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.