From the multilingual Boaventura de Sousa Santos comes news of an important upcoming event in southern thinking:

Call for papers

Epistemologies of the South: South-South, South-North and North-South global learning
Coimbra – 10, 11, 12 July 2014

A sense of exhaustion looms over Europe. It would appear that the old world is no longer capable of rethinking its past and future.

This colloquium challenges participants to consider that an understanding of the world is much broader than a Western understanding and that therefore the possibilities for social emancipation may be different from those legitimised by the Western canon. This is the essential challenge: we do not need alternatives, but an alternative way of thinking about alternatives.

Can the anti-imperialist South teach anything to the global North? Can the global North teach anything that is not defined by centuries of colonialism and neo-colonialism, imperialism and ethno-racial supremacy? Can both learn in such a way that one day there will be no South or North?

The answers to these questions will enable proposals for theory and action to be constructed which effectively confront the logic of global exploitation, oppression and exclusion

The colloquium is structured around the following four main themes,involving the participation of scholars and activists in the global North and South:

• Democratising democracy
• Transformative constitutionalism, interculturality and the reform of the state
• Other economies
• Human rights and other grammars of human dignity

Full version of the call for papers here

To submit a proposal, please follow this link

Also in Portuguese:

and Spanish: