Research and innovation as a result of a transformative process

What has changed regarding racism in the last fifty years?

Abstract

This working paper, supported by theoretical, methodological, instrumental, and technological tools, argues from a critical paradigm that tertiary-level postgraduate training and research in the field of education aim to diagnose problems in their context with intention and social responsibility. It is also applied as an innovation, generating intervention proposals for their transformation as an innovation based on their prior diagnosis.

Thus, the limitation of traditional professional training, which extends to diagnosis but without innovating by accounting for concrete solutions, transforming the results of any research into political action, into an intervention aimed at transformation, going beyond mere continuity or extension.

The methodology applied is mixed, with a non-experimental design and a descriptive-longitudinal scope. The problem addressed, as an example, is discrimination in general and racism in particular, as an expression of ethnocentrism, for a specific case of permanence in a diachronic reading of singular evidence across five decades. The objectives sought to exemplify the permanence and cultural transversality of discriminatory social practices. This also sought to demonstrate that the development and advancement in the scientific field in general and in education in particular, with all its tools, including advances in digital culture and applications of artificial intelligence (AI), have not, from a still hegemonic positivist and continuist perspective, been sufficient in themselves to overcome various knowledge problems as innovation, as they remain at the limits of diagnostics.

The results describe survey data and documentary analysis in a longitudinal timeline, connecting evidence of the permanence of discriminatory practices; in this case, racism, although applicable to various forms of relationships regarding historical and structural inequality and social difference: gender, sexual orientation, ethnic, religious, and linguistic minorities, etc.

Master's and doctoral theses, training courses for high-level academic resources, consulting, networks, and the digital age—primarily diagnostic outcomes—sideline active and critically transformative pedagogies such as those proposed by Freire (pedagogy of the oppressed), Bourdieu (theory of practice), and UNESCO (education and technologies oriented toward human rights, peace, justice, and sustainability).

This shift in focus makes it possible to develop actions to achieve proactive results in which innovation involves presenting responses, paths, or solutions of various kinds, as a counterpoint to the problem in its context, based on the results of its prior diagnosis.