Descosiendo el IMRyD. O de cómo contar fragmentos a golpe de catas

Abstract

This text works from a premise regarding writing and methodology: that contemporary reality is fragmentary and that, consequently, the forms of social sciences’ writing that aspire to account for it must also be fragmentary. Taking as its starting point an explicit critique of the IMR&D format, it argues that the currently established modes of organizing scientific knowledge are insufficient for thinking about and narrating worlds made up of fragments, discounted lives, and unfinished processes. In response to this insufficiency, the article proposes unraveling the canonical structure of scientific text and exploring forms of writing that work with fragments, cuts, and precarious assemblages. Based on the collective experience of the ViDes research project and the resulting book, Vidas descontadas, the notion of «sample (cata)» is developed as an attitude and methodology oriented toward the fragment, requiring practices of kinship (emparentamiento) that, far from aspiring to close totalities, seek to weave mobile relationships between pieces. From this perspective, the book does not appear as the final result of a research process, nor as a synthesis —no conclusions can be drawn— but rather as an unfinished tapestry.