what is 1 major challenge facing global south cities?

My colleagues and I are part of upper middle- to upper-class social and economic structures and we live in major urban hubs. Second, it is important to recognize and acknowledge the privileges of class and location within the Global South. Thus, I am able to recognize the difficulties marginalized scholars face in academic centers of authority, visibility, and access alongside the challenges faced by scholars in the Global South.

My research involves women of color, transnational and Indigenous feminism, with the goal of developing an understanding of these networks as embedded in globalized grids of economic, social, and economic power, including historical and contemporary formations of colonialism, settler colonialism, and neocolonialism.

I used this term in my Twitter discussion as a popular shorthand to indicate regions in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas which are not part of institutionalized networks of power, authority, visibility, and access in global academia. Some notes before I start: first, I understand that the term ‘Global South’ is problematic (see, for example, this article or this one) and I do not subscribe to the values that inflect this term.

Here I expand on a recent discussion I had on Twitter about the problems scholars based in the Global South face, and the solutions my colleagues and I have come up with. However, many scholars face particular challenges because of their locations. As the Scholarly Kitchen continues to look at bringing more diverse geographical perspectives into our discussions about scholarly communication, and what COVID-19 has forced us all to rethink, we thought it would be interesting to revisit Naveen’s post.Īcademia is a global network of institutions, people, and projects, and the production and circulation of academic knowledge is a globalized concern and goal. However, the past year has also shed some new perspectives particularly on the area of travel. The issues raised in the post still seem very familiar for researchers in many parts of the world, and the recommendations made important points about ways to improve equity in research communication worldwide. These included issues with access, resources and travel, as well as particular tensions relating to particular research topics, especially in the social sciences and humanities. Naveen Zehra Minai (who is now at the University of Toronto) wrote based on them - talked about a range of challenges for researchers in less well-resourced countries. Note from Sian Harris: In 2018 I read an interesting Twitter thread from a researcher who at the time was working in Pakistan.

What is 1 major challenge facing global south cities?