All posts by Kevin Murray

Book

Review of The Good University

Leave a comment

At a talk on southern theory in the Postcolonial Institute, Raewyn Connell invoked the imaginary ideal of the ‘smoke-filled Oxford pub’. This image seemed to epitomise what I once aspired to as an undergraduate at the University of Melbourne. Here, learned gentlemen would draw on their classical knowledge in the exchange of rhetorical contributions to a theme, augmented by puffs of the pipe and glasses of claret. 

Her recent book The Good University considers the evolution of the corporate model that has largely replaced the mortarboard with the business suit. The new ideal is a smart suited man or woman who can invoke the unlimited horizons that inspire capital, including new technologies and global markets. 

It would be tempting to feel nostalgic for the old distinction between “town and gown”. Connell’s book instead offers a plurality of models: “No single knowledge formation exhausts the human possibilities of knowing.” This includes the Visva-Bharati “world university” established in India, the Al-Azhar established in Cairo during the Fatimid dynasty, or recent models such as the Slow Professor movement in Canada.

Connell’s writing is clear and succinct, but it would have been good to see her purview extended to include less formal communities of independent scholars. Eastern models of the scholar offer an embodied understanding of learning that includes taste as well as knowledge. The generation of postgraduates that have been produced by the expansion of the university beckons some form of community that can be sustained outside formal structures. Some mention could be made of the tools that we have today for collaboration that can enable shared learning without the infrastructure that brings corporate interests. 

Raewyn Connell has been exemplary herself in sharing this knowledge through her blog on academic practices such as giving conference papers. 

We might hope for companion books that offer alternatives to the corporatised institutions – the Good Hospital or even the Good Office. 

The Good University is published by Zed Books.

News

Big Data from the South: The beginning of a conversation we must have – DATACTIVE

Aside Leave a comment

how does datafication unfold in countries with fragile democracies, flimsy economies, impending poverty? Is our conceptual and methodological toolbox able to capture and to understand the dark developments and the amazing creativity emerging at the periphery of the empire?

Source: Big Data from the South: The beginning of a conversation we must have – DATACTIVE

Education

Innovation Studies from a Southern Perspective: What New Insights for Comparative and International Education?

Aside Leave a comment

The chapter reflects on research that rethinks classic concerns of comparative and international education – the relationships between education and work and the role of education in development. The promises of knowledge-led economic growth have instead yielded increased inequality, poverty, environmental degradation and a decline in the quality of life for the majority, whether in advanced economies of the North, or least developed economies of the South. For education and training systems, the ability to understand these complex social, economic and technological challenges, interpret implications and integrate new practices in response, becomes critical. We reflect on the use of an innovation systems approach in the South, over time, to investigate the ways in which higher education responds to and interacts with, demand for skills from the economy. By highlighting the role of university actors and their interaction in networks, comparative and international researchers can move beyond dominant human capital accounts that focus only on the responsibility of higher education to become more responsive to firms, or on individuals to prepare themselves to be more employable, in a mechanistic reactive manner. This is a promising new emphasis for comparative research.

Source: Innovation Studies from a Southern Perspective: What New Insights for Comparative and International Education? | Annual Review of Comparative and International Education 2016

Texts

End of the South?

Leave a comment
In a recent article for Thesis Eleven, Nikos Papastergiadis argues that “the idea of the Global South is now over.” From the optimism of Bandung, he traces a growing complex and critical understanding of “uneven development”.  As an art theorist, his focus is particularly on its identity in global events such as Documenta. His analysis of Okwi Enwezor’s Documenta XI and Decolonial AestheSis is illuminating, but his overall scepticism about the South as a framework is not as productive.
Of course, any overarching concept leads inevitably to homogenisation, which must be resisted critically. This critique can be useful if it leads to a more responsive framework, rather than a disavowal of the political arena.
The problem with Papastergiadis’ writing is that it returns inevitably to the personal. A reader would be forgiven for expecting some alternative framework or concept emerging from this critique. Instead, we have “a couple of stories about the South and narrate the difficult relationship between art and politics from a more personal perspective”. The two anecdotes are incidental exchanges regarding personal trust between participants in global forums.
In the Santiago gathering of the South Project, the South African curator Kwesi Gule spoke about the “lucky turkeys” who attend such events. He referred to the practice of sparing a turkey before the annual bird sacrifice of Thanksgiving, drawing a parallel with the fortunate exceptions of disenfranchisement that are lucky to attend such global gatherings. I don’t think this should stop us meeting, as the face to face live argument is so important for generating the kind of revelations that Gule made. But we should always be critically reflexive of our own position in speaking for others.
While such gatherings favour the bold unmasking of illusions such as the Global South, they don’t always take cognisance of the role these frameworks can play in sustaining hope and solidarity outside the seminar room.
Hardt and Negri show an awareness of this in their support for a pre-postmodern concept of truth:
The postmodernist epistemological challenge to ‘the Enlightenment’ — its attack on master narratives and its critique of truth — also loses its liberatory aura when transposed outside the elite intellectual strata of Europe and North America. Consider, for example, civil war in El Salvador, or the similar institutions that have been established in the post-dictatorial and post-authoritarian regimes of Latin America and South Africa. In the context of state terror and mystification, clinging to the primacy of the concept of truth can be a powerful and necessary form of resistance.
(Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri Empire Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001, p. 155)
Papastergiadis’ language is threaded with poetic phrases. He describes how “a new kind of `cartography’ is woven into existence: one that is constituted through the choreographic manoeuvres that interweave motion and mooring.” While enchanting to read, and particularly to hear, such a expressions rarely provide a proposition for thinking.
If someone is going to claim the “end of the South”, they should provide an alternative that can respond to the need for solidarity and understanding between peoples and their communities.
Perhaps instead, we can look at an end to the South in a purely academic sense, and seek instead for forms of action that can further the kinds of relationships that the idea of South inspires.

Postscript

Papastergiadis, Nikos. 2017. “The End of the Global South and the Cultures of the South.” Thesis Eleven, June,
Raewyn Connell continues to provide for an engaged version of “southern theory” in her work with unions, gender activism and development of workshops. Bruno Latour’s Reset Modernity project is also an exemplary model of how academic practice can seek broader engagement.
Platforms for a more pragmatic use of the South can be found in South Ways and Joyaviva.
Image is from the Museum of the Constitutional Revolution, Isfahan, Iran
News

Critical Times – A new journal

Aside 1 Comment

Critical Times seeks to reflect upon and enact forms of transnational solidarity that draw upon critical theory and political practice from various world regions, calling into question hemispheric epistemologies in order to revitalize left critical thought for these times. Critical Times is under the editorship of Juan Obarrio.

Uncategorized

Christine Black: A Mosaic of Indigenous Legal Thought: Legendary Tales and Other Writings 

Aside Leave a comment
capture

capture

This book offers an Indigenous supplement to the rich and growing area of visual legal scholarship. Organized around three narratives, each with an associated politico-poetic reading, the book addresses three major global issues: climate change, the trade in human body parts and bio-policing. Manifesting and engaging the traditional storytelling mode of classical Indigenous ontology, these narratives convey legal and political knowledge, not merely through logical argument, but rather through the feelings o

Source: A Mosaic of Indigenous Legal Thought: Legendary Tales and Other Writings (Hardback) – Routledge

Call for papers

Crime & Justice in Asia & the Global South

Aside Leave a comment

Abstracts due 31 January 2017

Criminology has concentrated mainly on problems of crime and justice in the metropolitan centres of the Global North, while the global south has remained largely invisible in criminological thinking.  This is an historical legacy of the dominance of the social science in the northern hemisphere. This joint conference aims to redress this imbalance by providing an expansive overview of criminologies of the global periphery. Rather than being held in a city centre, the conference is being convened in the picturesque coastal city of Cairns in the far north of Queensland, Australia. It has an international airport and is within close proximity to Asia and other parts of the global south, as well as the Great Barrier Reef, Daintree Forest and a number of Indigenous communities.

Source: Crime & Justice in Asia & the Global South

Conference

Global South: A Colloquium

Leave a comment

“Global South: A Colloquium” – presented by the Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures, November 16-19, 2016
University of Virginia

November 16, 2016

Keynote Speakers

“Afro-Atlantic Genealogies of the Global South”
Laurent Dubois (History and Romance Studies, Duke University)
Wednesday, November 16, 4:00 – 6:00 p.m.
Nau Hall 101

Plenary Panel: “Southern Theory”
Juan Obarrio (Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University)

Sarah Nuttall (Literary and Cultural Studies, University of the Witwatersrand)

Moderated by Ian Baucom (Buckner W. Clay Dean of Arts & Sciences, University of Virginia)

Thursday, November 17, 4:00 – 6:00 p.m.
Nau Hall 101

“Poetry, the Global South, and the Migration of Form”
Jahan Ramazani (University of Virginia)
Friday, November 18, 4:00 – 5:30 p.m.
New Cabell Hall 236

“Where Next? The Global South Out West,” Tsitsi Jaji (English, Duke University)
Saturday, November 19, 4:00 – 6:00 p.m.
New Cabell Hall 236

Historically, the idea of the ‘Global South’ can be traced to the Brandt Report of 1980, which posited a divide between countries of the North and South according to technological development, GDP, and standard of living. A cultural genealogy of the term stretches back even further to the 1955 Africa-Asia Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, which inaugurated ‘Third World’ collaborations, decolonization movements, and heralded a sustained engagement with the postcolonial as an historical epoch.

Notwithstanding these specific genealogies, ‘Global South’ today appears as an unsettled and unsettling frame from which to contemplate the world. Some think of it as a post-Cold War era replacement for the ‘Third World’ (and so primarily covering Africa, Latin America, South and Southeast Asia, but not Europe, America and the Mediterranean worlds), while others use it synonymously with the idea of underdevelopment and deprivation wherever these are found. Yet others see it as a ‘frontier in the unfolding history of neoliberal capitalism’ and a window from which to grasp the conditions of intelligibility of our global present: historical, cultural, aesthetic, political, environmental, biomedical and technological. The antinomy with the more privileged Global North persists both in the domain of political economy and in culturalist perceptions of a decolonial reinvention and invigoration of non-Western lifeworlds.

As will be obvious from the above, the idea of the ‘Global South’ has varied inflections across the disciplines. An economist’s understanding of it does not converge with that of a historian or a literary scholar or even that of a media specialist. At the same time, the paradigmatic force of the term is not in doubt, one that makes intelligible larger constellations of meaning beyond the specific historicity of its origins in a postcolonial and post-Cold War world. The Global South currently exists at the confluence of and tension between systems of knowledge and ways of conceptualizing space, habitations, cultures, aesthetics and political economy. Our colloquium will explore the many dimensions of this concept – philosophical, historical, political, spatial and aesthetic – as they inform contemporary scholarship.

Source: “Global South: A Colloquium” – presented by the Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures, November 16-19, 2016 | IHGC

Conference

Alice invites you to a (northern) Summer School

Aside Leave a comment

The Third Edition of the International Summer School “Epistemologies of the South” is a collective space designed to meet, experience, discuss and broaden Epistemologies of the South. This school includes Boaventura de Sousa Santos, author of the epistemological proposal that gives its name to the course, researchers from the Alice project, as well as invited speakers that dialogue with the themes and perspectives under discussion. Among the latter is the well-known philosopher, political thinker and musician Lewis Gordon, along with artists and activists who will challenge and broaden the way we think and feel the world.

June 22 to 30, 2017, Curia (Portugal)