Knowledge and Global Power: Making New Sciences in the South

Knowledge and Global Power is a ground-breaking, large-scale international study which examines the processes and politics by which knowledge is produced, distributed and validated globally. Identifying how the former colonial nations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the rich countries of Europe and North America continue to dominate the global knowledge economy, Fran Collyer, Raewyn Connell, Joo Maia and Robert Morrell examine how these institutionalised power relations continue to affect the opportunities and experiences of knowledge producers in both 'Northern' nations and the majority world of the global 'South'. The working lives of 'Southern' researchers in new, socially and politically important research fields, which traverse the disciplinary spectrum (HIV/AIDS, climate change and gender studies), are shown to demonstrate emphatically that 'place matters', in ways that will profoundly affect future understandings and discussions of research, scholarship and knowledge itself. But it also shows that knowledge workers in the global South have room to move, setting agendas and forming local knowledge.

About the Author :
Associate Professor Fran Collyer is a sociologist at the University of Sydney in the Department of Sociology and Social Policy. She is Senior Editorial Adviser to the Health Sociology Review, and on the Editorial Advisory Board of Sociology, a Journal of the British Sociological Association. Her research interests span the sociology of knowledge and the sociology of health and medicine. Research has focused on the history of sociology, the formation of disciplines and institutions, the globalisation of knowledge, the privatisation of healthcare services, the sociology of the healthcare systems and its inequalities. Recent books include Mapping the Sociology of Health and Medicine (2012), for which she won the Stephen Crook Memorial Award for the best Australian monograph 2012–13, and the Palgrave Handbook of Social Theory in Health, Illness and Medicine (2015). More detail: http://sydney.edu.au/arts/sociology_social_policy/staff/profiles/fran.collyer.php Raewyn Connell is Professor Emerita at the University of Sydney, and a life member of the National Tertiary Education Union. Recent books are Gender Reckonings (with James Messerschmidt, Michael Messner and Patricia Yancey Martin 2018), Gender: In World Perspective (with Rebecca Pearse 2015), and Southern Theory (2007). Her work has been translated into nineteen languages. Raewyn has taught at universities in Australia, Canada, Germany and the USA, and is a long-term participant in the labour movement and peace movement. More detail: www.raewynconnell.net. João Maia lives in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He holds a PhD in Sociology and currently teaches in the School of Social Sciences (CPDOC) at Fundação Getulio Vargas. He has done research on the history of social sciences, Brazilian social thought and sociological theory in the global South. His most recent articles in English are ‘History of sociology and the quest for intellectual autonomy in the global South: the cases of Alberto Guerreiro Ramos and Syed Hussein Alatas’ (Current Sociology 2014) and ‘Space, social theory and peripheral imagination: de-colonial debates and Brazilian intellectual history’ (International Sociology 2011). João also blogs (in Portuguese) about sociology and public life in: avidapublicadasociologia.wordpress.com Robert Morrell was born and lives in South Africa. He is an historian by training and currently works in Research Development in the Office of the Vice Chancellor at the University of Cape Town. Robert’s major research activity has concentrated on questions of gender in Africa with a specific focus on masculinities in Southern Africa. Among his books are From Boys to Gentlemen: Settler Masculinity in Colonial Natal (2001) and (with Debbie Epstein, Elaine Unterhalter, Deevia Bhana and Relebohile Moletsane) Towards Gender Equality (2009). He has edited Changing Men in Southern Africa (2001) and (with Lahoucine Ouzgane) African Masculinities (2005). A new area of his research is in the area of knowledge production. Together with Brenda Cooper, Robert edited Africa-Centred Knowledges: Crossing Fields and Worlds (2014).