As readers of this blog will know, one of my main concerns as an academic is to understand the global-North dominance of knowledge systems – and to help replace that with a more democratic, multi-centred, model of knowledge.
In July this year I gave a
keynote address, “Thirty-four degrees south: community, work and family in
neocolonial perspective”, to the Fifth International Community, Work and Family
Conference, held in Sydney. The
video of this talk is now available online, at: http://podcast.unisa.edu.au/media/work-life/RaewynConnell.mp4
In August I was involved in discussions of these issues in both north and south America. At the University of Guadalajara in Mexico, and at the University of São Paulo in Brasil, colleagues invited me to speak to academic audiences on the theme of “Decolonizing Gender”.
Here is a lively account of the session at USP: http://ensaiosdegenero.wordpress.com/2013/08/28/descolonizando-o-genero-com-raewyn-connell/.
In August I was involved in discussions of these issues in both north and south America. At the University of Guadalajara in Mexico, and at the University of São Paulo in Brasil, colleagues invited me to speak to academic audiences on the theme of “Decolonizing Gender”.
Here is a lively account of the session at USP: http://ensaiosdegenero.wordpress.com/2013/08/28/descolonizando-o-genero-com-raewyn-connell/.
 |
| At the public lecture, USP |
Meanwhile, more publications
about world social science have been coming through the pipeline. My essay “Using Southern Theory:
Decolonizing Social Thought in Theory, Research and Application” has just been
published online in the journal Planning
Theory (2 September 2013). This discusses the intelligentsias of
empires, and opens a discussion of the ways southern perspectives are already
being put to use in applied fields of
social science. I think you can find it at: http://plt.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/08/28/1473095213499216.
(Is that number greater than the number of molecules in the universe?)
An immensely detailed volume
on the sociology discipline’s entanglements with empire, past and present, has
just been published in the United States: George Steinmetz, ed., Sociology & Empire: The Imperial
Entanglements of a Discipline. Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2013. (I wrote the concluding chapter, “Understanding empire”, pp.
489-497.)
Almost at the same time, an admirable volume on the social
and international contexts of social science has appeared from Sweden: Rickard Danell, Anna Larsson & Per
Wisselgren, ed., Social Science in
Context: Historical, Sociological, and Global Persepectives. Lund, Nordic
Academic Press, 2013. (I have a chapter in this, “Between periphery and metropole:
towards a polycentric
social science”, pp.
237-255.)
The debate
is moving!