ICAS:MP’s new research focus ‘Theory from the South’ functions as an overarching rubric for scholarship that seeks to generate new concepts and propositions from histories, experiences and traditions of southern societies. Philosophy and theory are often presented as a narrative of canonical western European thinkers – from Plato and Aristotle through Hegel and Marx to Foucault and Agamben – and taught as such, even in southern academies. Postcolonial and decolonial scholars have provincialized this overwhelmingly Eurocentric imagination of theory and criticised its universalistic pretensions by showing how such theories may not seamlessly apply to other-than-European contexts. However, much more work needs to be done in order to go beyond critique and undertake the creative task of generating alternative concepts and principles, which, while being situated in different locales, have a general if not global purchase. Theory from the South as an intellectual project encourages new kinds of conceptual work that takes comparison, translation and multilinguality seriously and works towards a decolonized theoretical subjectivity for the world at large. Scholars may work with different intellectual traditions as well as diverse practices and life-worlds as their research materials. However, it is expected that their research will transcend the empirical register and work towards a generalisable framework of study and analysis that will have relevance to academies of both the north and the south.
Researchers who work on one the following topics are invited to apply: i) Decolonizing Social Theory; ii) Precolonial World Views and Emergent Futures; iii) Thinking Across Intellectual Traditions
