Last year at this time, I was in Johannesburg, having my head rattled with all the theory I could handle. So I'm missing the firing of all those neurons right now, but trying to keep it going by following the postings of the goings-on at the Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism.
This interview with Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, professor of Science, Technology, and Society at MIT, is just more proof that I need to do more with this project. Check it at http://jhbwtc.blogspot.ca/2012/07/if-we-doubt-ourselves-who-will-have.html.
Back soon. Much sooner than this last post.
09 July 2012
13 September 2011
09 February 2011
Shaping a new world order
A very interesting piece by Mark Levine (UCI), one that raises some really good questions - like the extent to which the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions (and the others sure to follow unless some autocrats really get on the ball with genuine democratisation) are truly revolutions against the global order...
http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/02/20112611181593381.html
More thoughts soon on this whole thing. There's so much, it's taking a while to get my head around it all.
More thoughts soon on this whole thing. There's so much, it's taking a while to get my head around it all.
30 October 2010
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.
And WEIRD is a great way of summing up the global North, I might add.
29 October 2010
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.
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.
25 October 2010
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
22 October 2010
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.
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.
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