zum Inhalt springen
Workshop

The South Experience - Critical Discourse and Inequalities: Perspectives from the "lusophone" South

Cologne, 25 - 26 September 2017

This interdisciplinary Workshop brought together lusophone scholars from the so-called „Global South“ and „Global North“ with the goal to discuss core terms such as inequality, globalization and development, along with the concepts of identity and memory. It marked the constitutive event for a long-term cooperation network including researchers from Angola, Brazil, Mozambique, Brazil, Portugal, and Germany that aims to bridge the epistemic, social, and political divides that continue to mark the global socio-political and academic landscape. In recent years, these inequalities have increasingly become the subject of diverse critical schools such as Southern studies (Raewynn). Still, despite this solidarian rhetoric, real-life opportunities of mutual egalitarian exchange of knowledge and knowledge production remain scarce – both among scholars of the south and between researchers based in the North / South, respectively. Scholars continue to ‚other‘ their research subjects; apologetic Northerners tend to fashion the „South“ as their imagined other, while Southerners defend themselves against Eurocentrism risking to fall into the ethnocentric / nationalistic trap. The goal of this workshop was to critically interrogate one another’s concepts; identify similarities, differences, and biases; and to learn from each others research fi ndings and methodological approaches.


Funded and / or organized by: Competence Area IV, Department of Romance Studies, Global South Studies Center, Institute for African Studies and Egyptology and Portuguese Brazilian Institute.