Exactly...

In a slightly different vein than we work, the idea behind this article still holds: http://www.universityaffairs.ca/weird-science.aspx...


And WEIRD is a great way of summing up the global North, I might add.

English as the "lingua franca" of academia? Inside Higher Ed

This article just popped up in my feed, and I thought I'd share it, as it gets at one of the problems we have at the Global Social Thought Project. 


http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/university_of_venus/do_you_speak


This temporary site is set up to be published in English, though we do have a Google Translate API included so that you can read a (probably pretty close) translation of the postings in your own language. And one of the end products of the Project - the compilation of an anthology of social theory works from around the world - will end up being published in English, though our plan is to provide online access to the original language versions of the pieces we publish. But in essence, we run through English. We'll accept submissions to the anthology in French and Spanish as well (because these are the languages the four coordinators know in total), but for the most part, this is an English-language project. 


That presents with a bit of a problem, for precisely the reasons laid out in this article. There are people whose works we want to understand and who we want to know and work with who simply don't speak English (or French or Spanish or...), or don't do so well enough that their work would be "of publishable quality." Do we leave these pieces aside? Do we require the contributor to have them translated into English/French/Spanish at their expense, which might be nigh impossible? Or do we have them translated, and if so, what about all those traces of meaning that get lost when putting things into English? 


Better still is putting it like this: Does requiring submission in the three major colonial languages reinforce the epistemic hegemony we're working to overturn? This is a constant question for us at GSTP, and I don't know how well we'll be able to answer it. 

Googling Africa - Foreign Policy Magazine

An interesting piece on the global politics of information management... http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/10/21/googling_africa

The quest for partnerships and the "collective subject"

A project such as this is an odd (and fairly massive) beast. Just on its face, it's actually three different projects. The first of these proposes to study social theory texts produced outside North America and Western Europe - meaning that there are somewhere near 200 different countries whose social-theoretical works we seek to examine, or to have translated so that we can examine them. After that comes the examination of the production of these texts as a practice, one that takes place within a particular historical, cultural, political, and economic - in other words, material - context. Even beyond this, we propose to study the concept of epistemic hegemony - the extent to which the episteme of the global North dictates, determines, and even dominates the various epistemes that develop throughout the global South. Doing this through examining the travel of bodies (through curriculum vita data) and the movement of ideas (through citation data), we think, will yield a map of the ways in which epistemic hegemony operates in the world - the lines along which ways of thinking about the world are reproduced and maintained.


In order to do this, though, we need to tap into the networks of theorists that are hidden from scholars working in the North. Those of us working in North America, the UK, Australia, and Western Europe are used to established national and international associations and have the ability through a couple of clicks to find people working on similar problems or in parallel areas. Elsewhere in the world, though, there isn't this same infrastructure. There are, of course, national sociological associations (http://www.isa-sociology.org/colmemb/index.htm), but theorists may not be members of them. And the list linked above doesn't include all the countries of the world, and certainly doesn't have regional links. But theorists in one country know other theorists in that country, who have links to other thinkers in other countries, and so on - and this is in part what this project is seeking to discover and to foster. The key to this is the identification and development of explicit partnerships in the various regions of the world. Already, the core working group includes scholars in Canada, the UK, India, and Japan, and Scott will be travelling to Morocco in November 2010 in order to try to develop a partnership there.


But what does that "partnership" actually mean? In part, that partnership will serve as a networking conduit - a way for this project to be introduced to theorists working in the region of that partnership and vice versa. As much as the coordinators of this project want to gain access to the valuable ideas being produced in the global South and to bring them to the eyes of theorists in the North, we also know that there can be suspicion regarding these kinds of projects. Working through officially-established partnerships, as we seek to do, will hopefully go to ensure that there is a greater degree of trust and security about the relationship - that we're not out looking for the Elgin Marbles of social theory, so to speak, but rather to increase the number of voices taking part in the dialogues about our collective future.


We also envision ourselves as beginning to work through a model that we call the "collective subject." Rather than texts and data being extracted from the South and brought back to the North for analysis, we want to work side by side with our partners throughout the world to interpret, analyse, and hold against the material conditions of their production. By working on the analyses together with scholars from both North and South, we believe that we will be able to model the very process we're seeking to foster with the Global Social Thought Project, finding ways to learn from one another, to treat epistemological perspectives and theoretical traditions equitably, and to make some headway toward overcoming the hegemony we want to map. After all, it would be kind of fruitless to propose ways to get around structural blockages in the world that prevent Southern ideas from being read and learned from by Northerners that did not involve full cooperation and collaboration on that research process.

What is the Global Social Thought Project?

Welcome. You've reached the temporary home of the Global Social Thought Project. 

This project has one very simple goal (and a number of much more complex ones) - to help social theorists from around the globe engage in dialogue and collaborative ventures regarding their work and our broader efforts to theorise the state of the world today. 

The promise of globalisation and the creation of the Internet was that a flattening of the world would occur, allowing everyone around the world instantaneous access to ideas and exchanges across geographic borders and oceans, and an equality of those ideas. This, however, is not the case; while those in the global North have this kind of access, many in the South are left without the ability to access the ideas of others, either in the South or the North, or to disseminate their ideas, leaving a kind of "epistemic hegemony" of the North/West in place. As well, those of us in the North who want to understand the ideas of scholars in the South are unable to do so, by virtue of language or the lack of material resources available to scholars in the South to get their work published or for publishers to distribute works more than regionally. 

We believe that the works of scholars in the global South need a larger audience, have much to teach theorists in the North, and that their broader distribution can serve to break down the epistemic hegemony of the North. 

We are in the process of building a web portal that we hope will give theorists trained in or working outside of North America and Western Europe (the Global South) a space to have their works web-published, read, and engaged with by other theorists from around the globe, as well as a space to engage in broader discussions and pursue collaborative projects. 

As well, we are also in the process of building what we call "neighbourhood theory networks" - regional forums in which scholars who may not know one another's work well can come together and engage in dialogue and intellectual exchange on an annual basis. In February 2011, we will be having our second meeting of the Asian Social Theory Forum in Bangalore, India, following on the heels of our successful first meeting in Bangkok in December 2009. We are also looking to work with local coordinators in Central America, South America, North Africa and the Middle East, and East, West, and Southern Africa to establish neighbourhood theory networks in those areas. (If you are interested in participating in this project as a regional coordinator, please contact me at globalsocialthought [at] gmail [dot] com. 

The co-coordinators of this project are: 

-- Prof Scott Schaffer (PhD, York U, Canada), Associate Professor of Sociology at The University of Western Ontario

-- Prof Ananta Kumar Giri (PhD, Johns Hopkins), Associate Professor, Madras Institute of Development Studies, India

-- Prof Andrew Smith (PhD, Glasgow), Senior Lecture, Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Applied Social Sciences, The University of Glasgow

-- Prof John Clammer, Professor of Sociology and Asian Studies, United Nations University, Tokyo.

Regional coordinators in Central America, South America, North Africa and the Middle East, and East, West, and Southern Africa are also sought. 

In future posts, we will lay out the theoretical foundations of the project, as well as the particulars of what the project will be doing. If you are interested in participating in it, whether as a regional coordinator, a contributor to our larger discussions, or a supportive well-wisher, please contact us. We would be happy to hear from you.