๐๐๐๐๐๐๐ & ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐: ๐๐ก๐ ๐๐ฎ๐ฅ๐ญ๐ข-๐๐๐๐๐๐ญ๐ฌ ๐จ๐ ๐ญ๐ก๐ ๐๐ฅ๐จ๐๐๐ฅ ๐๐จ๐ฎ๐ญ๐ก
Following the success of the 2025 International Symposium on Care and the Ethics of Care, Global South Studies (GSS) 2026 continues our ongoing and collective effort to rethink and reconstruct the geopolitics of knowledge and intellectual power from Global South perspectives. This yearโs symposium brings together domestic and international scholars, practitioners, lecturers, and graduate and undergraduate students to reflect critically on how knowledge is produced, valued, and circulated across unequal global contexts shaped by colonial histories, development regimes, and asymmetries of recognition. Central to this effort is a sustained commitment to questioning dominant assumptions about what counts as legitimate knowledge, who is authorized to produce it, and whose experiences are rendered visible or invisible in academic and public discourse. From this standpoint, emotion and emotionality emerge as critical sites of inquiry, particularly when knowledge is understood not as detached or abstract, but as situated within lived experience, social relations, and historically formed conditions of power.
As feminist scholar Sara Ahmed (2006) has posited, emotions are not simply psychological states confined to the personal or the private. Rather, emotions circulate between bodies, institutions, and cultural forms, shaping how people come to belong, to be excluded, or to be positioned in relation to power. Emotions stick to bodies differently: some people are permitted anger, while others are expected to contain it; some forms of grief are publicly recognized, while others remain unacknowledged or dismissed. In this sense, emotions do not merely reflect social life but actively participate in organizing it, aligning individuals and groups with or against norms, values, and hierarchies. Emotionality, from this perspective, is socially and historically produced, deeply entangled with race, gender, class, nation, and coloniality, and central to how social worlds are sustained, negotiated, and contested. Approached through Global South contexts, emotion is not opposed to reason or critique, but integral to how people interpret injustice, endure precarity, imagine alternatives, and make sense of their worlds.
Emotion and emotionality are most visible in everyday life, where feelings are managed, expressed, and circulated long before they are named as political or theoretical concerns. They move between bodies, spaces, and practices, shaping ordinary interactions across families, classrooms, workplaces, communities, and digital platforms. In digital spaces, reactions, comments, emojis, and memes appear to offer immediacy and participation, yet these affective circulations are also shaped by algorithmic sorting, data extraction, and uneven visibility. Such dynamics raise questions about whose emotions are amplified, whose are ignored, and how emotional expression becomes entangled with economies of attention and value. Drawing on insights from Indigenous and posthuman scholarship, emotion can also be understood as relational and more-than-human, emerging through entanglements with environments, technologies, and other living beings (e.g. animals, plants, viruses, bacteria, rocks, rivers, landscapes). From this perspective, emotionality is not an internal state but a process of attunement that binds bodies, human and non-human, into relations of proximity, distance, and respons-ability. Attending to emotion in these everyday sites allows us to see how power is lived and felt through the ordinary textures of daily experience.
GSS 2026 welcomes interdisciplinary contributions that engage critically with emotion and emotionality across Global South societies, treating them not as supplementary themes but as central analytical and practical lenses. We invite work that is quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods in focus, and that takes diverse forms, including but not limited to panels, workshops, artistic performances, and PechaKucha presentations. Contributions may explore emotional life across the arts, humanities, and social sciences, including (but not limited) history and philosophy, anthropology, cultural studies, social theory, psychology, education, media and communication, science and technology studies, linguistics, development studies, gender and sexuality studies, and related fields. Central to the symposium is an understanding of the Global South as constituted through interconnected social, cultural, and emotional worlds, where emotionality is deeply implicated in knowledge production, political imagination, and everyday practices of โsurvivanceโ (Jesperson, 2023, p. 106) and relation, among both human and more-than-human beings.
References:
โข Ahmed, S. (2006). Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Duke University Press.
โข Jesperson, J. (2023). Trans Misogyny in the Colonial Archive: ReโMembering Trans Feminine Life and Death in New Spain, 1604โ1821. Gender & History, 36(1), 91โ111.
You can read our Call for Abstracts to submit your work through this link.