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Opening up RRI to values and ways of knowing and doing beyond its European and Anglophone origins has become a focal area for scholars and practitioners. This article addresses the role of RRI pedagogy within the broader scope of this transformation, an under-examined topic in the literature. Drawing on the theoretical framework of critical resistance, we explore how RRI pedagogy might offer engaged scholars and educators opportunities to ‘risk themselves’ by intentionally destabilizing their authority as knowers. We offer a case study of a multinational, multilingual, multi-institutional learning initiative drawing from decolonial thinking to resist Anglophone epistemic hegemony in responsible research education. Our case study points to tactics for unsettling pedagogical habits by working across language differences, centering learners’ contexts, attending to the labor of teaching itself, and ‘searching for decoloniality’. 

Abstract In the 1970s, Latin America became a global laboratory for military interventions, the cultivation of terror, and ideological and economic transformation. In response, family groups and young scientists forged a new activist forensics focused on human rights, victim-centered justice, and state accountability, inaugurating new forms of forensic practice. We examine how this new form of forensic practice centered in forensic genetics has led to a critical engagement with Indigeneity both within and outside the lab. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with human rights activists and forensic scientists in Argentina, Guatemala and Mexico, this paper examines the relationship between forensic genetics, Indigenous organizing, and human rights practice. We offer the concept of ‘genetic syncretism’ to attend to spaces where multiple and competing beliefs about genetics, justice, and Indigenous identity are worked out through (1) coming together in care, (2) incorporation, and (3) ritual. Helping to unpack the uneasy and incomplete alliance of Indigenous interests and forensic genetic practice in Latin American, genetic syncretism offers a theoretical lens that is attentive to how differentials of power embedded in colonial logics and scientific practice are brokered through the coming together of seemingly incompatible beliefs and practices. 

This article (written in Portuguese) offers design principles for a decolonizing pedagogy within STS. Analyzing a pedagogical experiment using digital tools to conduct a bilingual, collaborative online course, the article describes the potential and pitfalls of this approach emphasizing the importance of slow, ethical collaborations.