Decolonizing Philippine And Global (South) Sociologies: Towards An Agenda For Teaching And Research

Name: Decolonizing Philippine And Global (South) Sociologies: Towards An Agenda For Teaching And Research
Start: 2024-07-17T08:30:00+08:00
End: 2024-07-17T12:15:00+08:00
Location: Palma Hall / AS

Schedule

Wed Jul 17 2024 at 08:30 am to 12:15 pm

UTC+08:00

Location

Palma Hall / AS | Quezon City, MM

This event is hybrid.
Venue: Palma Hall 207, University of the Philippines Diliman
Date: 17 July 2024
Time: 8:30 AM - 12:15 PM (GMT+8)
Invited speakers:
Syed Farid ALATAS, National University of Singapore
Sujata PATEL (via Zoom), University of Hyderabad
UP Diliman speakers:
John Andrew EVANGELISTA, Department of Sociology
Ramon GUILLERMO, Center for International Studies
Caroline SCHÖPF, Department of Sociology
Description:
Recent years have seen a resurgence in critiques of Eurocentric biases in knowledge and knowledge production. Such voices have critiqued global academic stratification, elevating the globally most privileged populations in gatekeeping positions, legitimizing their authority to evaluate which sociological research is most relevant for the entire globe. It is argued that this over-selects research from powerful groups coming from the Global North, while under-selecting research from marginalized communities from the Global South, thereby inscribing Eurocentric biases in evaluating which knowledge is considered scientific, relevant, and novel. Which strategies can dismantle these hierarchies and biases? How can we affirm the significance and usefulness of decolonial/postcolonial theory? How can we orient sociological knowledge production in the Global South and its fruits back to the communities we intend to serve? This forum seeks to draw on the debates on decolonization of knowledge and dismantling of inequalities in sociological knowledge production in order to formulate a research agenda for decolonization of sociology in the Philippines and beyond.
Efforts to decolonize knowledge have been a force in the Philippine intelligentsia, and Filipino scholars are among the first globally to unmask Eurocentric biases in knowledge. As early as the 1850s, Filipinos tried to espouse a national “awakening” which resulted in friction with the dominant colonial power and its injustices (Blanco, Prado, and Aguilar 2010; Schumacher 1981). By the 1880s, illustrados such as Marcelo H. del Pilar, Graciano Lopez Jaena, and Jose Rizal challenged the notions of Spanish historiography that the Philippines were “uncivilized,” arguing that prior to colonial contact, the archipelago already possessed complex cultural and political systems (Salazar 2007), and that colonization had a negative effect on the Philippines, adversely impacting all realms of society (Rizal 1890).
Philippine sociology also has a long history of indigenization efforts, exemplified by the efforts of Randolf David, Clemen Aquino, and Gerardo Lanuza. David ([1998] 2004) recommends to see present challenges through the lens of the concrete visions of our past revolutionaries, heroes, and thinkers, in order to shed light on the issues of marginalization, inferiority, and minorization as a residue of our colonial past, and lead to emancipation from these persistent realities. Lanuza invites local scholars to embrace postmodern criticisms that produce relentless dissent against Eurocentrism and Western ideas and open spaces for local scholars to “re-create” their own theorizing that draws on local materials and resources (Lanuza 2003: 247). These contributions are just a few examples of a long-standing tradition in Philippine Sociology to resist Eurocentrism and indigenize/decolonize knowledge production. They occur in the context of over vital indigenization and decolonization efforts in the Social Sciences and Humanities, such as Sikolohiyang Pilipino, Filipinization in Philippine Anthropology, Filipino-centered historiography and Araling Pilipino.
Such positions from Filipino scholars strongly resonate with the criticisms forwarded by scholars from other parts of the Global South, which tackled Eurocentric biases in knowledge and the way it is produced. These scholars critiqued inequalities and exclusions in the political economy of global knowledge production and Western-centric biases in academic publications. Scholars who expose the coloniality of knowledge and the hegemony of cognitive empires highlight that such biases take on ideological characteristics, downplaying or masking global inequalities and exploitation of the South by the North (Mignolo 2002; Quijano 2000; Santos 2018; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2021; Go 2020; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2023, among others). Scholars researching intellectual imperialism and academic dependency have highlighted inequalities and exclusions in global knowledge production (S. F. Alatas 2003; S. H. Alatas 2000). They argue that the metrification of academia orients all knowledge production communities on the planet, including sociology, towards the globally highly ranked universities, journals, publishing houses, and highly regarded conferences, which are mostly based in the Global North (Guillermo 2023). This cements the gatekeeping function of these highly ranked academic institutions in place, where economically and racially privileged scholars tend to evaluate research according to their own, often positioned, viewpoints, and according to local—not global—criteria of relevance (Alatas 2003; Schöpf 2020).
Thus, individuals belonging to the globally most privileged groups are positioned to judge which research is globally most relevant. Such judgements may be impacted by their positionality , resulting in an over-valuation of research from the Global North and an under-valuation of research from the Global South, leading to exacerbated North-to-South flows of knowledge (Schöpf 2020). It also orients academics away from focusing on the languages, contexts, concepts, and issues of their own country and incentivizes them to focus on research agendas emanating from the Global North, rooted in social contexts and in the experiences and views of the former colonizers, not the formerly colonized (Hountondji 1990).
These open the discussions on what strategies can dismantle these inequalities and misalignments and orient Sociological knowledge production in the Global South back to the communities it intends to serve. Debates on this have stressed the importance of indigenous concepts and concept formation, language, and the urgency of cultivating autonomous social science traditions fostering local academic and theoretical lineages, and also highlighted the problems of incentive structures (Guillermo 2023). While strategies for decolonization of sociology and other fields have been formulated, they are dispersed across a wide field of literature and not always set into dialogue with one another. This forum seeks to fill this important gap, by debating questions including, but not limited to, the following:
Which steps should or should not be taken to decolonize sociological teaching and research?
What may decolonization mean for theory courses, various subject areas, research agendas, and concept formation?
How do we address the eurocentrism that exists throughout the body of theory and research in sociology and other disciplines?
How do we balance the need to write in a language that is understood by the populations we are trying to serve with the need to engage in international knowledge exchange?
How do we destratify (inter)national sociological dialogues and exchanges, and what kinds of exchanges do we want to prioritize?
How do we deal with metrification and neoliberalization of Global Academia, which may provide incentive structures that counteract decolonization efforts?
What may be the dangers and pitfalls of decolonization?
How do we deal with the danger that decolonization efforts may be co-opted by power-holding groups in the Global South, that seek to entrench their power while excluding marginalized groups?
Overall, what would an agenda towards decolonization of sociology of a Global Southern country such as the Philippines look like?