Expanding Capabilities for Epistemic Justice Through Social Innovation: The Case of Business and Management Courses in UNIMINUTO, Colombia

The chapter addresses the consideration and development of students’ competencies for social innovation in higher education by generating spaces of engagement with local communities. We combine concepts from the capability approach and epistemic injustice to address this topic and ask these specific questions: which epistemic capabilities can be generated in students when engaging with local communities in fostering social innovation processes, and how? And, how are these processes contributing to challenging epistemic injustice? To address these questions, we propose an original framework connecting ideas from Sen and Fricker and address the specific case of six pilot courses in UNIMINUTO University (Colombia), by using a qualitative methodology and information from interviews, workshops, and secondary sources. Results suggest that (1) fostering social innovation competencies by connecting teaching processes with local communities may expand epistemic capabilities; (2) very different factors, internal and external, are at play in these processes; and (3) they are also full of potential tensions and contradictions regarding their contribution to epistemic justice

PITPs as targets for selectively interfering with phosphoinositide signaling in cells

Sec14-like phosphatidylinositol transfer proteins (PITPs) integrate diverse territories of intracellular lipid metabolism with stimulated phosphatidylinositol-4-phosphate production and are discriminating portals for interrogating phosphoinositide signaling. Yet, neither Sec14-like PITPs nor PITPs in general have been exploited as targets for chemical inhibition for such purposes. Herein, we validate what is to our knowledge the first small-molecule inhibitors (SMIs) of the yeast PITP Sec14. These SMIs are nitrophenyl(4-(2-methoxyphenyl)piperazin-1-yl)methanones (NPPMs) and are effective inhibitors in vitro and in vivo. We further establish that Sec14 is the sole essential NPPM target in yeast and that NPPMs exhibit exquisite targeting specificities for Sec14 (relative to related Sec14-like PITPs), propose a mechanism for how NPPMs exert their inhibitory effects and demonstrate that NPPMs exhibit exquisite pathway selectivity in inhibiting phosphoinositide signaling in cells. These data deliver proof of concept that PITP-directed SMIs offer new and generally applicable avenues for intervening with phosphoinositide signaling pathways with selectivities superior to those afforded by contemporary lipid kinase–directed strategies