Challenging White Studies
Almost total Western domination of academic studies is a sad and oppressive fact of life in the universities and colleges of Asia, Africa and South America. The actual knowledge generating centres are all – almost naturally, it appears – located in the West and they continue to supply the categories and terms for all intellectual debates and academic research. They constitute the core, while we keep ourselves (or are kept) at the periphery. They create; we copy and apply. We do not challenge the underlying assumptions. We are afraid of doing so.
Whether we teach sociology, philosophy, ethics, history, anthropology, or whatever, we teach nothing of our own. We teach only borrowed material, cooked in other people’s brains, often written in languages we do not even speak or understand. Almost all academic studies in higher educational institutions today reflect the worldview of the European knowledge system and they simply assume that this knowledge system, though born within a specific cultural framework and time, is a ‘universal’ for all human societies on the planet .
Multiversity organised two international meetings in Penang of scholars and academics from Asia, Africa and South America to challenge the continued teaching of Eurocentric social sciences in our colleges and universities. At the present moment, some scholars are actively engaged in the challenging task of formulating curricula for the social sciences that transcend the concerns of Eurocentric studies.
We welcome scholars and academics who would like to join us in this intellectual adventure of liberation from Eurocentrism at all levels.
Multiversity Conference I (Transcript in full)
Multiversity Conference II (Transcript in full)
Multiversity Conference III
Multiversity Conference IV Penang June 27-29, 2011
