/library/oar/handle/123456789/19332 Sat, 27 Dec 2025 01:13:55 GMT 2025-12-27T01:13:55Z /library/oar/handle/123456789/20253 Title: Three Caribbean conferences in Jamaica and Haiti, 2016 Authors: Hickling-Hudson, Anne Abstract: The Caribbean region regularly engenders and hosts intellectually stimulating educational and cultural events. In a visit this year to Jamaica, my country of origin, I experienced three of these events in June and July. It struck me that each had a richly postcolonial element of challenging negative legacies of colonialism, which have often solidified into current norms such as insufficiently tackling intellectual exclusion, neglecting material local problems, and downplaying or ignoring local achievement and culture. I reflect below on how the conferences contributed to countering such problems and establishing creative practices in intellectual culture. Description: This article discusses the following conferences: 1. The Calabash Literary Festival, Jamaica: 3 -5 June 2016 - 2. The 41st Annual Conference of the Caribbean Studies Association (CSA), Haiti : 6-11 June 2016 - 3. Geography Anniversary Conference celebrating 50 years of the Geography Department at the University of the West Indies (UWI): 27 June – 1 July 2016 Fri, 01 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT /library/oar/handle/123456789/20253 2016-01-01T00:00:00Z /library/oar/handle/123456789/20127 Title: "The return of the excluded" feminist and postcolonial perspectives on western modernity Authors: Goedl, Doris Abstract: In political, scholarly and cultural discussions in the ‘Global North’, ideas of freedom, democracy and human rights were considered universal and legitimated for political and military interventions mostly in non-Western countries. Debates about the universality of the right to intervene are discussed in the frame of universality versus particularity. Whereas universalists defend their arguments in the name of modernity, their challengers opposed to these kinds of universal assumptions refer to the importance of particularism and relativism; yet, both groups consider modernity as their main point of reference. To overcome this stalled discussion, I look at modernity through the deconstruction of epistemic dichotomies and hierarchies in order to open up a space for critical reflection on the concept itself. Contextualizing my reflections on modernity in the rich literature by scholars who challenge the dominant Western concept of modernity, I demonstrate that Western knowledge is not universal in an epistemic sense. Rather, it can be considered as a contentious concept with problematic assumptions about an epistemically neutral subject, adopting a universalistic perspective while erasing the meaning of geopolitical location (Grosfoguel 2011). Arguing against this idea of an ‘assertive universality’, the metaphor of ’travelling theories,’ as proposed by Edward Said and Clifford Geertz, helps to reflect upon the local, social and individual positioning of knowledge. The focus of this contribution is the utilisation of feminist and postcolonial perspectives to contribute to the deconstruction of modernity as a homogenous monolithic bloc. Considering the frame itself, I question the hidden, not explicated assumptions in the production of Western knowledge. Arguing that knowledge production is not a question of geography but of epistemology, I deconstruct the modern project from the inside in order to overcome the epistemic dichotomy of modernity itself. The implications of this analysis for us as social scientists and researchers will be discussed at the end of the paper. Fri, 01 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT /library/oar/handle/123456789/20127 2016-01-01T00:00:00Z /library/oar/handle/123456789/20126 Title: Modern global imaginaries, modern subjects, enduring hierarchical relations and other possibilities Authors: Susa, Rene Abstract: This paper discusses selected dispositions and characteristics of the modern liberal/Cartesian subject observed in students’ responses to a survey on internationalization of higher education in Canada. The data on which this paper draws is part of a larger database of surveys, interviews, policy analyses and case studies that were developed within the framework of the Ethical Internationalization in Higher Education (EIHE) research project. The EIHE project was funded by the Finnish Academy of Science and was conducted between 2012-2016. This paper draws on three key findings from the responses of students (1451) of seven participating Canadian universities to present a broader (theoretical) context that could be inferred from what was observed in the data. For this purpose the paper first discusses some of the theories related to the existence and prevalence of the modern global imaginary that could be considered as a meta-framework under which such relations between the (modern) subject and his/her Other are normalized. In the next step it draws on psychoanalytical strands of decolonial and postcolonial critiques of the modern subject in an attempt to sketch some of problematic (and often unacknowledged) characteristics of the modern liberal/Cartesian subject that lead to constant re-production of binary hierarchical relations grounded on epistemic violence and privilege. Fri, 01 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT /library/oar/handle/123456789/20126 2016-01-01T00:00:00Z /library/oar/handle/123456789/20125 Title: "We shall fight, we shall win" : activist knowledge in Indian documentary film Authors: Thapliyal, Nisha Abstract: This paper scrutinizes the current politics of education in India through an analytic exposition of the film ‘We shall fight, we shall win’ (2016), a documentary about the struggle for a public common school system in India. The paper seeks to foreground the voice of the excluded indigenous communities and elaborate on the role of India’s politics and corporate media in reproducing societal stratification. Focusing on ‘activist knowledge’, which results from these struggles, the paper provides a reminder that that without the experiences of the Indigenous communities, without the listening to subaltern voices, there is an ‘epistemic break in our experiences’. Fri, 01 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT /library/oar/handle/123456789/20125 2016-01-01T00:00:00Z