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Debates have been under way for some time over the very nature of 'foundational knowledge' in many social science disciplines. At the core of the debates lies the collapse of the universalist premises of disciplinary knowledge. Many scholars have exposed the highly provincial nature of what has been considered 'theory' and its exclusive process of knowledge production which centres largely on the institutions in the global North (Alatas, 2006a, 2013, Chen 2010; Connell, 2007, 2014, 2015; Mignolo, 2011; de Sousa Santos, 2014). For instance, modernity, the central concept in sociological theorizing, has long been conceptualized as a peculiarly Western social phenomenon, disconnected from its underside, coloniality (Bhambra, 2007; Go, 2013). These critiques have shown how the uneven flows of intellectual influence and the intellectual division of labour, which designates the West as the source of 'theories' and the Rest as 'data mine,' underpins the contemporary geopolitics of academic knowledge. Raewyn Connell's (2007) Southern Theory: The global dynamics of knowledge in social science from which this special issue has taken its cues, has both initiated and emerged out of these ongoing critiques of the state of academic knowledge and its processes of production on a global scale. |
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