Towards an incoherent convergence science: diverse economies, crises, and recoveries, and the hope for better futures
2025
Manuel R Montoya | Renia Ehrenfeucht | Marygold Walsh-Dilley | Benjamin P Warner | Cassidy A. Tawse-Garcia
Here, we argue for a critical approach to convergence science: one that develops collaborative problem-solving for pressing contemporary crises. We ask for researchers to encounter spaces where diverse epistemological and ontological perspectives can build solutions based on on-the-ground practices and existing knowledge. This approach contrasts with status quo crisis responses, which are imbricated with dominant forms of capitalism, and whose solutions reinforce the very systems that caused these crises. An incoherent convergence, in contrast, requires university researchers to come together with other knowledge bearers to lay bare the incongruities among systems while also encouraging ontological and epistemological pluriversality without assuming a singular understanding, a singular path forward, or a shared worldview. We draw on the situation in Mora, New Mexico, USA, and its recovery from the Hermits Peak Calf Canyon wildfire of 2022 to illustrate the disjuncture that arose between the community and the dominant disaster response regime. We argue that convergence science has the potential to address such failures, but only by embracing rather than rationalizing the messiness of on-the-ground realities. Without a new approach, applied research may continue to reproduce the structural inequalities among these diverse communities, including the political-economic processes wrought from climate change. Convergence science, we argue, needs spaces of engagement with that which remains illegible within the privileged scientific paradigm.
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