Welcome to trans-hemispheric conversations
This initiative commences trans-hemispheric conversations between the cosmologies and epistemologies of the Global South. For our purposes cosmologies are ways of being, seeing, ordering, and making worlds and epistemologies are ways of knowing, producing and ordering knowledge. We center the voices of peoples marginalized by European/white colonization, slavery, and systemic racism across the world, who we refer to as Global South to capture their felt experience and to think from their experiential location regardless of physical geographical location. We open up this trans-hemispheric Global South to new dialogues that need not necessarily be reliant upon, respond to, or avoid the West to happen.
A qualitative diversity … of knowing
The Global South Cosmologies & Epistemologies Initiative seeks to promote qualitative diversity based on trans-hemispheric conversations across cosmologies and epistemologies. The hypothesis being that every society and culture on the planet has evolved from, and has had questions and explanations about, this earth and its humanities, lands, trees, waters, mountains and rocks, the air and the wind, etc. European slavery, colonization, and racism marginalized, even killed, these cosmologies, creating a hierarchical monoculture of knowing, knowledge, and know-how. These cosmologies and epistemologies cannot be separated from a people’s sense of being and its confidence and idioms to shape its presents and futures.
Heritages of knowing
Our goal is neither to respond nor dwell and reduce ourselves to mere critics always chasing the shadow of the West. We will take deliberate note of and put the West in its place as a phase or moment in the Global South experience, and proceed with how its people have self-rehumanized, self-reintellectualized, and reconstituted themselves and continue to do so. In others words, to rescue that experience away from the narrative of the colonizer and claim it as a part of the Global South story of creative resilience against impossible odds. For us, it is this self-knowledge that restores confidence to dare to invent new presents and futures, and craft ingredients and tools to get on with the job.
Necessary Knowledge
We are not simply here to produce knowledge for the sake of knowing or good theory. The goal is to produce knowledge for and through the practice of design-and-innovation-at-the-intersection of local and inbound knowledge systems. We are here to produce necessary knowledge.