Search results

This essay critically assesses Connell’s Southern Theory. Operating from the premise that knowledge is a “project” embedded in power relations, the essay suggests that while the scope of ideas surveyed in Southern Theory is an important accomplishment, two main dilemmas can be found. The first is that Southern Theory inadvertently puts “Northern theory” at the center. The second is that the southern theorists examined tend to be educated elites from the Global South, thereby overlooking other actors in the Global South and their ways of doing theory. Struggling to change, not just the ideas, but also the ownership, vested interests and institutional actors of social theory as knowledge project might create space for much needed dialogues across differences in power.

This essay critically examines Raewyn Connell’s Southern Theory. Limitations of the work include a tendency to overgeneralize about “Northern Theory” and to leave some claims about the power of “Southern Theory” unsubstantiated. Southern Theory’s most important contributions include its insights into the problematic tendencies and patterns of knowledge production in the Global North and its insistent plea to make social theory more dialogic.

This chapter explores issues related to building a globally conscious body of feminist gender knowledge and praxis, one that acknowledges the southern challenge to hegemonic western scholarship, develops means to hear subaltern voices on their own terms and takes lessons learned into account. Following the author’s positionality statement, the characteristics of feminist theory are briefly stated, and some current southern perspectives are reviewed. Recent published research is used to illustrate the place of gender issues in theory building, data collection, development efforts and pedagogy. The challenges related to and uneven progress toward the goal of a globally conscious body of feminist gender knowledge and praxis are acknowledged.

In this chapter, I present the methodological pillar of a Southern green criminology. It may prove useful for researchers and students interested in developing a science to end the ecological discrimination. My main concern in presenting this method is to upset the colonialist logic that sustains culturism and speciesism. In my ‘stereoscope’ of ecological discrimination, I aim to uncover harmful environmental practices that have a global reach and disproportionately affect the geographical and metaphorical Souths.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a normative model to determine the potential of cultural tourism in the municipalities that comprise the region 6 of the State of Jalisco, territorially delimited in the South of Jalisco.

After reviewing the literature, a normative model is proposed to conduct an analysis of cultural tourism to discuss and establish the potential target market in the Southern region of Jalisco.

The use of a normative analysis approach is a valuable framework to design tools for planning and operation of sustainable cultural and heritage tourism. The normative model proves to be useful for development strategies.

The limitations are derived basically from the availability of data in a region where there has not been any previous systematic strategy to develop sustainable cultural and heritage tourism.

The research provides the planning premises of the economic regional development strategies centered on the available resources and capabilities to exploit a sustainable cultural and heritage tourism. It has positive impacts on developing infrastructure, creating opportunities to attract foreign investors and funding agencies, designing and implementing marketing and promotional strategies and offering diversified products and services in the cultural tourism market.

The research has social‐spatial implications on development of entrepreneurial skills of the community, creating employment and improving better standards of life for the people.

There has not been any previous research contributing to increasing the regional economic development of Southern Jalisco. The paper provides a valuable framework and tools for regional economic development.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the first-year university experience as an agent for the (re)learning and (re)making of masculine identity as it intersects with other categories of identity. Historically, male students from working-class backgrounds have often struggled with identity issues and many leave school early for vocational employment where their masculinity is reinforced and validated. A small percentage, however, re-enrol in higher education later in life. This paper explores how “Deo”, a tradesperson who became a university student, reconstructed his identity during this transition.

The primary methodology for this case study is semi-structured interviews.

Deo articulated his transition in terms of “change” and “transformation”, in which a theme of risk was central. He also drew attention to cultural practices that regulate hierarchies of masculinity as they intersect with the identities of age, sexuality, ethnicity and socio-economic status within his work and study.

This study focusses on one student’s experience in an Australian public university, so findings may not be generalisable. However, single stories are an important means of illustrating the intersection of shared socio-cultural practices.

Within adult education literature there is limited engagement with intersecting cultural narratives that shape experiences, inequalities and barriers in learners’ lives. Deo’s story gives voice to socio-cultural narratives around masculinity, age, ethnicity, sexuality and socio-economic status, highlighting their central significance to learning, being and belonging.

This essay considers the relationship between global sociology and sociological theory through an examination of the critique of Northern Theory developed by Raewyn Connell. The author accepts many of Connell’s criticisms of the formation of the Northern Theory canon, and of the false universalism of contemporary Northern Theory, but disputes the degree to which Connell has succeeded in finding a replacement for the “ethnosociology of the metropole” provided by current sociological theory. In particular, the author suggests that, in Southern Theory, Connell pursues an intellectual history of world philosophies instead of the development of theoretical concepts that could provide a more adequate global sociology from a Southern perspective. Connell leaves the reader with a reconstructed canon of classics, but without a new repertoire of middle-range explanatory and interpretive concepts with which to reconstruct our understanding of history itself. The former may be the necessary first step toward the latter, however, rendering Southern Theory an important moment in the global turn in sociological theory.

This essay responds to comments on Southern Theory by Mustafa Emirbayer, Patricia Hill Collins, Raka Ray, and Isaac Reed as part of a larger discussion about the future of postcolonial sociology. It clarifies aspects of Southern Theory that are commented upon while stressing the big claim of Southern Theory, which is that the periphery produces social theory that sociology should take seriously in order to make for a more global and democratic intellectual project of social change.