About us

What we stand for

As a team we stand for cognitive justice and epistemic freedom. We endeavour to recognize the different ways of knowing by which diverse people across the globe make sense of the world and provide meaning to their existence. Our team is driven by the desire to rethink and even unthink thinking which no longer enable a clear understanding of the world. We strive to overcome theft of history, epistemicides, culturecides, and linguicides as we push for ecologies of knowledges. In our view all human beings were born into valid and legitimate knowledge systems. For this reason, we are pursuing research that is founded on recognition of planetary human entanglements, ethics of living together, and global cognitive justice as the essential pre-requisite for all other forms of justice and freedom.

Why epistemologies of the Global South are necessary
 

Boaventura de Sousa Santos (Coimbra University), a leading scholar in epistemologies of the Global South, in his book Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide (2014) provided three compelling reasons:

• The understanding of the world by far exceeds the Western understanding of the world.
• There is no global social justice without global cognitive justice.
• The emancipatory transformations in the world may follow grammars and scripts different than those developed by Western-centric critical theory, and such diversity should be valorised.

 The epistemologies of the South enable us to ‘rethink thinking’ itself

Cathrine Odora Hoppers and Howard Richards in Rethinking Thinking: Modernity’s ‘Other’ and the Transformation of the University (2012: 8) defined it this way: 

‘‘The task for rethinking thinking is therefore precisely this: to recognize the cultural asphyxiation of those numerous ‘others’ that has been the norm, and work to bring other categories of self-definition, of dreaming, of acting, of loving, of living into the commons as a matter of universal concern.’’

With epistemologies of the South we put forward the idea of the Global South as the majority world whose knowledge cannot be ignored – listen to the provocation by Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff in Theory from the South Or, How Euro-America Is Evolving Toward Africa (2012: 1):

‘‘What if we subvert the epistemic scaffolding on which it is erected? What if we posit that, in the present moment, it is the Global South that affords privileged insight into the workings of the world at large?’’