I am a co-founder of the Global (De)Centre (GDC), an international network of academics, culture makers, cultural managers, and people who use culture in their activism to produce, disseminate, teach about, and act upon knowledge in more inclusive ways. We try to be truly international (not just North America and Europe); truly interdisciplinary (not just humanists and social scientists); to reconstruct as well as deconstruct by not stopping at critique but always charting a positive way forward; and to trade in the ego, competition, and hubris that often reigns in the classroom or museum gallery for one of humility, generosity, and collaboration.
Projects
The GDC has working groups on migration and mobility, epistemology and pedagogy, and arts and culture. Some of our projects include:
- A book entitled, Southern Attitudes in the Social Sciences: Pathways toward a Renewed Professional Ethos, that I am co-editing with Cláudio Costa Pinheiro, and that will be published by the International Sociological Association
- Developing collective looking, listening, and drawing methodologies
- Analyzing syllabi for courses on migration and mobility from around the world to better understand trends in migration scholarship and to decenter them
- An ongoing series of public convenings on Decolonizing Decoloniality
- An unlearning project that reimagines places of learning, displaying, and conserving outside of traditional universities, museums, and archives
- Curating a Global Social Thinking Repository that will make unknown and under-represented theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical resources from around the world more widely available.
We are also exploring ways to create networks of networks of like-minded groups working toward similar goals.
For more information, please see https://globaldecentre.org.
Peggy Levitt 