‘With and Beyond Epistemologies from the South’ by Ananta Kumar Giri

Ananta Kumar Giri from Madras Institute of Development Studies presented his research entitled ‘With and Beyond Epistemologies from the South’ at the Sociological Research Colloquium.

When: Friday, 27th January 2017 at 3:00 p.m.

Where: Seminar Room (First Floor), Department of Sociology, University of Delhi

Abstract

Our contemporary moment is a moment of crises of epistemology as part of the wider and deeper crises of modernity and the human condition. The crises of epistemology emerges from the limits of the epistemic as it is tied to epistemology of procedural certainty and closure. The crises of epistemology also reflects the limits of epistemology closed within Euro-American universe of discourse. It is in this context, the essay discusses Boaventuara de Sousa Santos’ Epistemologies from the South: Justice Against Epistemicide. Santos is a friend of the world and he collaborates with many seeking souls and social movements for a giving birth to a new world, a different world of beauty, dignity and dialogues. The essay also discusses some of the limits of Santos’s alternatives especially his lack of cultivation of the ontological. It then explores the pathways of ontological epistemology of participation which brings epistemic and ontological works and meditations in transformative and cross-cultural ways for a fuller realization of going beyond both the limits of the epistemic as well as Eurocentrism. It also explores pathways of multi-topial hermeneutics and transpositional subjectobjectiviy which involves foot-walking and foot-meditative interpretation across multiple cultures and traditions of the world.

About the Speaker

Ananta Kumar Giri is a Professor at the Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai, India. He has taught and done research in many universities in India and abroad, including Aalborg University (Denmark), Maison des sciences de l’homme, Paris (France), the University of Kentucky (USA), University of Freiburg & Humboldt University (Germany), Jagiellonian University (Poland) and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He has an abiding interest in social movements and cultural change, criticism, creativity and contemporary dialectics of transformation, theories of self, culture and society, and creative streams in education, philosophy and literature. Dr. Giri has written and edited around two dozen books in Odia and English, including Global Transformations: Postmodernity and Beyond (1998); Sameekhya o Purodrusti (Criticism and Vision of the Future, 1999); Patha Prantara Nrutattwa (Anthropology of the Street Corner, 2000); Conversations and Transformations: Toward a New Ethics of Self and Society (2002); Self-Development and Social Transformations? The Vision and Practice of Self-Study Mobilization of Swadhyaya (2008); Mochi o Darshanika (The Cobbler and the Philosopher, 2009); Sociology and Beyond: Windows and Horizons (2012), Knowledge and Human Liberation: Towards Planetary Realizations (2013); Philosophy and Anthropology: Border-Crossing and Transformations (co-edited with John Clammer, 2013); and New Horizons of Human Development (editor, 2015).

Abstract

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