The epistemologies of the South and the future of the university
Boaventura de Sousa Santos
Abstract
Abstract Even though the university has the potential to help humanity in what amounts to a paradigmatic transition, it has been very restrictive and very selective in the kinds of knowledges it validates. In fact, the kinds of knowledges in which it has excelled are those most responsible for the paradigmatic crisis in which humanity finds itself. In a nutshell, the paradigmatic change calls for cognitive justice, justice for the different ways of knowing that circulate in society. Cognitive justice is the polar opposite of ‘anything goes’. The assumption is that there is no global social justice without global cognitive justice, justice among knowledges. Looking back, while privileging one specific kind of knowledge and, indeed, granting it a cognitive monopoly, the university has been the privileged site for producing and legitimating cognitive injustice. As a result, the immense epistemic diversity of the world has been ignored or suppressed. In the following, I identify the problem and the promise for overcoming it.