The Idea for the Symposium
The symposium emerges from the growth of voices and tremendous academic contributions of the Global South scholars across disciplines, ranging from foundational sciences to arts and humanities. The Global South, for sociologists like Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, Emile Durkheim, and Lester Frank Ward, is a social, cultural, and political concept that denotes a global divide drawing broad distinctions between advanced and primitive institutions and societies (Dados & Connell, 2012). The phrase Global South refers to the regions of Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Oceania. As a re-colonial discourse in social and sociological theory that defines geopolitical power relations, Global South is one of a family of terms, including “Periphery”, which implies regions outside Europe and North America, mostly (though not all) low-income and often politically or culturally marginalized.
The symposium originates from the idea that aims to disrupt the conceptualization of the Global South as a peripheral disposition of academia where voices of low socio-economic-cultural scholars are silenced and their narratives are not appreciated. Through the symposium, we unite these voices and the work of scholars from the Global South, especially from Southeast Asia, to empower innovative and alternative approaches to re-search (Barad, 2007) creation and dissemination from multi and interdisciplinary areas.
Our symposium aims to
(1) promote critical thoughts and praxes from the Global South knowledges;
(2) push the boundaries of knowledge re/construction that perpetuate the north-south divide;
(3) foster innovative and alternative approaches to research-creation emerging/ed;
(4) support scientists and researchers whose work is situated in the Global South;
(5) engage voices of the Global South scholars with the global dialogue on multiple interdisciplinary research topics; and
(6) transcend the Eurocentric knowledge that has been framed by Western philosophies, theories, and praxes.
The scope of the symposium
We are particularly interested in works that contribute to re/shaping the scholarship of Global South studies, addressing burgeoning and intensive topics discussed widely by international scholars and critical thinkers, whose work transcends and disrupts the public and academic understanding of non-western societies and cultures. Topics that draw our attention feature emerging and context-specific issues in various Global South landscapes of being, becoming, and shifting, which require interdisciplinary lenses to look at, inquire about, and put into a critical discourse. 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 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.
Our Keynote & Plenary Speakers
- Dr. Fiona Blaikie, Professor in Art Education, Faculty of Education, Brock University, Canada
Private and public feelings, energy/ies and intensity/ies: Local-global a/symmetries of power in relation to pedagogy, the arts, and scholarship
- Dr. Edward Howe, Professor in Education, Thompson Rivers University, Canada
Internationalization of Canadian Higher Education: Reality or Rhetoric?
- Dr. Ethan Trinh, Associate Director, Atlanta Global Studies Center, Georgia State University, USA
A Walking Meditation on the Soils of Quê Hương: An Autohistoria-teoria Lullaby of Embracing Inbetweenness
- Dr. Vina Adriany, Professor in Gender and Early Childhood Education, Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia
Imagining “Bandung” Child
- Dr. Marleny Bonnycastle, Associate Professor in Social Work, University of Manitoba, Canada
Women’s Transformations In Colombia’s Armed Conflict And Peacebuilding Context
- Dr. Deevia Bhana, Professor in Gender and Childhood Sexuality, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
Troubling the Silencing of Sexuality in Global South Childhood Studies
- Dr. Ly Tran, Professor in Education, Deakin University, Australia
Disrupting the Global-North- centric discourse in international education through reverse student mobility and decolonisation of the curriculum
