Care and the ethics of care
The year 2024 has passed with our successful inaugural international symposium on Global South Studies (GSS) centralizing southern knowledges and empowering emerging scholars in the Global South. Our endeavors to organize this intellectual debate have received many compliments from leading scholars in interdisciplinary and active participation from both domestic and international scholars, practitioners, lecturers, and graduate and undergraduate students. On the ground that, in 2025, we aim to shift the way to understand Global South from a static and monolithic construct to an action as doing. Global South is a gerund and actively engaging with shifting and evolving scholarship of decolonization and deconstruction of knowledge, power, and research work.
The symposium this year will be our seamless effort to re-think and then re-construct geopolitics of knowledge and intellectual power through Southern theory. As posited by Raewyn Connell, an Australian trans sociologist, in their recent key text, Southern Theory (2020), it is crucial to note that intellectuals from colonial and postcolonial societies have also produced important analyses of Global North societies and worldwide structures. Such scholars as Vina Adriany, Fiona Blaikie, Deevia Bhana, Ly Tran, Ethan Trinh, Xuan Thuy Nguyen, and more to count who are integral parts of the GSS collective are contributing greatly to what we call ethico-onto-epistemological turn under colonialism or in the postcolonial periphery where the conceptual work is produced alternatively with care. Key to our symposium in 2025 will be the concept of care and the work on care.
Care, as contemplated and grounded in Southern theory, cultures, and societies moves beyond western definitions and theorizing of care and ethics of care. Care is not simply understood as a moral orientation in contested and conventional settings, but constructed and embedded in socio-cultural narratives of being, living, and transforming/becoming. Care as an action for social change is interrogated and potentially re-imagined in transdisciplinary landscapes where boundaries in research and scholarship creation are transparent and porous: in families, in schools, in relationships, in memories, in mobilities, in thoughts and in social and virtual realities/technologies, and in affects/fantasies.
The GSS 2025 is intended to go beyond an academic gathering, a conference that is constrained by ‘high scholarship’ norms and conventions that might restrict public engagement. Akin to local praxes of care and moving ontologies of care among communities and within histories and cultures, i.e., in traditions and beliefs, in texts and literatures, in old stories, lullabies and folklores, scholarly attention to care via research and scholarship has shown the complexity of care. Care as a porous and shifting construct far beyond any western disciplinary and theoretical grounds might need to be contemplated and even re-configured through different canons and approaches. Care in GSS 2025 is encapsulated in a scene of everyday life, e.g., a mother singing a traditional lullaby to her child who is sleeping in a hammock. Care, we perceive and acknowledge in this year’s symposium, has many acts and takes forms of presentation in the Global South cultures and societies. Therefore, care, as Raewyn Connell posits, transcends considerations of theorists at the metropole. The work on care connects different formations of knowledge in the periphery with each other and with knowledge from the metropole.
We are drawn to interdisciplinary lenses and critical approaches to the work on care as well as studies that look at, inquire about, and put into a critical discourse around care. By emphasizing the importance of interdisciplinary research paradigms, we welcome work that is quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods in focus and demonstrates a concentration on offering a critical analysis of what it means by care and how care is formed and performed in the Global South from different perspectives: history and philosophy, cultural studies, social theory, psychology, education, arts, media and communication, linguistics, business and economics, management and development, gender and sexuality, ethnic studies, etc. Key to the symposium is the reconfiguration of Global South as wholistically constructed and embodied in an embracement of interdisciplinary arts, humanities, and social sciences.