PhD Oral Exam - Maria Vargas, Humanities

When studying for a doctoral degree (PhD), candidates submit a thesis that provides a critical review of the current state of knowledge of the thesis subject as well as the student’s own contributions to the subject. The distinguishing criterion of doctoral graduate research is a significant and original contribution to knowledge.

Once accepted, the candidate presents the thesis orally. This oral exam is open to the public.

Abstract

Anchored in decolonial critiques, this research seeks to design an embodied, experiential approach to facilitating intercultural encounters that transcend and challenge the rationalist tradition of Western modernity, which organizes reality through binary and hierarchical divisions (Escobar, 2018; 2024), separating metropolitan forms of sociability from colonial forms through the ‘abyssal line’ inherent to epistemologies of the Global North (Santos, 2018). Guided by these theoretical insights, this research-creation project employs an emergent (Brown, 2017), iterative methodology, prototyping small-scale explorations that converge in the design and implementation of a workshop, exploring how post-abyssal intercultural encounters can be enacted as epistemological vortexes of co-creative knowledge, where resisting separation, relationality is practiced.

This research takes the International Organization for Migration’s Mixing Activities, based on Allport’s contact theory, as a benchmark for fostering positive intercultural contact and empathy. Building on this, the workshop proposed here re-envisions such encounters as contact zones (Pratt, 1992), where Dancing Smells Together opens an alternative mode of relating in the spirit of oddkin (Haraway, 2016). This reframes empathy not as an outcome but as a method of kinesthetic listening, with olfaction serving as a relational strategy to weave the plurality of homefelt sensations into a shared interconnectiveness of La Gran Casa. Dancing Smells Together is proposed as a tool to open alternative possibilities for engagement that foreground prismatic knowledge crystallized in an embodied ch’xi (Rivera Cusicanqui, 2023) ‘ecology of knowledges’ (Santos, 2018) and a radical relationality of ‘being with’ and inter-existence (Santos, 2018; Haraway, 2008, 2016; Escobar, 2024).