New article on grand challenges in the Global South
17 Jan 2024
Impact without Imposition: How can academics from the Global North have an impact without imposing their ideas and mindset on people in the Global South? Three principles for rethinking and changing scholarly behavior.
While academics in the Global North increasingly focus on relevance, they still tend to neglect engaging with grand challenges for the Global South. When they do, they tend to fall into one of the following traps. One is to offer solutions for the Global South based on knowledge that was created in the Global North and lacks contextual relevance as a consequence. Another is to use the Global South to extract data to create knowledge, with both data and knowledge likely ending up locked up in universities or behind paywalls, with harmful consequences for the communities that should own the data.