Southern Theory
Southern Theory is an intellectual resource which enables us to think beyond the established frames of reference. As such it brings new insights and innovations to real world issues and problems. The knowledge hierarchies in health, education and social science are dominated by knowledge produced from Anglo-centric neoliberal cultures and typically construct minority cultures in deficit. Southern
theory aims to disrupt knowledge hierarchies and make hitherto ‘othered’ and emerging knowledges visible, available and valued. These hold promise as intellectual resources to address pressing problems of inequality and sustainability.
Southern theory is a body of work in the tradition of critical theories. Prathama Banerjee (2021) positions Southern theory after the key moments of postcolonial and decolonial criticism which showed up euro/american theory’s provincial nature, negated its universalist claims and exposed its complicity in regimes of colonial power and violence. Importantly it has shown up the complicity of the nation form in colonial technologies of rule. She contends that Southern theory is decidedly not associated with nationhood. Banerjee argues that Southern Theory is a mode of breaching the intellectual borders of established geopolitical and disciplinary forms that have been inherited from colonial modernity. Southern Theory is a mode of thinking across traditions and of thinking against the grain of progressivist linear histories. It brings pasts and new possibilities into play with each other. Southern theory is attentive to the politics of knowledge and knowledge production in colonial and neo-liberal regimes. It encourages us to be aware and attentive to enduring a-priori knowledges as well as those formed in the context of people’s ‘suffering and struggles against late neo-liberalism, capitalism,
colonialism, patriarchy and imperialism orders and the unique epistemologies that have emerged out of these conditions’ (de Sousa Santos, B. 2014). Doing southern theory’ involves “identifying and contesting” academic knowledge production processes, “bearing witness” to the influence of the global north’s “epistemic indifference”, curating and/or translating neglected southern intellectual work to foreground “discredited/disenfranchised knowledges”; and “mobilizing southern experiences and knowledges as legitimate intellectual resources” (Takayama, Heimans, Amazan and Maniam, 2016:11).
The discipline of early childhood education has good examples of these intellectual practices that are attentive to attentive to the politics of knowledge and knowledge production in colonial, post-colonial and neo-liberal regimes. In the 1990s, a reconceptualist movement of scholars questioned the cultural bias of child development theory which was at the time singularly located in euro/American and middle-class cultures (Cannella and Viruru 2004). Practice guidelines in Australia and Aotearoa now reflect concepts of children, families and learning that are developed outside of as well as within the dominant and dominating conceptual framework of Eurocentric child development theory. More recently, Indigenous knowledges and practices are becoming a key knowledge to support early childhood education and care practitioners. These knowledges and practices may be those that existed prior to colonisation but include those developed out of the experience of colonisation. Like Southern theory itself, these knowledges are intellectual resources that help redress material, cultural and intellectual inequalities.
By engaging Southern theory through the dual lens of education and health practice we are able to consider how methods of knowledge production are transnational, transdisciplinary and highly mobile. Dominant, reclaimed and new knowledges and methods move across national borders. There is for example an emerging field of Southern Theory studies coming out of Europe by scholars interested in
the equality claims of marginalised groups within their own nation and globally. Further, we argue that Southern theory can help us think anew about knowledges that are marginalised within and across disciplines – early childhood knowledge is subject to marginalisation to school education (a process which has been named – schoolification) education knowledge is often subordinate to health knowledge. Southern theory honours thinking that emerges from diverse starting points and departs from dominant euro/American tradition of knowledge and knowledge production
