About

The Global South Workshop supports and mentors interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary work that moves toward decentering a singular historical vision of the Global South. The workshop will explore alternative genealogies, geographies, and methods for thinking about the conditions of precarity produced through hegemonic structures of state power under late capitalism and reimagine the disciplinary canonicity that underlie our epistemologies of race and ethnicity. Critical to these interpretative moves is a willingness to address the social and political networks that traverse aligned and non-aligned geopolitics, including “Third World” and “Second World” spaces, while challenging the disarticulation of specific local, historical, political, and economic conditions and the static geopolitical vision that the term Global South might imply. The workshop takes the Global South as referring to a post-Cold War cartography that includes Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East but it also considers the south side of Chicago, the U.S. South, and the former Soviet East as part of the South. Within these capacious geographic frames, the workshop is especially attentive to the political and racialized subjectivities of multiple souths, the formations and fragilities of their lateral solidarities and the deeper genealogies of the Global South.