 Okay, so once again, a warm welcome to everyone, to the fifth lecture of the Sohas World Philosophies Lectures, which we started organizing in January this year. We had quite some very interesting discussions in the last couple of months, and today promises to be yet another enlightening and interesting lecture. The Sohas World Philosophies Lecture is organized by the World Philosophies Team here at Sohas, and it's in line with how we do and teach philosophy, taking the colonial and diverse approach to teaching philosophy as a human experience, and not a Western experience. The subject head for the World Philosophies Program is Dr. Sean Hardham. Dr. Sean, are you here already? Yeah, I don't think so, but should we join you? Definitely. The guest lecturer we have today is someone whose reputation precedes him. We all know very well Professor Boaventura, the source of some, I hope I pronounced that very well. Many of us have encountered him quite a number of times. Could you please mute yourself if you join to avoid background noises? Yeah, please mute yourself. So many of us have already encountered Prof. in several of his works. We know very well the impact that such works as the end of the Cognitive Empire, the coming of age of epistemologies of the South. Epistemologies of the South, that is against epistemicide, those have been books many of us have referred to and have used in our attempt to colonize philosophy and epistemology. Please mute yourself if you are just joining. Thank you. So without further ado, it's my pleasure to introduce a guest lecturer, Professor Les Santos, and he will be presenting the lecture this evening here at UK, right to the epistemologies of the South and the task of decolonizing the university. So Santos, you have full attention. Okay, thank you very much, Alvis, and thank you very much for the invitation. I'm glad to be here with you discussing this topic. Are you hearing me? Fine? It's fine? Yes. Okay, good. Okay, I think that I propose this title because it's kind of an important topic today, the decolonizing of the university. I myself wrote recently a book with that title. And I think there is no way of decolonizing the university without decolonizing history. And in order to decolonize history, probably we have to break somehow with the knowledge that brought us here and which in spite of its so many accomplishments of which we are very proud of, it in fact, it was the knowledge that conducted all the Western modernity and therefore also the modern domination, basically capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy. And I think that this knowledge did that through three main modern instruments, modern science, modern law, and modern state. All of them, one could say structurally promoting capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy. Of course, this knowledge has been highly contradictory, because it has allowed for counter-hegemonic uses, used by the oppressed, by the domination, they resort to this kind of knowledge to promote their struggles. It has always been in a limited way and so limited that at the beginning of the 21st century, we wonder what were the gains in bringing about a freer, more just society, because that was the object, the objective of these modern instruments. And in fact, when we look around, we don't see really many reasons to be proud of all this. On the contrary, we seem to be navigating a period of regression, historical regression in many ways. And therefore, I think that this is a time is ripe for us to make some serious reflection about this topic. And therefore, I'll start by saying something about decolonizing history, then about the epistemology of the South as a possible way of conducting such decolonizing. And finally, the task for universities, for our universities. Well, the first question, so when we confront the idea of decolonizing history is what is the weight of history? Is it heavy? Is it light? Well, it depends. It is light for the inaugurational generations, those people, those generations that feel that they are at the onset of something, something new after revolution, first years of the revolution of liberation struggles. Then for them, the weight of history seems to be light. On the contrary, for those generations that feel that they themselves are coming at the end of something, I call them the after generations, the weight of history seem to be very heavy. So these two generations trying to see history in very different ways. For the after generations, the main, basically the past is either a trophy or is seen with nostalgia or resignation, sometimes triumphalism. In any case, it's closed, it's accomplished. For the inaugural generations on the contrary, the past is a mission, it's a task, it's unaccomplished, it's open. So the type of subjectivities that these two generations create are also different. Conformist subjectivities on the after generations look out or rebellious hopeful type of subjectivities. So I think that we have to see because the concepts that are used by the these two generations are very different. For the after generations, the key concepts are tradition and innovation, continuity and discontinuity. While for the inaugural generations, the key concepts are interruption, eruption, so to say. So I think that we have to see, to think a little bit about which kind of generation prevails today. Well, for the past 40 years, we have been promoting, actively promoting the after generations, because at least since the fall of the Berlin Wall, it has been said that this is the end of history, that capitalism won over all its competitors and from then on, from now on or from then on would be no major transformation in society. So in a sense, everything is closed, it's accomplished. And this is tends to put a very heavy notion on our past. Is it so? Well, I think the pandemic, in a sense, contributed to change a little bit of this. In a book that I hope will be soon available in English, titled The Future Begins Now, From the Pandemic to Utopia. I think that in fact, following Eric Habsbaum, I think that the 21st century is beginning, in fact, with this pandemic, because we are entering a period of intermittent pandemic, that will be with us in one way or the other. And I think that this pandemic is causing a kind of an inter-regnum, one would say like Gramsci and Tony Gramsci. The idea that you can see two types of opposite feelings today, even in the news. The feeling of an ending, sometimes apocalyptic. Let's look at the ecological catastrophe. It looks like that we are at the end of times and sometimes risking the very survival of the human species on Earth. And in fact, the human life is just 0.01% of the life of the planet. And our model of development, they've been trying to destroy the major balances in nature. And therefore, all the studies available show that this model of development will conduct to the recurrence of virus, of pandemics. And this will be really inscribed in our sociabilities. That's what Eric, that's why Eric Habsbaum said that, you know, the 19th century didn't begin on the 1st January of 1800. But it began with the Industrial Revolution and the 20th century began with the First World War and the Russian Revolution. I'd have to think that the 21st century is beginning with the pandemic. So we have these contradictory feelings and the subjectivities. And so I propose you today a wager. And the wager is what are the possibilities for different generations, for the two opposite generations. Could we bet on inaugural generations? For that one would need to think that probably we are not only at the end, but also at the beginning, that probably there is a call for now and a civilizatory alternative coming up, in which basically we'll develop a different understanding of our relationships with Mother Earth, the name that indigenous people call to what we call nature. And I think that the university has everything to gain to bet on the idea of inaugural generations. And if we do so, I think that we have to start by radical diagnosis of our society and show that our civilization, no matter how many accomplishments, is also a barbarism. It's a barbaric. And this barbarism is manifested in scandalous concentration of wealth, ecological catastrophe, irregular wars in which only innocent people die, violence all over, capitalism more aggressive than ever, as well as colonialism and patriarchy. So I think that we do bet on the inaugural generations, then probably will help to develop a kind of knowledge that will be adequate for them. And I don't think that the knowledge that brought us here is a good guide for the future, because it was the knowledge that in fact accomplished this idea of the end of it. The completion in fact developed, promoted, legitimized this model of society in which we live in. So I think that we are calling, if you are betting on this generation, doesn't mean, of course, that we are going to discard all the things that the current civilization has brought to us. I mean, societies don't evolve in that way. They evolve by what I call a palimpsest. And therefore layers and layers of the past civilizations will be with us. So I think that we have to pay attention to this fact. But then which kind of knowledge will guide us in that movement? Well, I think if you look particularly in social science and the money this, we have had up until now two major paradigms, epistemological paradigms. Both share the idea that knowledge is a separate activity from practice, from social transformation. And in fact, that separation was called to task by Karl Marx in that small text of 1846, in which he criticizes the materialist philosopher Ludwig van Feierbach. And his major note of that text is Thesis 11, in which Marx claimed that philosophers have up until now tried to understand the world, but the task now is not to understand the world, but to transform it. Well, I think that Marx was right in 1846, but I don't think he's fully right now. And I was trained as a Marxist, but I have to in a sense to decolonize my own Marxism to be able to say this. I think that we need both a new transformation and a new understanding. We need a Thesis 12, so to say, to guide us. So let's see which are the two paradigms and where could we look for the Thesis 11? The first paradigm is the paradigm all of us know, is the Caelian paradigm, is knowledge after the struggle, after social transformation. The owl of Minerva, as he says, flies at the dusk. That is to say, when the struggles have come to an end, things are calm, and knowledge, reflection, research can't start. So this is our main dominant paradigm of knowledge, and in fact, the one that dominates in our universities. But the problem with this paradigm of epistemology is that at the end of the struggle, only the knowledge of the winners of history survives. The losers are gone. Most of their knowledge have been suppressed, destroyed. It's not there. It is probably there. But it's of no interest for the winners of history, because in fact, the struggle in itself has ratified the excellency of their knowledges, of their epistemologies. So at the end of the struggle, only the knowledge of the winners, and in fact, this is the knowledge that we have been really developing, doing research on and teaching in our universities. It is true that we may account for the knowledges of the winners, but always from the perspective of the instruments and the methodologies and theories from the knowledge of the winners. So it is very difficult to do justice to the knowledges of the losers of history on that basis. Well, there is a second paradigm, epistemological paradigm is a minoritarian. It is Marxist paradigm. There is to say knowledge before the struggle. What Marx did basically was precisely that. The Marxist science was, and Marxist philosophy of course, was developed to prepare the working class for the tasks of revolution. Because the working class in Zeich and not Führer Zeich could not possible be a revolutionary class. So knowledge before the struggle. Well, this was a very hopeful and did lots of accomplishments around the 20th century, but also lots of frustrations. Because in fact, it was separated also in a sense from the struggle and therefore the struggle very often contradicted many of the ideals that were and the Marxist thinking, particularly after he wrote the first volume of the capital 1867. We know that after that until 1883, he wrote 30,000 pages, never published. And only now we are trying to see what is there and there's really such a wealth of knowledge that sometimes contradicts the published knowledge. So the second paradigm is not very useful either taken as it is. It may be useful, but not just as the sole paradigm. That's why I propose a third epistemological paradigm in which in fact we can really rely on the possibility of the thesis 12 is knowledge is born in struggle, neither before nor after the struggle, but while the struggles are taking place. This is the experience of most people in the world is the experience of resisting against modern domination capitalist colonial eastern patriarchal domination by the social groups that have suffered most by these dominations. Their practices, of course, our knowledge practice is also not separate from the practices, but they are knowledges. And these knowledges need to be validated. Maybe consider the knowledge of the losers of history, but they are precious. And I think we should really try to pay attention to this knowledge during the struggle. And if you look at the not just born in struggle, you can see that very often they also use in a counterhegemonic way the knowledge of the winners, but then they combine them with other knowledges, non-western knowledges, non-dominant knowledges, different kinds of knowledges. Well, I think what I call the epistemology of the South is precisely a contribution to produce several thesis 12 because I don't think that one single one will do it. But it is really an attempt to develop this idea of the knowledge in which you can validate in fact that you give capability to the knowledges of the winners of the losers of history. And if you look at that, it's very clear that for them, in fact, the main dominations have been precisely capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy. Of course, colonialism and patriarchy existed before capitalism, but they were reconfigured by capitalism. And the reason why they were reconfigured is because Sylvia Federich and many other people are already mentioned that is that the free labor cannot sustain itself without highly developed labor and non-paid labor. And these two kinds of labor have been produced by racialized bodies and sexualized bodies. And that's why capitalism cannot exist without colonialism and patriarchy. When you work with indigenous people with Afro-descendants, peasants in Africa or Dalits in India or so, as I've done in my life, it's very, for them is very obvious that colonialism is with us. It's not something of the past, as we very often in the critical theory, particularly in the Marxist critical theory, I have to say, we also thought that struggle against capitalism was the most important struggle. And in fact, the struggle against colonialism was over with political independence. Well, there were many people in the Marxist tradition that didn't agree with that. That's why they developed new concepts. Necruma was the first one in 1965 with neocolonialism. Basically at the same time that Pablo Gonzalez Casanova Rudolf Stabenach in Mexico with internal colonialism. And we could also bring in Gandhi and from the inspiration, it was very clear for Gandhi that political independence, particularly in the Nehru style, would not bring about liberation or emancipation. So for all of them, this idea is that colonialism is with us. What does this means? Is that colonialism and patriarchy, they are not the sole dominations or dimensions of modern domination. Casteism is also a domination in many countries. Ableism is also a dimension. Political religion is also a dimension. But I think that the main forms are these ones. And they in the struggle saw very, see very clearly how they are articulated. I was recently doing a study on Brazil and I could see that with Bolsonaro coming to power, capitalism became more aggressive. At the same time, racism increased. That is to say, colonialism in the form of racism increased the genocide of Black youth in the major cities, particularly in Rio de Janeiro. And also patriarchy increased violence, domestic violence, gender violence, and family side. All of them increased. That is to say, modern domination acts articulated in the drama of our time is that the resistance has been fragmented. Many anti-capitalist movements and parties have been racist and sexist. Many feminist movements have been racist and sometimes pro-capitalist. And many anti-racist or anti-colonial movements have been sexist and have been pro-capitalist. So as long as domination acts articulated and resistance fragmented, it will be very difficult to get out of this hell of domination. So I think that we need to pay attention to the struggles and the knowledges that are born in those struggles. And that's why for the Spanish of the South, it's very clear from the outset that in modern times, our societies are fractured by an abyssal line that divides. It's so radical that it is invisible. It divides society in two separate groups, the group of the fully human beings and the group of sub-human beings. This abyssal line is precisely the result of this composite domination in which racialized and sexualized bodies are degraded ontologies and therefore they create sub-human people so considered by dominant knowledge. And it is invisible. It's so radical that it is invisible because the liberal thinking that dominates our metropolitan, that is to say the sociability of the fully human thinks and makes credible pretenses that is universal without contradiction where the realities that go on on the other side of the abyssal line where racialized bodies, sexualized bodies are considered sub-humans. And they do so of course without contradiction. The first three presidents of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and James Madison, well, they were the defenders of freedom, equality of people, everybody know we the people. Well, all of them were slave owners without contradiction because slaves were commodities for sub-humans. Okay, so this contradiction is part of the result of this abyssal line. And it is not a question of the past. It exists today. If we look at 20,000 people that died in the Mediterranean in recent years, if they were US citizen, British citizen, German citizens, Portuguese citizens, probably there will be a major crisis. But they're Africans. They were Bangladeshis. They were sub-humans. So in our system, there is no humanity without sub-humanity because of the abyssal line. So if you look at this then, then we start a different kind of research with different methodologies, which are not creating, aim the creating objects but subjects. The first one, the first principle, and I can't go into detail in all of them, of course, but because, you know, as I always said, some of you have contact with the end of Cognitive Empire and the response of the South, we know that this sociology of absences is the first by means of which we can identify what is not there because it's not allowed to be there. It's produced as inexistent. It's non-existent. And how can we develop methodologies for the sociology of absences and then the sociology of emergencies, which I distinguish three of them, counter-hegemonic, counter-hegemonic uses of hegemonic instruments, ruined seeds, and liberated zones. So you can identify all different forms of emergence, the richness of wealth, of experience, social experience that have been wasted because the dominant knowledge by not, by refusing all the other ways of knowing in society produces a massive epistemic side, as I have been calling it, the destruction of knowledge. So we have to fight against such a destruction. And I think the sociology of emergencies and sociology of absences are very good instruments. Of course, they are not sociology in the conventional. In terms, in positivist terms, they are absurd. How can I do research on something that is absent that does not exist? That's precisely the limits of dominant knowledge. So from then on, I elaborated my work on what comes after that. From the sociology of emergencies, then we have a task. Once we increase the epistemological diversity of the world, then you can see that how many different knowledges are there, conceptions of nature, for instance. And therefore, we know that some of them may be incompatible. So we need the intercultural translation. We know a college of knowledge, as I call them. And in fact, if you are involved in struggles, you can see very often these are college of knowledges. I've been very active in a movement in Latin America against the toxic products by industrial agriculture, herbicides, insecticides, that poison, in fact, our foods, and poison the people that work in the fields. Well, in that struggle, it's very obvious and clear that we use together knowledge by engineers, biochemists, biologists, not paid by Monsanto, of course, that are with us in the struggle together with the peasants, indigenous knowledges. We do that as a kind of a college of knowledges, a kind of a coexistence, cooperation, and the mutual enrichment of different kinds of knowledges. So then from this, a different artisanship of practice will emerge. And this bringing up diversity is what I call a reaction against the five monocultures upon which our dominant knowledge, our epistemology of the North, epistemic North and epistemic South, never geographic, because we have epistemology of the North in the geographical South, of course. So there are five monocultures, and I cannot go into that in detail, but the monoculture of knowledge, the monoculture of the dominant scale of classification of linear time and of capitalist productivity. So the smallest of the South allow us to move from monocultures to ecologies of knowledge, of scales, of temporalities, of productivities, etc., etc. So this kind of knowledge is today has always been there. I mean, when I named the smallest of the South in 2009 now, well, it is naming something that is ancestral. I mean, it has been there all alone. Well, we should inquire why now, we can talk and we can have such a rich feedback on this. So now let's see the final part of my talk very briefly about the university itself, because now we can see that all these sources of the South are a contribution to create a general generation that could bring about a kind of a civilizatory alternative, a post-pandemic type of thing. Because if it is not that we are going to have what I call negationism or gato-pardism, I can develop that in the debate if you like, but you can develop in order to do that, we have to reform profoundly our universities. Let's look at very closely a little bit more about these types of the universities. You can see that the Spaniards, from the 16th century onwards, they created 30 universities in Latin America. The British, only in India, created, founded 21 universities, which after the partition were 19 in India and two in Pakistan. And through all the 19th century, other universities were found in Africa, in Sudan, in Zimbabwe, in Ghana, in South Africa, which is one of the last, in 1997. And we know that all these universities, in fact, even though they were in the colonies, they were reproducing the same kinds of knowledge, the metropolitan knowledge. They were not there to produce a college of knowledge, on the contrary. So it is true that decolonizing the university in that book that I mentioned published by campus scholars, I make it very clear that the tasks of decolonizing the university are different in the form metropolitan societies and in the former colonies, tax colonies. But, you know, there are something similar because the universities in both in the geographical south now and the north, they have been the university have been really confronted by resistance. The first wave of resistance, in fact, was probably the best, not probably the first, but the best known was 1918, when the students in Cordoba, Argentina, made a major movement where the complete social university upheaval, out of which came the manifest of 1918, for a new type of university, more socially responsible university. There was in fact really the struggle of the local Creole bourgeoisie that were not happy with what the university, very scholastic and very Spanish was teaching them. That was the first movement out of which, in fact, also popular universities emerged. Another trend of resistance, trying to decolonizing knowledge. And one of the first of these popular knowledges is created in 1922, in which a major figure of it is going to be a major Marxist thinker in Latin America is the Peruvian, because the Carlos Marietti. And from then on, there were several universities. But then there are other different movements. And we are in the third phase of this process. The second phase was in the United States, in many other countries, moved by students, the questions of affirmative action, and sometimes also the creation of ethnic studies and so on. But none of these phases altered the curriculum. And I think the third phase in a year now, in which we have also bring down statutes and changing names. But what is really at stake is changing curriculum. And in order to change curriculum, you have to really change extremologies. And the extremities of the South will be an attempt to develop, in fact, what in a transition period could be called a positive Bessel science, a positive Bessel law, and the positive Bessel state. I think that is the task of the university is to develop these realities. And I think that as the university was responsible to legitimize the Bessel line and to make it invisible by the ideas of universal principle, general ideas, and the humanitarian, humanism, and so on, can also undo that through different epistemologies. And these different epistemologies will help, in fact, to move from the monocultures to ecologies. So a university that wants to decolonize in this third phase has to be at the level of knowledge, at the level of temporalities, of classifications, of scales and of productivity try to change, to move from monocultural ideas to ecological ideas, ecologies in the sense of mutual enrichment, meeting of different types of practices and of knowledges. We know, for instance, that our societies, they are not just the capitalist economies, there is a peasant economy, there is a feminist economy, there is popular economy. Most of our foodstuffs that we have in our meals are not produced by large industrial agriculture companies, by family agriculture in most countries. In some countries, 70% of the foodstuffs in the markets comes from small farms for all the agriculture. It's not really the real capitalist economy that we teach at the business schools and economic schools in our economy schools in our societies. So this diversity, I'm not saying that we are getting rid of capitalist economy for a long time, probably we are going to have it, but the capitalist productivity should not be the criterion for the others. There should be allowed to be taught at our university, popular economy, cooperative economy, solidarity economy, reciprocity economy, popular, feminist, peasant, etc., etc. Based on the idea, which I think it's basically for the university, or the idea of the ecology of knowledge, because there is no anti-science, I'm a social scientist, there is no anti-science in this epistemology because it does not want to reproduce the epistemic side that the epistemology of the North produced. It is called epistemology of the South so that it won't be necessary in the future, where once there is no North in the sense that I'm talking about, epistemic North, there is no need for an epistemic South. So what we need is this ecology of knowledge. Science is of course a valid knowledge, but it's not the only one, because if I want to go to the moon, I need science. If I want to know the biodiversity of the Amazonian, I need indigenous knowledge, different knowledge for different purposes. So we have to analyze our knowledge and our purposes. And if we do that, we start to be more knowledgeable about the consequences than about causes. Causes are important, but usually in our universities, we are very much concerned about causal phenomena, but the consequences are met by the people out there. Look at the consequences of structural adjustment that we have been teaching as a new neoliberal orthodoxy in our universities. So I think that these are the tasks that if we do that, then probably we'll be able to develop, start to develop, that we need a theory of transition. We can do this from one generation to the next. We have to start now. But it'll be a transition and a long transition, you'd say. But it's a transition which is showing you that in fact it's possible to be objective without being neutral. That probably in our universities, we can have different types of teachers, not just the teachers that we are and we have been trained for, but other people that have notorious knowledge of other kinds of knowing that are also fundamental to understand and to bring about some social transformation. Well, I know in some Latin American countries in which some universities, medical schools also teach now by the elders and the charge of those community indigenous shamans. They also teach medical traditional medicine and so on and so forth. I mean, we need more courageous type of ideas for the colleges because in fact I sometimes have the feeling that we also should try to be more reciprocal in our relationships with students that are coming to Europe from the empire, be it the British empire or the Portuguese or the Spanish empire. We train them and I think we train them very well, but to analyze their countries. I think for each of the students that come to us, that we train to study their countries, we should have one to study our countries. I mean, it would be interesting to have Bangladeshi students, students talking, doing PhD researches on the UK or students from Angola, Mozambique, and Portuguese society. I think that they would be probably better researchers in identifying the peace alliance that we don't very often see. So to create a more kind of reciprocal, because sometimes relationship, because sometimes I think that we train them to be non-confirmist in their society, but at the same time we promote their conformism without society. So this, that is to say, will reproduce inequality, the unequal and combined development that Trotsky spoke about. So I think it won't be easy, and that's my final word. Because in fact, we are not, if we look carefully, we are not at a period of strong decolonization. I guess that we are at a period of recolonizing the university. I think that, you know, titles like the defense of colonialism are becoming now more often in academic articles. Defense of colonialism, like Bruce Gilley from Portland in Third World Quarterly, the idea that some failed of fragile states, states would be faring better if they would become colonies again. So this is the trend. And in fact, this pandemic didn't make things easier for us. Because since colonialism and capitalism are brought together, together with patriarchy, we can see that there was a movement, a top-down pressure on the university, which is the capitalist, global capitalism, which now is stronger. The ideal of this movement is that the university from now on would be online, it would be much cheaper. There will be no protests. There are no status online. That's their utopia, of course, to make our knowledge, our university knowledge with a price tag. That is to say, in order to be a commodity for international trade. But in fact, we have really relinquished too much already in the ideas of ranking, of outputs, of, you know, impact factors in which our students are bound to and are forced, in a sense, to publish in non-native language so that they promote their career in the same process that they separate them from their own realities in society. So I think that there are many factors. And today in many universities, you know that I have been in 35, for the past 35 years, I've also been associated with the University of Wisconsin Medicine. And I can see that the capitalist pressure on the universities, the humanities department's closing down almost every day. And on every day, popping up new buildings on nanotechnology, biologists, biotechnologists and so on and so forth. This will pay a price for this thing because it's knowledge with a price tag. And there are things on knowledge that they have no price and they should have never had any price. It's the knowledge that we thought we would have been doing. So I think that this process now capitalism sometimes comes together with religious or political secular conservatism. I think the extreme right in many countries is already trying to bring us creating forms of censorship. It's very clear in some countries, it's even in Europe already. So I think that we are probably not so much in a period of strong decolonization, but I would say also recolonizing. I think that probably you don't see that in the UK, because in the UK the movement toward decolonizing has been quite strong in Europe, probably the strongest. I would say when I compare it, I've been working with people in Cambridge and Bristol, Glasgow and so on and Oxford. So I think that we are at a juncture in which it is important to reflect upon our epistemologies that I have offered you just a contribution to this for a large period of transition that could help us to create new inaugural generations. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Professor Santos. Very rich and insightful lectures, as always, and there's a lot ringing in our heads already, as to several of the issues you touched on. I'll now call on anyone who has questions to raise them now, raise your hand and a digital hand. I'll call on you to ask a question. So we'd like to begin with one of the key team members in the world's philosophy program here, Dr Andrew Hanks. Let's go ahead with your question. Thanks, Elvis. I actually think there's a question in the chat that I wondered if you wanted to take first from Peter. Hello? Yeah. Andrew, is the question, I'm interested in understanding our professor's some concepts of knowledge in epistemologies? No, this is a separate question. I'm wondering if Elvis would like to take that first. Okay, good. Go ahead, go ahead. I think there's a question professor referring to the question about how you use the concept of knowledge in epistemologies, and he asked that it is easy to see the need to include such ecology of knowledge as local forms of medical practice, and I have imagined and wondered the easy, the easy in seeing, say an ecology of knowledge in aeronautics also. Basically, how do you use the concept of knowledge and epistemologies? Well, thank you. I don't know who asked that question, but in any case, I'm glad to answer it. Yes, well, that's really, I understand your problem, because even if when I put the word the knowledge is in the plural in the computer, it corrects me. So the computer doesn't like the plural of knowledge. I mean, that's the how much of, you know, monoculture in terms of knowledge has been developed in our culture. We even lack terms to develop what we would like to develop. And it's not surprising that in some times today, many people, particularly coming from non-western tradition like indigenous people and so on, they try to bring into the conversation concepts that are not even western, that they are in their native languages, be it umbuntu, be it svaraj, be it sumakauza, be it swadeshi, be it sardubaya, so many that I can name them. So I think the plural is really intentional is the idea that there has always been an attempt to reconstruct the unit of knowledge of different knowledges. And this unit has been created at two levels, what we called the internal diversity of science. Because science in itself at the beginning was very diverse. And it became even more so when the feminist like Sandra Harding, like Donna Haraway, like Isabel Stangers, when they came in, they showed that there were many ways of different science. And this week have been calling internal plurality of science. And that's why from the very beginning, from the early, from the Vienna Circle, the Vienna Circle, the Vienna Circle, from the beginning of the 20th century, that was this movement of unified science. Bertrand Russell was also involved in this. I mean, Einstein in the beginning. So this idea that we need a unified science. Then as a reaction, so to say, many social scientists and promising in India, and in Latin America develop different concepts of science that would incorporate ideas from the West, and ideas from their own cultures. In India, Sivish Van Anta is probably one of the most prominent epistemologists in this. And in in Latin America or land of alzborn in Colombia, with the idea of popular science, which also a name in India. So this idea of a difference, but always in the singular as science, because it's the idea that the metaphor of science became a kind of a metonymic thing that is to say the metaphor became metonymic. That is to say, the past for the totality that science is just a form of knowledge and is equated with knowledge at large. Well, I don't think that it's very productive to try that to say that what other people do that we don't do is after all another science and we should try to bring together this science. No, there are different knowledges, let's assume that so that you can really start a dialogue and there are different epistemologists. Because, you know, if I start from the epistemology, and I can just give you an example among many, because with concrete examples, that's my way of working from my own my own practice. I mean, if you are whether studying the distinction between society and nature with indigenous people, this distinction that is so fundamental for our knowledge, for our science, human science, natural sciences, objectivity, you name it doesn't make any sense to them, because nature is they nature, they, you know, they don't own nature. Nature does not belong to them. They belong to nature. Nature is part of them. And in fact, they do what a great philosopher of the 17th century also did, Spinoza. But our knowledge, our dominant knowledge does not come from Spinoza, but from Descartes. So, nature is a very extensive. Well, if you are really trying to bring together a struggle of urban, western ecological movements, for instance, because you have to understand that from the perspective of the epistemology of the South struggle is at the core. So we have to see how to articulate struggles. So the people understand each other without patronizing, without saying that my struggle is more important than your struggle. That's the fate of the West. That's why domination has prevailed, because we are always being divided. If I do that, I have to assert the epistemology. I don't accept to recognize the epistemological diversity to it. It makes sense to speak of epistemologies. But you are right. And I mentioned that in the end of Cognitive Pire, that the way I use epistemology is a twist. If I were with Lucretius, I would say with a clean amen. Because in fact, epistemology calls for separate knowledge is the state of separate knowledge as an activity. While the epistemology of the South, in a sense, occupy, in the sense of occupy movement, occupy Wall Street, they occupy epistemology, because the knowledge is coming in from the struggle, they are not separate from the practices. They have to be understood in the context of those practices, because sometimes knowledge is in fact, they move from one struggle to the next. Well, behind me is the great practitioner of the epistemology of the South, Milcar Cabral, a great liberator of the liberation movement against Portuguese colonialism. It was very clear that you are not going to throw away all the knowledge that the colonizer brought to us. Some of it may be very useful to them. So I am against some trends of the decolonial thinking that I think that since science is colonialist, for instance, it's of no use. I don't think this is productive. It's really to reproduce all the epistemicide. What we have to say is that different knowledges are there for different uses. And therefore, it is really a kind of, I recognize it's an occupation of the term and it's also a little bit normative, so much so that my computer does not allow me to write it. It wants knowledge, not knowledges. And with my editors and publishers, I have to insist here, please, it is really knowledges. It's not a narrative. It's on purpose. So, you know, it's the orthodoxy goes to our grammurgical basics. So we have to understand that's why probably we need the deep decolonizing. And I didn't talk about that because that's a different layer of problems probably for another talk. But thank you very much for those. The ecologists, you can see them emerging that we don't have a recipe. It's impossible to tell you in advance because sometimes doesn't work. But I have said, at least in two fields, ecologists of medical knowledges and ecologists of legal knowledges. In legal knowledge, we have already in sociology of law, an old field of legal plurality, legal pluralism in which we can organize this. And the ecologists of medical knowledges in this book of the pandemic, I brought that in precisely because in the pandemic, I saw that the indigenous communities in Latin America, the ones that I know, resort more and more to their traditional medicines in the period to protect the populations. Of course, they cannot protect the people from the virus on the contrary. Like in the 16th century, they have the highest rates of mortality in that continent. As they had when the colonizers, the Portuguese, the Spaniards, the French, and the British arrived. They are least protected against the virus. But they have the traditional medicine allows them to improve the immunity of their bodies. So they don't have vaccines, of course, but they have these products that improve immunity. And they've been using it. They have been reproducing the tax even writing them down in a WhatsApp. So using modern technology to reproduce medical and distribute medical knowledge, traditional logic with the plants that they only them know. So I can see that people resort to these ecologists very normally. And it's a pity that because our models are based, the knowledge are based on the purification of knowledge, purification of race, purification of scale. You don't allow this diversity to get in. It is threatening. It is messy. And that's why we discard it. But thank you. Well, the question by Andrew that apparently you have a different question. Yes. Thank you. Thank you so much, Professor DeSantis. I did have a different question. I was first of all, you know, I really was within myself up quite a lot of hospitality and gratefulness for the nuance and self reflectiveness within your talk. So thank you. But I also there was a moment where I thought I just wondered if something was slightly too tidy. And so I wanted to ask if you could clarify it a bit for me. I mean, that's when you talked about betting on the inaugural generations and talked about it before and after. And on the one hand, I completely understand this with the pandemic. I mean, I'll be a part of a of a generation who, you know, can talk about going through it in a way that I'm sure people in the future will kind of roll their eyes and be like, oh, he's on that story again about before the pandemic. And so I understand that from my own experience. But when talking about betting on the inaugural generations, I wondered if it was too tidy precisely because there's a splintering of meaning within the inaugural generation of precisely what to inaugurate means. They're misunderstanding each other at the moment. And it's not falling on the the class lines or the race lines or whatever there might be of the 20th century. There is a splintering of meaning within those very groups of what they did direction to inaugurate, what that actually means. And I felt like this was almost, you were almost hinting at this when you talked about your third paradigm, which I thought was very powerful about knowledge being born out of struggle. But I wondered, you know, that clear knowledge doesn't have a tailos automatically. And so I just wondered if you could clarify for me, clarify for me that the fact that the inaugural generation doesn't have, you know, one automatic task, they seem to all be going down. What are we betting on? We bet on them. So hopefully that makes sense. Very good, Andrea. That's a very important question. So of course, thank you for that. Well, I tend to, I have identified the three scenarios that I see on the ground now in this post-acute period of the pandemic. The first one is negationism. Negationism, to negate that the pandemic is an importance. I mean, it's something that, you know, it's go away, others have gone and before and it's the same thing. I mean, most conservative governments on the right have followed the negationism. UK in beginning, Trump in the United States, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Narendra Modi in India, Iván Duque in Colombia. And with the idea that we have to protect the economy and then economy first and then with that we protect life. Well, these governments neither protected life nor protected economy. All of them have major crisis. In fact, the UK changed course very rapidly. So to say, once body Johnson got to the virus and all of a sudden he was in favor of the national health service and so on. It seemed to change the things and praising the nurses. It's one of them was a Portuguese person. So I think it's very interesting, but you know, this pandemic, the negation is is prevalent today. And if you look at the recent study by the IMF, look, it's why the IMF, it's what they say, what is the future? They are based on this negationism, basically, what they say is the future is going to be a major social crisis out of this because of the economy meltdown and so on. And the countries have no, the states have no other solution but repression. They bring the case from the 19th century. For instance, Victor Hugo was a writer about that repression of the police in Paris. And they said, well, basically the same. And I look at it and I see that many countries, for instance, Colombia is now with really social explosion in Cali, for instance, because in fact, the government only has repressive policies to the people that are without them, employment without any perspective in life, so to say. The second scenario is what I call Gattopardism is from Gattopard from the Lampeduz, the novel of the Italian writer in 1958 is that you change some things so that nothing changes, nothing essential. So the elites, that's the paradigm that I see in the editorials of the Financial Times in the UK. And I wrote about a chapter on the Financial Times in the tutorials and the European Union is the idea that we are going to have, you know, energetic transition, we are doing this. But you know, model of production, it'll be the same model of consumption will be the same. So we'll have electric cars, but we'll have, you know, we will favor, you know, private cars, of course, and the families will have two or three. And they forget that cars are produced by lithium, and lithium is in Venezuela, in Bolivia, in Congo, and in China. So there will be a major struggle for the lithium in the future. Even in Europe, already the lithium mining companies are already coming to Portugal, to Spain, to southern France. So they don't look at this because the elites are going to reproduce capitalism. So green capitalism is what it is. The third one is the one that I in contact with students with the young people, for instance, in this Colombian people that they, they really, they are between two worlds, quite frankly, Andrea. On one side, they see no alternative. I mean, they are very depressed. I mean, the idea of mental depression is very serious now among the young people throughout the world. I mean, the idea that there is no hope, anxiolytics are on the rise everywhere. And it is true that we should analyze that. Why, in fact, people are turning into psychological problems, what seems to be the social problems. Like neoliberalism was for a long time replacing social responsibility by individual guilt. So if I'm an employee, I'm guilty. If I'm, if I'm poor, I'm guilty. It's not social responsibility that I shouldn't be employed or I should be poor. So they are, they have internalized that. On the other side, I see a reaction. I see something that is amazing that people like Greta Thunberg mobilized the students with the idea, the young people with the idea that the world is coming to an end. But for me as a sociologist, Andrea, it's quite intriguing. Why for these young people, it's easier to think about the end of the world than to think about the end of capitalism. Of this model of, because capitalism is historical, so it is that everything has a beginning and an end. So probably we'll have an end. We don't know. But they have, they are not aware of that. You know, so I think that I see my idea is that that's why I think there is a, there's not an interregnum in, in the Gramscian sense. It's not the new video. This in the minds of people, there is this interregnum between full resignation with the mental health problems, consequences and rebellion. That's something has to be done. They don't know what, because we have been preaching them that there are meta narratives. So there is no tellers, no automatic and, and, and that this junk that is very dangerous, but this is a moment of danger in Walter Benjamin terms, because we don't know. Because some of this diversity that we, that we are promoting could even, and this alternative could turn against us. There's to say, for instance, we, for a long time, we have been, I myself, being very active in the World Social Forum with the idea that all these struggles, anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist and anti-patriarch, all of them are important. Some of them may be more urgent than others in a given context, but all of them are important. But all of them are important. One is not more important than the other. Well, now what I see is the creation sometimes of identitarian ghettos, the idea that my struggle is more important than, than your, with lots of antagonism, even, you know, worse than before. So this is a preversion and there is no safety, no insurance against this, no safety valve. We have to really, you know, walk over these risks. They are uninsured, quite frankly. And that's, that's why I think that our knowledge has to be more collective, more humble, more flexible. And, you know, so that we, if we commit errors, we commit collectively. So to say no, the avant-garde, that's why I, I call myself a little bit, you know, jokingly, but it's very serious. I call myself a rear-guard intellectual, not an avant-garde intellectual, because the avant-garde is always the idea that the theory is right and the practice is wrong. And I don't buy that anymore. I mean, it was too many, too much frustration for a century. Now, if the practice goes wrong, so we were also wrong. So we are not out of the struggle. And that's why the smallest of the South involve you in the struggle. I mean, you have to be with them. You cannot really be just studying them. You have to be with them. So because there's knowledge about, there's knowledge with. And these, I'm sure there are many people, so to the younger people there, as my doctoral students, both, both in the States and in Portugal, they call, ask me, what about the methodologies? And that's why in the end of Cognitive Empire, I dedicate two chapters on collaborative methodologies. We have really to develop collaborative methodologies of a different type. I can't go into that there, but, you know, the idea is that we have to move gradually from the subject-object binary to the subject-subject binary. I mean, the idea that, you know, I want to create subjectivities, not to create objects. And when I'm doing this, then it's very clear, Andrea, that sometimes in our work, from President Michael, as a sociologist, if you interview people as I did for many, many years, you make these distinction between information and knowledge. I mean, the people that I'm discussing with or interviewing, they have no knowledge for me. They have information. Knowledge is my own knowledge. Well, they are producing knowledge. They are knowledge producers also. My knowledge is better for certain purpose, but who knows? Their knowledge may be better for other purposes. I have at least to engage in a conversation. And we don't, we do what I call extractivism. We're not just the mining companies or the data companies that do the mining than the digging of data. We have done that in social sciences all the time. So this extractivism is embedded in our methodologies. We have to go carefully and gradually, because these things are, we have to conduct cautiously, also because some of our students are PhD students and the evaluation is not by their supervisory, by committees and so on. You have to protect them also, but, you know, help them to navigate this period. But at least they should be aware of these challenges now. That's my basic mining idea. Thank you. Thank you, Professor, for those very interesting comments to those questions. We have Dr. Sean Harlow, who's the subject head of the program. Hi. Thank you very much, Professors, to Susa Santos for a really thought-provoking and, I think, very timely presentation to really the kind of projects that we're trying to do at SOAS. And I'm really interested in what you're saying here about extractivism, because I think that as far as kind of epistemologies of the global north are concerned, even, you know, critical thinkers, critical philosophers are not actually as interested in the voices of the intellectual production or indeed the ecologies of knowledge of those who live the oppression, who live the struggle, who live the resistance. Rather, they're interested in the interpretation of the utility of that experience to then again turn it into a kind of commoditization that gets kind of reabsorbed into the neoliberal university that then becomes this kind of selling point for a program, a university, and so on. And so I'd be really interested to hear what you have to say about how universities in the global north can really avoid that absorption, appropriation of these knowledges from the global south, into their own projects of commoditization or extractivism, I mean. Yeah. Well, we are perfectly right. That's a serious question. This voracity of our dominant knowledge is that it converts everything into somethings that they can be used. It has been called at the beginning of the century a simulationism in a sense, you know, you really decontextualize knowledge and then you put this in there and then all of a sudden we have a different package and this package in fact reproduces the system. Well, I think that the first thing, Sian, because I think that we are at the period of defensive struggles, we have to navigate carefully, particularly if you are a younger scholar in our universities, because they have ways of neutralizing you very easily. I mean, promotion, things like this, because we allowed ourselves to have all these infamous forms of impact factors by five large companies that account for global relevant knowledge these days. And it looks like the world is around all the impact factors and the ranking. And for many of us, the scholars at the university were not aware some, when these things started 20 years ago, that the objective, the final object, was to put a price tag on your knowledge on your university. Because in fact, the idea was a discussion is still on, but now we specialize in the World Economic Organization in which they are trying to transform the university knowledge into one of the services that will be liberalized. And therefore, you could sell a sociology program to India or to another country or a philosopher program. And how much you are going to ask for the price for this process and how much the other country is going to pay depends on your ranking and on the ranking of the country. That's why they developed these rankings, which have perverted completely the cooperation among universities. We were used, I still am a generation, that a more advanced university was trying to have contact with the least advanced to promote it, to help it, to come to other knowledge, trying to solidarize the type of people that go abroad, teach there and so on. Now what we are going to see is a kind of a university apartheid in which we have on one side, we have the global universities and on the other side, the rest. And in fact, the university programs worldwide are trying to concentrate all the funds on the global universities. All the other universities, that is to say, 95% of the universities in the world will be doing no research ideally, but just training because the real research will be in the global ones. I mean, even in the European Union, it's a fight every year to get kind of programs that in which when you have type of excellence is not measured by rankings, but by the quality of the work, all the work, for instance, the European Research Council, it's a good process there, it still survives. But I think that this is part of the problem because then some of our works in the future, I'm sure that much of our work that is single author work should be co-authored by many people that gave us all the information that is to say their knowledge. And it is difficult for a student now to say, well, yes, your PhD, you did a beautiful study in this community and so on. But now your PhD thesis will be co-authored by the leaders of the community that helped you. Well, this is the right approach. The problem is that you cannot find committees or universities that will allow that someone that is a great community leader, but is eventually literate, be sitting on a committee now, you know, evaluating a thesis, even though they are the people that know more about that community than the students themselves. So these are trends because I've seen versus in Brazil, some universities already allow for popular committees in which if a student, particularly if it is an indigenous student, and he does a study in the indigenous community, the committee should have a leader of that community in the community. So it is an attempt to bring together without cannibalizing the different knowledge. So for that, I think we should have a different evaluation of our work. I mean, we should be able to write your piece, the piece in which we are working with other people, try to bring different types of narratives, and without risking your career and your promotion. And sometimes we can do that at the end of your career, when in fact we are not looking for promotion, but as I published it, it's not available in English, that one. But some of my assistants put together my lectures and they revised, is called in the workshop of the sociologist. And it's very interesting, why it is interesting. Because in my classes, the doctoral classes, the abstracts or the summary of my class in the next class are done by my students that are rappers or slam poets or artists or theater performers. So they are five minutes in the beginning of the class to try to convey in their narrative the key concepts of my previous lecture. If you go to, you can even go to the Google and see a visa line, which is a key concept, but then it is a rapper was my doctoral student, a Brazilian called Renee Carrito, and he wrote a rap lyric on the visa line, and then put music on it. It's fabulous because it's a different narrative about the visa line, but it is there. Of course, I can't do that because nobody is going to really say, well, what are you doing and so on. But we are crazy. What I'm trying to do is to bring a little bit of ecology of knowledges, because if the people read really carefully the abstract, the summary of my class, they can see that that slam poet, in this case, is a black student from Guinea-Bissau. She is reading saying not just the same thing, but something different. There are things that I can't say in a sociological philosophical discourse, but they can do. So this expand knowledge. But I think that our risk is like that because it's a moment of transition. The only way to minimize this risk is to do that collectively. Never try to do that at service or whatever you are just alone. Try to bring other people with you that can create a group in which you can try these experiments in teaching so that if they want to hit you, it's not so easy because you are with some other people. Because individually, I've seen so many people at my university, and I got my PhD at Yale University, how they kicked out a marvelous colleague that deceased recently. It was a dear colleague, David Graber. Probably you knew him as a sociologist in Goldsmiths College, and now it was at London School of Economics. It's one of the most brilliant sociologists of his time. He died recently because he was not really trying to be with the movements, with the people, and that was messy because university doesn't like to see social movements come in because of our buildings, because of our furniture and things like that. You have to be careful and do it collectively, even if not so risky, so that you can minimize your risk. But I would encourage you to struggle against the cannibalization, which is really there all the time. Thank you. Thank you, Professor. Yeah, and I was just thinking about the fact that this epistemic domination and how it's so neatly articulated and so interestingly intertwined, capitalism, colonialism, racism, when you think you are done with one, another is taken over, and it's the same thing. For instance, with the universities, we are thinking of thinking that we are decolonizing, yet programs are rated based on how many students they bring in, how much they bring into the university. Capitalism is sort of just turned around and put on top, and colonialism is pushed down, but it's basically the same thing. And if we have to proceed with resistance cautiously, which I understand, which is so nicely articulated. But my worry, as you said, is resistance itself is fragmented, it's competitive, there is prioritization of interests. And if resistance is this way, is it really possible to overcome this domination that is already so well in places? Elvis, that my response to Sian was going precisely that. I mean, in the sense that if, because it's fragmented, because sometimes it's individualized in people, I mean, our struggle, I think that if you, once you bring together the colleagues, that some of them may be very competent, of course, we know by our training that we are more competent in knowing very well about capitalism, others about colonialism, others about patriarchy, about case, case to casteism or whatever. But if you try to put together, based on the idea that all the struggles are important, and that all knowledges are incomplete, so I know that my knowledge is incomplete. I cannot account for domination based on an anti-capitalist struggle, as I can't do just on a colonialist, anti-colonialist struggle, or an anti-patriarchal struggle. I think you have to try to articulate, even in the concrete condition, sometimes one anti-colonial struggle is more important than an anti-capitalist struggle. For instance, when George Floyd was assassinated, all of a sudden in the United States, the most urgent struggle was the anti-colonial struggle, the anti-racist struggle, right? But as the movement grew, and grew immensely, I was very glad to see how the feminists came in, how the trade unions and the anti-capitalist movements came in and joined the struggle. I think once you do that, and this movement, this Black Lives Matter and so on, is still strong, even though probably it's not in the news, but it's very strongly morphing into the Bernie Sanders revolution, many other things. So you can see that these things evolve. But I think that you have to really bring more knowledge, because our specializations, very often, are specializations in words. And we keep our people out of our speciality by the special words that we use. And sometimes we do that among colleagues also. So I think that we have to deconstruct a little bit, sometimes our concepts, because I'm here with you, very comfortable discussing epistemology of the South. But if I'm with a social movement, I'm not going to discuss, well, this is epistemology of the South, what they are doing. Epistemology is a very difficult word to be even pronounced by people that have no university degree. So you have to formulate that in different ways. That's what my unthinking of my training was to be able to get the core of the idea without reality or what relying solely on the special concepts. That if I don't use that concept, I'm already messy. I'm already not rigorous and so on, so that people don't understand us. I mean, we have a long tradition in this country, in your country, of the analytical philosophy, which for me was really a flag in this regard. So I think that we have to go carefully. I think I have to say this because I care about the younger generation of scholars at university. I'm not talking students, but young faculty, because they are going to have to be navigating this period. And believe me, Elvis, if you look competitively speaking in Europe, probably for good reasons, that's a different discussion. In the United Kingdom, I can see more advanced discussions at university than in other universities, take Paris, which I was with them yesterday, for instance. Well, I think that the discussion in the UK is more advanced now, I think, in some cases. But there are islands of country Germany. Of course, it's very clear the case. But we have to go from here. I mean, you're not give up. I said, thank you so much. We really enjoyed the last hour and a half with you. And it's, I mean, it's a very interesting and insightful discussion. And thankfully, we have this record. And I'm sure many of us will be going back to these and listening again and using it to build insights and further discussions. So thank you so much, Professor, for honoring our invitation. It was a real privilege having you give this talk today. And we so much appreciate thank you so much. At this time, I'll stop recording and then show my colleagues who want to say