accountable. As a result, they end up becoming more “characters” than people.

Do we lack co-creative “response-abilities” in the face of A.I.?

These quotations from Heinz von Foerster and Gordon Pask appear in Delgado and Gutiérrez (1995), a book in which we proposed moving from social movements to participatory methodologies. Social mobilizations are engines of change because of what they seek to achieve. They aim to be self-organized movements with greater continuity, yet they are sometimes constrained, fail to relaunch transformative mobilizations, and exhaust themselves in internal conflicts and bureaucratic forms.

Educational movements - such as trade unions, neighbourhood movements, environmental, feminist movements, and even political parties - also fall into these vices. These two quotations are useful insofar as they encourage increasing the number of alternatives, rather than following an exemplary model derived from the ethics and aesthetics of the “avant-garde model”.

To act in order to know - that is, to move from conversations to the interaction of actors - because, in order to know better, it is useful to learn how to act in schools of citizenship through creative and co-labour-active processes. This is precisely what we have been arguing.

We are living in the age of Big Data and so-called Artificial Intelligence. There are ways of acting and knowing that open up new alternatives. These are realized not only through traditional educational tools, but also through new participatory modes. Data centres gather vast amounts of information from all over the world, managed by transnational powers. In these spaces, data from all ongoing transfers and communications are accumulated, and from these computational and economic powers AI is promoted. But are these informational powers, and the technical dissemination of what is and is not considered true, being democratically regulated? When we pose legitimate questions on any subject, are we answered with a “truth”? Trained by whom?

The father of second-order cybernetics, Heinz von Foerster, already taught us that some questions are legitimate and others illegitimate. Legitimate questions are those we ask in order to advance knowledge and action in areas we do not yet know, and in which we can move forward through co-labour-active intelligences. Illegitimate questions are posed when someone already has a prefabricated answer and seeks to disseminate it while testing others on their knowledge. From the technical expertise held by certain powers, it is easy to deploy techno-populism in the face of the “ignorance and fears” of ordinary people. The cybernetic revolution, and its latest advance with so-called Artificial Intelligence, brings with it the magic of inevitability and lavish miracles in which we are expected to believe. In Europe, there is an attempt to legislate on the uses of AI, and there are increasingly more scientific voices which, without denying that it is a very interesting medium to use, also point to a range of challenges and dangers that we must address socially.

But we can move forward by posing some legitimate questions: 1) Are the materials that AI requires in order to develop abundant? Is there a crisis in the availability of necessary extractive materials that will make it very difficult to envisage the large-scale development of AI? The struggle over patents and basic materials continues and will provoke new conflicts, even wars. 2) What will happen to the jobs that are replaced by machines? The world’s population continues to grow while jobs are being reduced. Instead, tendencies towards polarization between tasks and jobs are increasingly observed, precisely in relation to the management of new technologies worldwide. 3) Can we know who appoints the “trainers” of data-driven machines, and who formulates the proposals that reach us as “objective”? Who will have the control and power to decide on the use of technologies that can alter the behaviour of thousands of people, making things appear real that are “needs” only from the perspective of AI trainers? Large transnationals already wield power greater than that of many states, or are even allied with them. 4) What happens to our cultures if they are, or are not, left out of the game by Big Data and AI?

Becoming literate in the face of these new techniques requires asking questions, beyond assuming that technologies are good or bad in themselves. For Ana María Valle (Valle, 2023), “GPT” is still exactly what its own definition indicates: a “Generative Pre-Trained Transformer”. Prior information is accumulated and transformed in a trained manner (but by whom?), in order to facilitate generative processes (for what purpose?). It is “a friendly instrument for this new world that is opening up, but one that serves to create and recreate it”. This, in turn, calls for “questions about questions and answers”. The crucial issue is who asks the questions and who carries out the training. With such vast quantities of data, it is possible to develop pedagogies and forms of activism based on legitimate questions, but also on illegitimate questions and answers. What is at stake is posing legitimate questions and fostering a collective will in the face of those who present us with ready-made answers and with data that “respond to questions that do not exist for people”, as Freire and Faundez remind us in Por una pedagogía de la pregunta (For a Pedagogy of the Question, 2014).

From the perspective of ecofeminist situated knowledge, what challenges are urgent?

It should be clarified that Haraway is a widely recognized feminist and an even more radical environmentalist. The notion of “sympoietic collaborations” situates us in learning from nature itself and its ways of life, from its forms of resistance and resilience, from long temporalities, and from situated and rooted knowledges. It also involves tempering human arrogance in the face of failures that are so natural to us and being able to identify the connections that matter within complexity. Haraway plays with the precise formulation of new concepts in her most foundational approaches, but as a biologist she also works in dialogue with Lynn Margulis, Isabelle Stengers, Bruno Latour, among others, and with Communities for a Just Transition (in which some of us are experimenting).

As Haraway proposes in Seguir con el problema (Staying with the Trouble, 2019), we must confront ecological crises, capitalist exploitation, the wars that threaten us, and resurgent authoritarianisms, while at the same time building protective barriers for “El mundo que necesitamos” (The World We Need, 2020): “What I propose is a kind of ‘sympoiesis’, in a mundane sense, to confront the dangers we truly live with. And I refuse to do so in an exclusively critical or denunciatory way. On the contrary, I propose doing so through a continuous practice of risky joy.”

Terry Eagleton remarks in a book on Walter Benjamin (1998) that “humour is a rare concept in Marxism, and even more so in Benjamin’s melancholy work.” What he proposes, then, is to recover from Bakhtin his reflections on carnival, and from Brecht a form of theatre linked to everyday lives. That is, the “grotesque parody” … “an incessant activity of disguise and inversion” … “misreading” texts and causing binary oppositions to collapse into a growing wave of ambiguity. “Carnival is more than deconstruction. As in Brecht, its effects of distancing reconstruct as well as deconstruct … The laughter of carnival is both mockery and plebeian solidarity.” The methodologies used in Social Creativity Workshops bring contradictions from everyday life to the surface (through photos, phrases, etc.) in order to break open the dilemmas into which alienating powers seek to confine us.

It is neither black nor white, because there are other possibilities (often hidden because people do not dare), yet there are always those who pose deeper questions to affirm that it is neither one nor the other. This is where legitimate questions emerge: some suggest a little of each, while others aim to combine the positive aspects of each contradiction. These games with “multilemmas” (Galtung, Ibáñez, etc.) bring underlying viewpoints to the surface and shift according to group dynamics. In the practices of Deliberative Assemblies with mini-publics (groups selected by lot to debate with professionals), even when simple dilemmas are initially posed, people are given time and develop many nuances and positions that move beyond the original oppositions. With AI, can we ask questions that go beyond judging a position as good or bad? What margin of co-creativity and situated knowledge can we achieve?

Joan Subirats, at the CLACSO Conference in Bogotá on Data Centres and AI, reminded us that it is not a matter of “discussing AI, but of doing”. He presented data on what are already known as the four questions we have been asking ourselves about AI: problems related to basic materials and water; the scarcity of jobs that are increasingly controlled and stripped of initiative; large-scale information concentrated in undemocratic powers; and the production of “universal truths” in the face of complex and creative cultures. He then turned to the alternatives at stake: getting down to work (if necessary, together with young experts) to make use of AI from below, from driving groups and social movements. We can conclude by returning to “schools of citizenship”, the “interaction of actors”, and the need to “increase the number of alternatives”, and by moving towards “acting in order to know”, with “risky joy” and the spirit of they can’t take away what we’ve already danced. Satisfied, we step outside the four walls of the classroom, for example in education, to engage in practices based on legitimate questions about the shared life of local communities.

What if we add some participatory methodologies?

For our part, below I reproduce two tables from our latest open-access book (2025), Transducir: estrategias y desbordes (Transducing: Strategies and Overflows), so that each “school of citizenship” can pose its own “legitimate questions” in the face of the dilemmas presented by contemporary society, including both ageism and patriarchy, which share the same root. At each stage of life, with its biological changes, new “operational relationships” emerge in each generation. From each of these situations, it becomes possible to ask new questions, within “schools of citizenship”, in order to build co-labour-active strategies and effective concepts that account for the advances being achieved in each specific context, fostering greater personal fulfilment and producing socially satisfactory outcomes in response to the needs that arise.

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TABLE TEXT	Biological changes	Operational relationships	Efficient concepts

Childhood

Breastfeeding and attachment

Feeding and playing

Fantasies

Movement

Family and school

Fears, obedience

Adolescence

Growth and strength

Collective rituals

Rebellions

Hormones and sexuality

Daring ignorance

Identifications

Procreation

Vital energy

Working, managing economies

Creativities

Having children

Feeding and educating

Responsibilities

Maturity

First physical ailments

Routines and conflicts

Cooperation

Children as adolescents

Commanding and judging

Authority

Old age

Frequent ailments

Caring for oneself and remembering

Pending tasks

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In addition to the questions that re-evaluate what each stage of life can contribute to the collective, we can also, in the face of patriarchy, ask ourselves questions about ethics, self-organizing leaps, and boundary-breaking processes, drawing on the authors and methodologies we have been using in our participatory processes:

“TRANSDUCTIVE” SOCIO-POLITICAL ETHICS	“SELF-ORGANIZING” MICRO-MACRO JUMPS	“BOUNDARY-BREAKING” SOCIAL PROCESSES
In the face of “linear cause-effect determinisms”, “ONE IS NOT BORN A WOMAN, ONE BECOMES ONE”: (and the same applies to men), through Analyzers (historical and socially constructed) and Emergent Systems (De Beauvoir, Haraway, Braidotti, Federici, Guattari, etc.). Group self-reflection through Sociodramas, Drifts...	In the face of individualizing “patriarchal power structures”, “THE PERSONAL IS POLITICAL”: STRATEGIES rooted in EVERYDAY NETWORKS, drawing on “network analysis” (Bott, Dominelli, MacLeod, Gutiérrez Aguilar, Freire, etc.). Strategy maps: “sets of action”	In the face of the “neutrality of science”, and beyond “subject-object distances”, EMOTIONS AND SCIENCES from PRAXIS (involvement in action-reflection-action), (Shiva, Mies, Fox Keller, Knorr Cetina, Galceran, Verden Zöller-H. Maturana, etc.) Negotiation, and transformative and comprehensive strategies
In the face of the “simplification of the media dialectic”, “LISTENINGS”, “DOINGS” and “SAYINGS” of “communication and self-training-action”. (Rivera, Montero, Reguillo, Braidotti, Galtung, etc.) Dilemmas are overcome through multilemmas.	In the face of “patriarchal and authoritarian ancestors”, generational “SUBJECTS IN PROCESSES”, from the E.C.R.O. to the R.O.C.E. (Kristeva, Hernando, Rolnik, Quiroga, Pichón Rivière, etc.) Processes developed through Social Creativity Workshops.	In the face of “exploitation and elitist neocolonization” MOBILIZATIONS with “CARE-ORIENTED MOTOR GROUPS” from inclusive movements. (Luxemburg, Davis, Spivak, Carrasco, Gutiérrez Aguilar, etc.) Driving groups and distribution of power.
In the face of the “post-truths” of dominant media, “CUNNING / BOUNDARY-BREAKING PRACTICES” and “POPULAR REVERSAL”, grounded in grassroots self-organization and “Buen Convivir”, (Juliano, Izquierdo, Sabadell, Zibechi, Vega, Comunidades en Transición, etc.). Smart groups, enjoyment and examples of “good coexistence”.	In the face of “elitism” and “sectarianism”, CO-LABOUR-ACTIVE “SELF-ORGANIZATION” rooted in GRASSROOTS INITIATIVES and social movements (Henderson, Olstron, Wainwright, Harnecker, M.E.R.Palop, Mov. Chipko, Kerala State, Mov. Pro Comunes etc.) Participatory assemblies with operational task forces.	In the face of “financialization” and the “dictatorship of the markets”: “LIFE AT THE CENTRE” - SUSTAINABILITIES and SOLIDARITY ECONOMIES grounded in feminist economics, ecofeminisms, and agroecology (Shiva, Pérez Orozco, Tiriba, Herrero, Laval and Dardot, etc.) Comprehensive and Sustainable Action Plans.

Reworked from an article by Villasante and Hernández (2020) published in Tendencias Sociales (UNED), available as open access, and further developed in Villasante, T. R. (2025)

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We can explain these nine leaps and anti-patriarchal devices, which we believe distinguish a process carried out with methodological guarantees from others that rely more on will and good intentions than on an understanding of the problems that typically arise. In “schools of citizenship”, each participant reformulates the questions posed by these authors, since the aim is not simply to accept their postulates, but rather to engage with their concerns. The answers must be constructed in each specific situation and through the collective intelligences present. Likewise, those who wish to download the book cited here, which includes these and other tables and diagrams, can do so in order to make greater use of the questions than of the lines of response. This can be done free of charge via the CREASVI Foundation (publications) or the CLACSO Library, where readers can also choose a topic of interest for each situation.

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Delgado and Gutiérrez (1995) Qualitative Research Methods and Techniques in Social Sciences. Synthesis. Madrid.

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Fals Borda, Villasante, et al. (1993) Participatory action research. Social Documentation No. 92. Madrid.

Foerster, Heinz (1981) Observing Systems, in Delgado and Gutiérrez (1995) Theory of Observation, in Methods and Techniques... Work Cited

Freire and Faundez (2014) For a pedagogy of the question. XXI century. Argentina.

Haraway, Donna (2019) Continuing with the problem. Consonni. Bilbao.

Haraway, Donna (2020) The World We Need. Icaria. Barcelona.

Ibáñez, Jesús (1992) The methodological debate. In Reyes, R. (ed) Las ciencias sociales en España. Complutense Publishing House. Madrid.

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Pinto, Rosa/Villasante, T. (2011) Democracy on the Move. Kerala. The Old Mole. Barcelona.

Subirats, J. and several (2025) Artificial intelligence, social sciences and critical thinking. Video downloadable in Diálogos Magisteriles en CLACSO.

Stengers, Isabelle (2017) In Times of Catastrophes. Previous future. Barcelona

Valle Vázquez, Ana M. (2023). 'Technical literacy and pedagogy of the question. Life between Simondon and Freire'. In: Literacy, health and emancipation. Ana M. Valle Vázquez, Marco A. Jiménez García, Agustí Pascual Cabo, Marina Aparicio Barberán, Iolanda Corella Llopis, Paqui Borox López and Pep Aparicio Guadas. Publications of the Paulo Freire Institute. Xàtiva.

Villasante, T. R. (2025) Transduce, overflows and strategies. The matrices in sciences, with motor groups and feminisms, for democracies and commons. CLACSO, virtual download.

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