Asides

Global South Studies


This digital platform intends to provide a conceptual mapping of key concepts, moments, thinkers, and issues for the field of Global South Studies and to serve as an online forum for an international and interdisciplinary scholarly community.

Pluriverse now in paper

Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary contains over one hundred essays on transformative initiatives and alternatives to the currently dominant processes of globalized development, including its structural roots in modernity, capitalism, state domination, and masculinist values. It offers critical essays on mainstream solutions that ‘greenwash’ development and presents radically different worldviews and practices from around the world that point to an ecologically wise and socially just world.

Researching South-South Development Cooperation | The Politics of Knowledge Production | 

Coming out in July 2019

This interdisciplinary book draws on voices from across the Global South and North to explore the epistemological and related methodological challenges and opportunities associated with researching South-South development cooperation, asking what these trends mean for the politics of knowledge production. Chapters are interspersed with shorter vignettes, which aim to share examples from first-hand participation in and observation of South-South development cooperation initiatives.

Source: Researching South-South Development Cooperation | The Politics of Knowledge Production | Taylor & Francis Group

On the Pursuit of Good Living in Highland Ecuador: Critical Indigenous Discourses of Sumak Kawsay

This article is a welcome analysis of the different versions of Buen Vivir and the conditions of their emergence in modern Altiplano South America.

Quick, Joe, and James T. Spartz. 2018. “On the Pursuit of Good Living in Highland Ecuador: Critical Indigenous Discourses of Sumak Kawsay.” Latin American Research Review 53 (4): 757–69.

Sumak kawsay, a vision of good living originating in the thought of indigenous intellectuals, has attracted many commentators since its incorporation into Ecuador’s 2008 constitution. But it remains unclear in much of the secondary literature how the discourse of sumak kawsay and its Spanish derivative buen vivir relate to the day-to-day experiences of indigenous people. We address this lack of clarity through a three-part exploration of Kichwa perspectives on the good life. First, we describe how day-to-day discussions are more likely to revolve around the actually existing life of struggle. Then we analyze an artistic genre that illustrates how decolonized indigenous lives might look. Finally, we examine how the decolonial political philosophy of sumak kawsay has emerged out of concerted collective efforts to overcome the life of struggle. We consider how these three instances of discourse relate to a long Andean history of looking to the past for an alternative to the hardships of the present, and conclude with a call to take indigenous perspectives more fully into account when concepts such as sumak kawsay are invoked by nonindigenous actors.

Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education | Mapping the Long View 

Linda Tuhiwai Smith has co-edited a new volume on decolonisation and education, including perspectives across Moana and the Americas.

“to say water is life, land is our first teacher, and to ignore Indigenous presence and relationship with those lands and waters, is to miss the point entirely. Indigenous feminist scholarship has been especially careful to remind: there is no decolonization without Indigenous presence on Indigenous land and waters.”

Source: Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education | Mapping the Long View | Taylor & Francis Group