Thinking from the global south
Interviewed for La Jornada Semanal of Mexico by Mario Bravo, on Sunday, November 16, among other topics, Pablo Vommaro He was asked about how to ensure that the knowledge, experiences, and expertise of the global south can be revitalized and contribute to social debate in a Latin American and Caribbean region that, according to the journalist, is still largely inhabited by a rather Eurocentric academy.
“That has to do with decentering ourselves, the Executive Director of the Latin American Council of Social Sciences replied. CLACSO fosters numerous collaborative and working processes with Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, which raises the question of how we conceive of ourselves as a region, an academic community, and an epistemic community. It's crucial to examine how we reposition ourselves because, often, we continue to reproduce the theories that reach us from the Global North: it seems that this is the only place where philosophy is produced. In the Global South, it's believed that our knowledge lacks the strength of a gnoseological and ontological system like philosophy. This subordination is deeply ingrained within academia itself, and we must work diligently on this issue. Part of piercing these rigid frameworks involves allowing ourselves to be influenced, and this means repositioning ourselves within an intellectual geopolitics and a geopolitics of knowledge.
