BOAVENTURA DE SOUSA SANTOS
Epistemologies of the South: Decolonizing Art and Knowledge
Starting from the assumption that there is no global social justice without global cognitive justice, what are the tasks involved in decolonizing knowledge? Introduced as a paradigmatic shift, Boaventura de Sousa Santos will unfold the key concepts converging in his proposition “epistemologies of the south”: abyssal line, sociology of absences, sociology of emergences, ecology of knowledges, intercultural translation and artisanship of practices. Tracing the differences between art as an institution and art as the practice of artists, Sousa Santos will propose the cantilever, a structural element borrowed from architecture and civil construction, as a metaphor to characterize the artist as the one who may walk on the abyssal line and see both sides of it.
Boaventura de Sousa Santos is Professor of Sociology, University of Coimbra and Distinguished Legal Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is Director of the Centre for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra and has written and published widely on the issues of globalization, sociology of law and the state, epistemology and movements. Sousa Santos is the author of numerous monographs, such as If God Were a Human Rights Activist (2013) and Epistemologies of the South. Justice against Epistemicide (2014).