Dislocating peripheries to the center: A tecnologia social reinventing repertoires and territories

Abstract

Although social innovation has gained increasing importance in recent decades due to its promise of promoting social change, critical scholars have identified a number of gray areas, notably numerous perspectives that fail to deeply question the conditions that maintain social inequalities and exclusion, and that are marked by the absence of the voices of those living in the so-called “peripheries.” Through the example of The Agency, we propose an alternative to hegemonic ways of understanding social innovation, one based on the Latin American concept of tecnologia social, which embodies a decolonial view. We make three contributions to the social innovation literature, thereby enriching the North-South debate. First, we illustrate a process of sociotechnical reconfiguration—an interplay of methodological tools, artifacts and discourses—which is central to the conception and implementation of a tecnologia social. Second, we show how a tecnologia social operates through a cumulative layering process of decolonizing the imaginary, challenging the colonial relationship between center/periphery and positioning deprived young people as actors who reinvent their repertoires and territories. Third, we introduce a debate linking the anthropophagic approach to epistemic justice, a valued theme in decolonial thinking. In doing so, this article contributes to the literature by proposing applicable and positive outcomes to critical and decolonizing thinking.