Building knowledge from the margins: information, knowledge and social movements

The social theory that has been constructed in Latin America in the past twenty years, proposes an alternative to the traditional criteria of science boundaries. This alternative approach, oriented towards social emancipation, is gaining ground over the predominant tendency, which is to subsume knowledge into an intensive process of commoditization. Anti-globalist movements are amongst the social players that have a leading role in the development of new ways of building knowledge. These movements act based on a new relationship between processes of social change, knowledge-building and the meaning and direction of communication. In this context, communication and information cease to be instruments for the regulation and control of social behavior. The tensions arising from the market and the predominating, inherited communication models go against research concerned with building meanings and viewpoints that are alternatives to the predominant ones. The new, emerging approaches tend to strengthen bidirectional relationships between communication and social transformation