Resisting and accepting: Farmers’ hybrid epistemologies in the GMO controversy in Chile

There is a growing interest in understanding how different actors involved in debates regarding GMOs produce, justify and mobilize evidence in the face of the ‘unknown unknowns’ put forward by this technology. Moreover, and in line with the STS literature on the role of non-expert knowledge and concerned groups in the shaping of GMO regulations, there is an ever-increasing interest in understanding how non-scientific actors – for example anti-GMO or groups or non-industrial farmers – create and legitimize an ‘evidential culture’. In this paper we analyze the case of the emergent controversy over GMOs in Chile. Expanding on the concept of civic epistemology and based on in-depth interviews and document analyses, we specifically examine how a key sector in the debate – medium and small farmers – frames its evidences regarding GMOs, what type of trials they mobilize, and which political strategies are fleshed out. Our preliminary findings suggest a very particular epistemic configuration, one that we call hybrid epistemology: a mix epistemology in which free-market claims are entwined with state intervention demands, consensual political strategies are mixed with perceptions of strong power inequalities, and science-based rationalities are entangled with experiential and intuition-based knowledge. Finally, the paper opens a question about the epistemological impacts of the Chilean neoliberal experiment on the positions of farmers regarding GMOs. 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.