Prompted by Fabrizio Terranova’s film, we continue to explore the work and thought of Isabelle Stengers. Although originally graduated in Chemistry, Stengers is mainly acknowledged for her contributions to philosophy of science, and for the network of affinities she created with Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, and, lastly, with Starhawk. Of her extensive published work and public interventions, we can perhaps highlight the idea of the incapability to maintain a “neutral science”, and the claim of an “ecology of practices”, reinforced by the provocative observation of her friend Latour in the preface for Power and Invention: Situating Science (1997): “I told you, Isabelle Stengers is always worse! She wrote as much on hypnosis as on physics and she happily compares chemistry laboratory and ethnopsychiatry, going so far as to rehabilitate the word ‘charlatan’”. For a conversation, as should be, interdisciplinary and non-hierarchic, we invited Manuela Teles, an FCT Researcher for the Philosophy Institute of the University of Porto, at the Mind, Language and Action Group (MLAG), and Samuel Guimarães, responsible for the eusoupaisagem, Education Program of the Douro Museum.

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