Why and How to Take a Distance from the Western Critical Tradition
Channel: Havens Wright Center for Social Justice
Date: 2022-09-29

A lecture by Boaventura de Sousa Santos examining the stagnation of western critical theory to search for and develop alternatives for the realization of social emancipation. This "exhaustion" stems from the Global North's colonial relationship with the Global South; the Global North is unable to understand the struggles of social movements in the Global South because they are framed in ways western critical tradition cannot understand. Since the Global North cannot "see" or "read" these struggles, it is blind to them, leaving them un(der)theorized. What's more, because the struggles of the Global South do not correspond with preexisting theory, that theory is largely irrelevant. He suggests the need to develop an epistemology of the South - a quest for new knowledge and new forms of knowledge production based on experiences and struggles of classes/social groups that have suffered injustices, discrimination, and oppression of at the hands of capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy. He also emphasizes an ecology of knowledge - all knowledge is, in a sense, incomplete, and some knowledge may create ignorance of another kind - and that knowledge must be seen as non-hierarchal.

This event was co-sponsored by the Latin American, Caribbean and Iberian Studies (LACIS) Program, the Center for European Studies, and Global Studies at UW-Madison.

Boaventura de Sousa Santos is Professor of Sociology, University of Coimbra (Portugal), Distinguished Legal Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Global Legal Scholar at the University of Warwick. He is director of the Center for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra and has written and published widely on the issues of globalization, sociology of law and the state, epistemology, social movements and the World Social Forum. He has been awarded several prizes, most recently the Science and Technology Prize of Mexico, 2010  and the Kalven Jr. Prize of the Law and Society Association, 2011. His most recent books in English include The Rise of the Global Left: The World Social Forum and Beyond (Zed Books, 2006); Democratizing Democracy: Beyond the Liberal Democratic Canon (Verso, 2005); Another Production is Possible: Beyond the Capitalist Canon (Verso, 2006); Another Knowledge is Possible: Beyond Northern Epistemologies (Verso 2007); and Voices of the World (Verso 2010).