Amazonia as a critical frontier: epistemological displacements and editorial challenges

Abstract

This theoretical essay aims to reflect on the contemporary forms of the geopolitics of knowledge within the field of Brazilian Collective Health, with emphasis on the incorporation of the Amazon as a horizon for transforming hierarchies in editorial practices. Conceiving Collective Health as a scientific field shaped by disputes over what can and should be researched, by which methods, and by whom, the text examines how regional, racial, and epistemological hierarchies structure regimes of scientific validation and editorial practices. Engaging with the notions of the coloniality of power, the geopolitics of knowledge, and the dispositif of raciality, it argues that such hierarchies produce a dual peripheralization— territorial and epistemological—that affects knowledge production originating from Brazil’s Northern Region. At the same time, institutional fissures are identified that signal ongoing shifts. The Amazon is thus presented as a critical frontier, not as an exotic object, but as a space of conceptual and practical production capable of challenging and reconfiguring the criteria of legitimacy within the editorial field of Collective Health.