A new collective of women researchers is born
ICTA-UAB researcher Sara Mingorría is part of the FRACTAL group, a collective composed by eight women researchers coming from different trajectories, expertise, experiences and institutions, joined by common aspirations, concerns and the firm belief of passion, determination and effective science-society commitment to meet the socio-environmental challenges our world is facing.
After more than five years working together in different networks and projects, the group has been officially recognized as Spanish Association. The name of FRACTAL is inspired by the mathematical object, which is a repetition of a pattern across scales. It remembers us that how the inner system appears and act may reflects how the system appears at higher level.
Thus, FRACTAL is for us an intimate space of care and reflection where we can develop ideas and passions together to create a political space of care-full and collaborative science. We pretend to be attentive to the political economy of knowledge production that challenges dominant models of science and strengthen transformations towards a more socially just and sustainable world.
The FRACTAL collective mission is to generate, disseminate and transfer knowledge on sustainable socio-ecological systems for social transformation through an action research approach based on three fundamental pillars: 1) Participation, facilitating stakeholders’ involvement with scientists in transdisciplinary research processes and co-producing knowledge by bridging dialogues among epistemologies; 2) Engagement / Commitment, weaving networks between different people, organizations and institutions; and 3) Transformation , considering environmental feminism one of the key elements to provide resilience in our questions and answers.
Integrating a wide range of theoretical frameworks, methodologies, and techniques from social to biophysical dimensions, our lines of research focus on an interdisciplinary analysis on: 1) socio-ecological system assessments and global environmental change; 2) sustainable communities, social innovation and territory; 3) environmental conflicts analysis; 4) gender and feminist analysis and 5) policies evaluation oriented to change at local, national and international scale. Our research has been developed mostly in Latin and Central America, Asia, Europe and North Africa (Mediterranean Basin).