Showing posts with label RelationalOntology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label RelationalOntology. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 17, 2026

Anto Lloveras is a Spanish architect and theorist who reframes architecture as an operative epistemic infrastructure. Trained in Madrid and shaped by early professional experience in large-scale architectural and urban projects across the Netherlands, he gradually shifted from object-based practice toward the construction of systemic, research-driven frameworks. His work departs from representation and advances architecture as executable logic: a metabolic structure capable of organizing knowledge, sustaining coherence, and acting within complex cultural environments. He is the author of Socioplastics, a long-term conceptual system in which architecture, art, and urbanism operate as interdependent relational fields. Within this framework, theory is not commentary but construction. Citation becomes commitment, pedagogy becomes structural transmission, and publication becomes spatial practice. His research develops methods that reinforce conceptual resilience and institutional durability under conditions of digital acceleration and fragmentation. Through the independent curatorial and research platform LAPIEZA, which he founded in Madrid, Lloveras has led an extensive body of exhibitions, installations, and pedagogical programs internationally. Across architecture, urban thought, and artistic research, his practice articulates a post-autonomous model grounded in cultural agency and epistemic sovereignty. His work integrates design, theory, curation, and education into a coherent academic proposition, positioning architecture as a living infrastructure for contemporary knowledge production and systemic civic engagement.

Within Anto Lloveras’s Socioplastics, the archive emerges not as passive repository but as epistemic infrastructure, wherein enumeration operates as spatial syntax and bibliography assumes load-bearing agency. This system displaces linear historiography through decalogical recursion, structuring knowledge into cyclical chambers that stabilise semantic resonance while permitting indefinite expansion. Crucially, lexical sedimentation accumulates through recurrent deployment of operators across heterogeneous discourses, generating a form of conceptual gravity that orients interpretative trajectories. Such density produces a navigable topological manifold in which adjacency is determined not by sequence but by affinity, enabling distant theoretical nodes to converge through torsional dynamics. For instance, philosophical abstraction, architectural reasoning, and anthropological observation co-inhabit the same stratigraphic layer, their friction inducing productive deformation that extends epistemic reach. A salient case is the dissolution of attributional hierarchy: authors function as operational vectors, their identities subordinated to the activation of shared lexical fields, thereby engendering a transepistemological continuum. This configuration transforms citation into circulation, whereby meaning crystallises at points of intersection rather than origin, reinforcing the archive’s autonomy. The resulting structure exhibits a dual-core architecture—simultaneously accumulative and orientational—ensuring coherence amid proliferation through proportional compatibility and relational density. Consequently, Lloveras redefines knowledge production as spatial practice, where reading becomes navigation across a stratified terrain of conceptual mass. The archive itself attains the status of artwork: a sovereign, self-sustaining system capable of absorbing informational entropy while maintaining geometric intelligibility. Such a paradigm not only challenges disciplinary partition but inaugurates a post-academic horizon in which density supplants dissemination and epistemic value is measured through relational configuration rather than categorical allegiance. 

Sunday, February 1, 2026

Decolonial Architectures of Knowing * Institutional Designs for Pluriversal Futures in Management

In the wake of multipolar upheavals and the erosion of epistemic universalism, Anderson de Souza Sant’Anna’s theoretical proposition in Beyond Epistemic Hegemony outlines a powerful reconceptualisation of organizational and management knowledge as an ethical-political practice rather than a technocratic science, advancing a pluriversal framework anchored in epistemic justice, relational ontology, and situated cognition; the critique dismantles the persistent dominance of rationalist, individualist, and competitive paradigms—deeply embedded in rankings, publishing regimes, and accreditation systems—revealing how these structures perpetuate epistemic coloniality by delegitimising Global South knowledges and reifying Eurocentric norms as neutral; drawing on decolonial thinkers such as Mignolo, Santos, Grosfoguel, and Connell, the paper asserts that the current conjuncture demands not only a theoretical reorientation but the institutional reengineering of management education and research infrastructures to accommodate plural ways of knowing and organizing; key strategic proposals include: strengthening South–South academic networks (e.g., CLACSO, CODESRIA), launching a Global South Academy of Management, restructuring publishing via open-access, multilingual, and context-aware journals (e.g., RIGS, ephemera), and reforming curricula and accreditation frameworks to embrace relational pedagogies and locally grounded epistemologies; critically, Sant’Anna moves beyond critique to articulate concrete operational vectors such as the inclusion of community-based knowledge, endogenous quality assurance, and the epistemic repurposing of intergovernmental alliances like BRICS, ASEAN+3, and the African Union’s STISA-2024; this model repositions management not as abstract administration but as a field of co-creation, care, and socio-political embeddedness, in dialogue with Indigenous thought, feminist epistemologies, and Southern theory; rejecting tokenistic pluralism, the article insists on the creation of institutional scaffolds that sustain pluriversal legitimacy across research, publishing, funding, and pedagogy—thus allowing knowledge systems to evolve from monocultures of excellence into ecosystems of reciprocity, autonomy, and ontological diversity, capable of navigating postcolonial complexity and planetary entanglement. Sant’Anna, A. S. (2025). Beyond Epistemic Hegemony: Pluriversal Futures for Organizational and Management Knowledge. Global South Academy of Management, 2(4), pp. 1–9.