Tag Archives: Portugal

Alice invites you to a (northern) Summer School

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)

Call for papers

Southern Modernisms (Porto, 19-21 Feb 15)

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Southern Modernisms (Porto, 19-21 Feb 15).

Deadline: Oct 19, 2014

The hegemonic definition of Modernism has been subjected to an intense critical revision process that began several decades ago. This process has contributed to the significant broadening of the modernist canon by challenging its primal essentialist assumptions and formalist interpretations in the fields of both the visual arts and architecture.

This conference aims to further expand this revision, as it seeks to discuss the notion of “Southern Modernisms” by considering the hypothesis that regional appropriations, both in Southern Europe and the Southern hemisphere, entailed important critical stances that have remained unseen or poorly explored by art and architectural historians. In association with the Southern Modernisms research project, we want to consider the entrenchment of southern modernisms in popular culture (folk art and vernacular architecture) as anticipating some of the premises of what would later become known as critical regionalism.

It is therefore our purpose to explore a research path that runs parallel to key claims on modernism’s intertwinement with bourgeois society and mass culture, by questioning the idea that an aesthetically significant regionalism – one that resists to the colonization of international styles and is supported by critical awareness – occurred only in the field of architecture, and can only be represented as a post-modernist turn.

Conference, Europe

Epistemologies of the South: South-South, South-North and North-South global learning

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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: