Keywords

Introduction

While academia is usually represented in public culture as the most common place for knowledge production, activism is seen more as direct action and less as a source of knowledge in its own right. In this chapter, I would like to trouble those separations and hierarchies, using examples from theory and drawing upon my own personal experience and positionality. I am writing from Colombia, a country in the Latin American Global South where there are not the neat separations between academia and activism that are present in the Global North. As a result of personal political commitments to struggles for gender, sexuality and other rights, I have navigated between academic and non-academic environments. This navigation has taken place within contexts that many experience today—job precarities, the de-regularisation of labour and the fragility of work industries in neoliberal economies—that require adapting permanently to changes in employment opportunities.

Frequently, when news reports require expert knowledge, a university researcher is called. Often the person called is a male professor, despite the long-term and increasing presence of women in academic environments.Footnote 1 When thinking about knowledge creation, a single individual in a classroom or experimenting with test tubes in a laboratory may come to our minds. Think about characters in The Big Bang Theory, Doc Brown in Back to Future or Erik Selvig in the Avengers. On the other hand, when thinking about activism we may think of raised arms, megaphones and collective organisation in the streets. I invite the reader to do an online search of images of activism. You may find more images of women, public spaces and of collective action.

Academia and activism are often represented as if they are separate worlds, rarely connected. Some could claim the need of such separation since academia and activism serve different purposes. In fact, there have been long-term calls for connecting academia and activism, for example, by putting into practice what is produced in academia or by supporting those struggling for social change. Action research, since its origin in early 1950s (Lewin, 1946), has been a perspective that connects knowledge production with the answer to social problems and demands for social justice. The call for connections between academia and activism has resulted in ideas such as activist scholarship (Lempert, 2001; Sudbury & Okazawa-Rey, 2015) and engaged scholarship (Lynette & Tania, 2013), among others.

In linking these separate spheres, the approach tends to go in one direction: from academia, as the space for knowledge production, to activism, as the space for action and application. When the interest is in the other direction, the knowledge produced in activism is framed as practical in nature (Maddison & Scalmer, 2006), with a different status than academic knowledge. Such renderings of activist and academic knowledge as different run the risk of creating hierarchies and divisions.

Many areas of struggles for social justice and social change have troubled those separations and hierarchical linkages. Feminisms, critical race studies, postcolonial and subaltern studies, gay and lesbian studies, queer studies and transgender studies, together with all their different political developments, commonly interrelate activism and academic scholarship. They show that knowledge production is action. Still, not all those connections are based on the same political agendas, nor have they all had the same resources for making their contributions to social change recognised.

Several areas of intellectual work in Latin America have developed at the intersections between teaching, research, social activism and government consulting, such as Edgar Valero (2017), an example of sociological thinking, Marcos Roitman (2008) on the theories and practice of development and Esther Wiesenfeld (2014) on community social psychology. The work of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire (1921–1997) and Colombian sociologist Orlando Fals-Borda (1991) on popular education and critical pedagogies intrinsically connected political activism and knowledge production. Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales, created in 1957, is a further demonstration of such commitments (Correa Delgado, 2008).

The disciplines of gender, feminist and women’s studies have a long history in Colombian universities of fostering strong connections between academia and activism. Those connections are in conflictive and creative relationships, as can be read in the account of the Escuela de Estudios de Género at Universidad Nacional de Colombia, by Luz Gabriela Arango (Arango, 2018). Latin American approaches to men and masculinity studies (Keijzer, 2011; Madrid et al., 2020) have developed in close connection with feminist, women’s and gender studies, with research centres for activism and policy making. We have rich knowledge on gay, lesbian and transgender topics, not necessarily developed as silos or autonomous areas of study, but inside broader academic projects (Serrano-Amaya, 2010). In these overlapping areas of expertise, some of us have been educated as social scientists to produce knowledge that leads to social impact and the advancement of social change.

On This Contribution

I will use as an example the story of producing a report on the violence faced by people living with HIV in relation to socio-political conflict (Serrano Amaya et al., 2021) to discuss ways in which theory can be used to connect academic and activist knowledges. This example is part of the increasing scholarship on the victimisation of LGBTQI+ individuals and collectives and on their contribution to peacebuilding during Colombian socio-political armed conflict. This is a collective knowledge produced for activist, theoretical and policy purposes mostly either outside of academic settings or at the intersections between social organisations, state institutions and interested scholars. It has been pivotal for the implementation of transitional justice instruments, for the reparation of victims and for making perpetrators accountable for their crimes. It is knowledge and expertise that is making Colombia the focus of increasing international attention for policy making and as a fieldwork site for visiting academics and graduate students. Hopefully, this piece will invite them to reflect on their own practices for knowledge production.

It would be possible to define this knowledge as grey literature. It is a term used to describe information that does not circulate in traditional distribution channels and that is often produced by organisations or institutions with limited resources to make their knowledge known. Grey literature includes formats such as pamphlets, reports, dissertations and working papers. Publications of these types have an important role in social mobilisations and activism. Danusia Malina and Diane Nutt (2000) argue that grey literature is at the core of feminism for communicating women’s knowledge and promoting activism. The same can be seen in the activism of other subordinated social groups, such as that related to gender orientation and sexual identities. Still, grey literature is a broad category that risks reproducing what it criticises, homogenising under one banner knowledges produced by disparate regimes.

I prefer to define this knowledge as activist knowledge since it is produced mostly by and for activist purposes. In doing so, however, a certain hierarchy may be implied between activist and non-activist knowledges. Instead of making a separate typology of knowledge, I will consider it as a “knowledge project”, following Raewyn Connell’s (Connell, 2007, p. 228) invitation to rethink social science not as a unified system of theories, methods and results, but rather as an “(…) interconnected set of intellectual projects that proceed from varied starting social points into an unpredictable future”. I also follow Patricia Hill Collins’ (2021) discussion of how those within systems of oppression create and disseminate a knowledge that helps them survive, recover and resist. The knowledge projects I refer to provide understandings of past and present injustices and strategies for imagining possible dignifying futures.

The chapter starts with a discussion on the possibilities that Southern Theory opens for reflecting on the role of activist knowledge in social struggles and in theory development. Then, to describe the particularities of knowledge projects coming from activism, I will explore three of their dimensions: (i) interpellation of the politics of not-knowing, (ii) contribution to producing a knowledge that is useful and brings justice to social struggles; (iii) articulating power. In the conclusion, I will discuss and expand the call made by Connell in Southern Theory to promote new dialogues between the Global North and Global South.

On Southern Theory, Social Justice and Activism

Southern Theory is a concept coined by Australian sociologist Raewyn Connell (2007) to continue and expand discussions on power relations in knowledge production on a global scale. The use of “Southern” is a call to examine periphery-centre relations, to recognise that theory does emerge from so-called peripheral positions and to remember that social thinking and intellectual work occur in specific settings rather than in abstract or invisible locations (Connell, 2007, p. ix). It is a critique of universality, of implicit centrality in knowledge production and of the erasure of the knowledge produced by those in subordinated positions.

Connell engages in dialogue with feminist scholarship (Haraway, 1988), subaltern studies (Das, 2008; Guha, 1997), decolonial thinking (Castro-Gómez & Grosfoguel, 2007; Domingues, 2009; Mignolo, 2007) and other perspectives that have responded critically to universalised knowledge based on a metropolitan, male and colonial way of thinking. Since Connell’s work comes mainly from the social sciences and sociology of knowledge, it adds a particular angle to other perspectives based on humanities, literature or cultural studies. Amid those interconnected discussions, Southern Theory invites scholars to explore the geographies and cartographies of knowledge production as an industrial formation (and corresponding labour force) distributed across specific historical, political and social settings.

This invitation by Connell has been applied to diverse areas of academic inquiry, showing the potential of exploring how those in Southern positions—and not only residing in the Global South—contest power imbalances in the production of knowledge and claim agency as knowledge creators. There are applications of Southern Theory perspectives to a variety of fields, including information and computing technologies (Kreps & Bass, 2019), childhood studies (Abebe et al., 2022), and gender and education (Epstein & Morrell, 2012). In literary criticism, Southern Theory has helped to challenge the standard canon imposed by Euro-American literary studies, looking at works from countries like China (Yan & Connell, 2019). In urban studies, it has invited scholars to consider what kinds of lessons can be learnt from cities in the Global South for planning in the Global North (Narayanan, 2021). Southern Theory has extended reflection on the history and application of criminology scholarship, uncovering the discipline’s fixed production of hierarchies and its colonial legacy, expressed, for example, in the over-representation of Indigenous people in the judicial system of settler societies such as Australia (Carrington et al., 2016). Epstein and Morrell (2012) are correct in considering Southern Theory as a work in progress, but it is a work with clear and direct impact in offering possibilities for new perspectives on knowledge production.

As expected for a project with rapid uses and appropriations, there have also been critiques. These criticisms include claims that Southern Theory homogenises representations of both North and South, that it paradoxically centres attention on the North when intending to talk about the South and that it overlooks educated elites in the South. Discussions were presented few years after Connell’s pivotal work in a special issue of the journal Political Power and Social Theory (2013). This dialogue gave Connell the opportunity to update some of the components of Southern Theory, emphasising that the North and the South are ways to discuss power imbalances and stressing the fact that the periphery does produce knowledge that extends the democratic purposes of education and research.

Knowledge coming from social justice struggles is at the core of Southern Theory. Responding to a critique by Patricia Hill Collins (2013), Connell emphasised that Southern Theory was developed from the reading of the work of intellectuals committed to social justice and activism (2013, p. 176). This reading highlights a method and a purpose of Southern Theory. Robert Morrell uses this strategy in his analysis of gender research in South Africa to show how the apartheid regime and struggles against that repressive regime framed and defined research decisions and agendas (Morrell, 2016). Still, the reflections made by Connell or Morrell are mainly focused on individual intellectuals whose work benefitted from resources allowing it to be published, circulated, recognised and consumed as legitimate knowledge. What about those who do not get access to such resources? What happens to those who do not obtain individual recognition as intellectuals or to academics whose work is part of collective projects in which individual recognition is less relevant?

The North and the South are strategies to identify knowledge inequalities that happen in the separation between academia, as the space for knowledge production, and activism, as the place for practice and application. As I will illustrate later, inequalities due to the exclusion of knowledge from collective activism and sites outside “proper” academic circuits can also occur in Southern positions. Knowledge from activism is at the South of Southern knowledge and even more when such knowledge is written and published in languages and in publication circuits less available, legitimated or attractive for academic markets. At present, I am writing this piece in English even if most of its thinking and supportive experience comes from Spanish and Latin America.

This contribution shares with Southern Theory its call to democratise the social sciences on a global scale and to promote more dialogic knowledge production. However, resources to access more dialogic interactions are unevenly distributed, and the benefits obtained from those dialogues may not be the same for those in the North and those in the South. Southern Theory offers us a useful strategy for ongoing vigilance in recognising where, how and by whom power imbalances are produced, reproduced or challenged.

On Knowing but Not-Knowing

In the late 1990s, Álvaro Miguel Rivera, a Colombian environmental engineer, was doing HIV activism in the department of Meta, an area expanding from the central Andean region in Colombia towards the border with Venezuela. This area was at core of struggles between the former Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia—FARC guerrilla, paramilitary groups, the state army and drug dealing industries. If getting access to HIV treatment was already difficult in capital cities due to complex bureaucratic procedures and lack of integral assistance schemes, it was even more difficult in rural areas and areas affected by armed conflict. Activism and organisational networks were pivotal to establishing a space between the violence committed by armed actors and the violence committed by institutions.

Such movements were risky. Álvaro travelled in the region and to capital cities, ascertaining the limited HIV treatments available to distribute to those who were affected. Due to the permanent control of the region by armed actors, carrying HIV medicines would put someone at risk of being stigmatised and subject to violence. On one occasion, Álvaro and other activists appeared in the main square of a town with their hair dyed blond as a way of resisting the gendered dress codes imposed by paramilitares on young men and women. When in 2002, Álvaro denounced guerrilla groups that were forcing inhabitants of small towns to undergo HIV tests and other human rights violations, he was threatened and forced into exile.

These events did not go unnoticed. Local, national and even international media (Hodgson, 2001; Reforma, 2001) documented the forced testing, the complicity of some local authorities, how results were made public and how those who tested positive were persecuted. Informal networks of activists made public what was happening, and early researchers on violence against LGBT people in relation to armed conflict collected the voices of victims, including Álvaro’s (Payne, 2007). Information about these human rights violations was available but still ignored by state institutions. This explicit ignorance has been theorised as a politics of not-knowing (Nordstrom, 1999)—the explicit and intentional denial of some events as a result of power relations that allow the continuation of violence.

Álvaro Miguel was murdered in 2009. His killing was under-investigated, and no one has been prosecuted yet (Colombia-Diversa, 2012). Nevertheless, Álvaro’s work and the events that surrounded it stayed in the memories of activists for years.

Useful Knowledge

On October 18, 2012, the Colombian government announced the beginning of peace dialogues with the FARC guerrilla, marking a new moment in the efforts for non-violent conflict resolution and peacebuilding. Civil society organisations played a key role in pushing for the need to stop violence and protect negotiations (Valencia-Agudelo & Villarreal-Miranda, 2020). LGBT organisations and activists have had a long-term commitment to peacebuilding and were relevant actors for peace throughout the negotiations (Bueno-Hansen, 2021). They produced manifestos and documents that were discussed at the peace negotiation table and participated in social pedagogies for peace all around the country.Footnote 2 The signing of a first version of the peace agreement between the Colombian government and the former guerrilla of FARC on September 26, 2016, was both a moment of expectations and tensions.

Peace negotiations occurred at a time during which anti-gender movements in Latin America were gaining momentum. The inclusion of a gender perspective in the peace agreement was the result of mobilisation by feminist and LGBT organisations that utilised gender—as a perspective, a strategy for social analysis and an agenda for change—to raise awareness around the differentiated impact of the conflict on women and men. Gender was therefore central to the implementation of peace strategies. Yet gender was also at the core of opposition to the peace agreement. Those against the peace process used gender to stoke fear, denouncing the peace agreement as promoting a “gender ideology” that would undermine the family and existing social values. The defeat of the first version of the agreement in the plebiscite held on October 2, 2016, resulted in the signing of a new one on November 24, 2016. The negotiation of the new agreement included a conservative redefinition of the gender perspective that erased references to gender and sexual diversity, excluded the role of LGBT activism in peacebuilding and emphasised gender binarism, presenting women mostly as victims.

Opposition to gender and to the needs and proposals of LGBT organisations did not prevent the inclusion of transitional justice mechanisms in the peace deal. The peace agreement created three mechanisms for transitional justice: the Truth Commission, the Special Jurisdiction for Peace and the Unit for the Search of Disappeared Persons. These mechanisms required specialised knowledge on issues of gender, sexualities and victimisation, as well as the inclusion of the agendas for peace created by LGBT organisations. Activists mobilised to provide the knowledge required not only data documenting the victimisation faced by LGBT individuals and collectives, but also technical support to translate concepts and categories of analysis into guidelines and instructions useful for the collection of data, the development of questionnaires and the preparation of reports.

In this negotiation and peacebuilding, LGBT organisations and activists drew upon accumulated knowledge from the LGBT movement’s earlier work in lobbying for rights. This knowledge had been produced according to the politics of collective action, identity building and dignity struggles (Planeta-Paz, 2002; Proyecto-Agenda, 2001). Contributions to the peace process also came from state institutions in charge of historic research and memory work (CNMH, 2015), as well as from academic research (Serrano Amaya, 2014) and local publications. This was a heterogeneous body of knowledge, circulating mostly outside of academic publications in meetings, assemblies and documents that supported legal struggles. Because it was published in Spanish, this knowledge received little attention from academics in the Global North.

Cultural studies scholar Elizabeth Walsh (2003) argues that the politics of knowledge encompasses practices that allow certain kinds of knowledge to be considered proper, while other kinds are put aside or marginalised. As mentioned earlier, this phenomenon results, in part, from hierarchies and power relations between the metropole and the periphery. It is also due to differences in political purposes. The politics of knowledge that gave rise to the information mentioned just above have a relation to the “memory work” (Haug, 1987) done by activists and organisations, a kind of work intended to connect theory with experience through collective processes. In this memory work, documenting is not just a technical endeavour to collect narratives from witnesses and victims, but is also a mechanism to enable the emergence of testimonies that challenge the plain description of events common in official recounts. Furthermore, memory work can produce knowledge that acts against the previous politics of not-knowing (Nordstrom, 1999) that for decades explicitly ignored certain individual and collective struggles. Disputes over the recognition of LGBT activism in peacebuilding and the subsequent denial and forestalling of LGBT actors’ participation in formal initiatives for peace can serve as instructive examples of such politics.

Articulating Knowledge

The Colombian Truth Commission worked from April 5, 2017, until June 28, 2022. Building on the previous experience of other commissions such as the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, in which gender was included from the beginning of the process, the Colombian Truth Commission mainstreamed a gender perspective in its design and composition, and in the structuring of its final report. Considering previous opposition to LGBT topics during the peace agreement discussions in Colombia, the inclusion of gender identity, sexual orientation and the work of LGBT organisations was all the more innovative. This mainstreaming of a gender perspective in the work of the Commission resulted in the writing of a full volume on gender, with a chapter on women and another on “LGBTIQ+ persons”Footnote 3 (Comisión-de-la-Verdad, 2022). It was the long history of activism and knowledge produced by women and LGBT organisations that made such inclusion in the structure of the Commission and in its final report possible.

Civil society organisations were key participants in the making of the volume on gender, as described in the documentation of the research and writing process. Women and LGBT organisations participated in the collection of information, in drafting technical documents, in educational campaigns on the work of the Commission, in the legal representation of victims, in their counselling and psychosocial support when giving testimonies and in the writing of reports. Just in relation to the chapter on LGBTIQ+ issues, LGBT collectives and allies submitted 22 reports to the Commission from September 2019 to March 2022, describing and explaining the heterogeneous but systematic violence faced by LGBTIQ+ collectives due to the armed conflict in Colombia (Cuello Santana et al., 2022). Caribe Afirmativo, one of the leading organisations working to protect the rights of LGBT people, submitted 13 of those reports, detailing among other issues violence against LGBT children and youth, Afro Colombians and Indigenous communities.

Organisations and activists worked for more than two years to produce the information required to prove that violence against LGBTIQ+ persons and their collectives was fundamental to the dynamics of armed conflict in Colombia, that it occurred in many areas of the country and that it was committed by all armed parties involved in the conflict. They produced diverse explanations to show how gendered and sexualised violence was not a side effect or an isolated case committed by deviant persons, but a structural and integral aspect of Colombian socio-political violence. All these reports were prepared during the COVID-19 pandemic and with limited economic and logistical resources, making the researching and writing more complex.

These processes can be described using the concept of articulation developed in cultural studies (Clarke, 2015; Grossberg, 1986). Articulation describes a connection between elements that may belong to different orders and for which unity is not permanent but specific to certain conjunctures; in this way, the concept of articulation makes intelligible a historical situation in ways that cannot be reduced to a single structural factor. This is relevant for the inquiries discussed above for three reasons: (i) it challenges the idea that the knowledge projects under discussion can be explained as response to some kind of communality linked to a single and exclusive social identity; (ii) it allows for the existence of disparate alliances that under other circumstances may not occur; (iii) it emphasises the temporality of the political projects that mobilise knowledge projects.

In 2018, small groups of activists and academics organised to write a report on the violence against people with HIV in the Colombian armed conflict. Some of us were working in an HIV organisation, others in an LGBT collective and others in academia. The interest was based in previous personal, political and academic experiences. Some of us were colleagues and peers of Álvaro Miguel, and paying respect to his memory was also motivating our involvement in the project. While some have had a long-term commitment to HIV activism and community work, others have come through academic pathways. The intention in producing the report was less about adding a document to the work of the Truth Commission or making visible a topic that was not considered before in other commissions. Writing was a form to deal with silences, with the lack of voice in state institutions and in official memory accounts and with the process of healing wounds from long-term violence. It was a way to exist not as casualties or as epidemiological statistics, but as victims of political conflict and agents in its transformation. It also provided the opportunity to pay respect to Álvaro Miguel’s memory and to engage his legacy in current efforts for justice and memory work.

The writing of the report faced economic, methodological and theoretical challenges. We were not able to obtain funding for the project, so we had to work in the usual form of community and grassroots activism: each one drawing upon their own human and economic resources, donating time from other regular paid work and contributing labour across weekends and off-work hours. Theory work happens in concrete material situations and those situations are often not ideal, especially when located in the Global South.

In terms of methodology, there were two main challenges: access to information and the protection of participants’ identities. Information was dispersed, uneven and hard to access. We worked using a meta-analysis methodology in which we combined information coming from newspapers and previous reports with interviews to identify acts of violence against people living with HIV committed by armed actors or in circumstances associated with armed conflict. Protection to participants was fundamental, since some of them were still living in areas of conflict and could be talking about their own experiences of victimisation or violence against others close to them. Information provided could expose some participants to great risk.

In theoretical terms, the main challenge was finding an explanatory theoretical frame that could support the analysis of data and contribute to the report. Victimisation of persons living with HIV in the context of armed conflict has been mostly understood from an epidemiological perspective and with a focus on public health securitisation. There is extensive literature on the varying effects of armed conflict on patterns of HIV infections; in some cases conflict has caused an expansion of infections, in other cases it has brought about a reduction (Bennett et al., 2015; Elbe, 2002; McInnes, 2009). Most of this research has been developed in African countries. There is little about Colombia and even less that centres the perspective of people living with HIV. Since our report was conceived as a contribution to memory work and to reparation, such previous focuses on epidemiological perspectives were limited. The report also limited the concept of “stigma” commonly used in previous research (Chaw-Kant et al., 2010; Colombia-Diversa, 2017; Herek, 1998) due to its focus on the violence associated with stereotyping, shaming and prejudice and its neglect of other issues relevant to our findings, such as armed forces’ use of violence to secure economic and territorial control.

Instead of using a well-established academic theory to discuss these issues, we decided to use another approach that would locate our report in dialogue with international law and with theoretical discussions closer to transitional justice and the reparation of victims. Our team included lawyers and social scientists, and we sought to develop a concept suited to both data analysis and political action. After intense discussions, we decide to frame our findings in connection with the concept of “crime against humanity of persecution” found in Article 7(1)(h) of the Statute of Rome. Our data was consistent with such an explanatory frame. Violence was committed against people living with HIV as constitutive of a particular group defined by gender, sexual and social orders. Such perception and constitution as a particular group put them in a situation of vulnerability. Events were systematic and generalised. Our report was less intended to prove a theory than to make an issue visible to the state and to those implementing a transitional justice instrument such as the Truth Commission.

We gave the report to the Truth Commission during a semi-public encounter on September 28, 2021. It was a very emotional event. Present were some of the participants, who offered testimonies and knowledge that had made the report possible. Some of us had not been able to be together for years, and it was a moment to reunite. There were laughs and tears. There were memories and recollections of those who were lost due to armed conflict and due to the pandemic. Having the report on paper and handing it to the representatives of the Truth Commission gave our writing and research a new sense of tangible, material existence. Writing theory is also an embodied, physical and collective experience.

Conclusion

Theory can be used in several ways. I was educated in a positivist tradition in which theory was often presented as a frame announced at the start of writing in terms of big statements taken from a leading figure of the canon. This canon was often masculine and from the Global North. It was assumed that with such framing of one’s ideas, the reader would understand where one is located in a tradition, how one’s perspectives can be distinguished from other perspectives and how one’s work exists in relation to defined intellectual frontiers. The frame had to be applied carefully and rigorously if one expected to be considered an adequate subscriber to the intellectual tradition behind the frame.

The use of Southern Theory, described above, is different. Instead of making borders by using a frame, Southern Theory is more an invitation to enter into permanent and open conversations. As in any invitation, there are basic rules of respect for those who open their houses, their stories and their histories before any questions are asked or interventions made. In this piece, Southern Theory has helped me to represent and explore an experience in which I have been both actor and observer. There are some long conversations far from my understanding that come to me as echoes and others that sound clear and loud. Southern Theory has enabled me to tell a story of power relations in knowledge production and to locate my own work and contribution. I used Southern Theory to claim a space for the knowledge produced by and for activists as valid and relevant. It is the knowledge that one may not find in the expensive databases to which universities in the Global North subscribe, or through simple online searches, which often contain algorithms that deprioritise research and reports from the Global South.

These conversations also helped me to identify how a particular knowledge project emerged from the work of activists and organisations that are not only documenting their suffering and acting to transform it into political agency, but are also active producers of expert knowledge. I do not intend to produce a romanticised view of knowledge, although a little romanticism can be useful in times when hope for change seem less evident. There are intense inner tensions and hierarchies within activist knowledge production that need to be recognised and discussed. If activist knowledge is in a Southern position in relation to academic knowledge, inside activist communities there are some researchers with more resources than others. Activism requires literacy as well as social and political capital. There are voices there that do not speak the language of laws, of rights or of the state and are therefore heard as “noise”. Hierarchies between Southern positions risk reproducing some of the power relationships they intend to challenge.

Connell calls for the use of Southern Theory as a vehicle for more dialogue between North and South. But this is not just any kind of dialogue. Dialogues between academia and activism, or between theory and practice, can still perpetuate separations and hierarchies. Connell’s call requires considering the heterogeneity and diversity of those involved. Otherwise, the dialogue may end up assuming homogeneity, blending what is intrinsically different. We can often see these problems in international conferences in the Global North that feature the South as an exception or a case study, but not in organisational and decision-making positions. Similar issues can be identified in calls for cooperation between North and South that still bring the knowledge to the Global North for processing, publication and consumption.

I would endorse instead those dialogues that create spaces for interaction between different collective knowledge projects. These interactions cannot be simple exchanges or cooperations, since those in an unequal relationship are not exchanging the same things nor are they under the same political and institutional constraints. Even more, those interactions are embodied in concrete persons and groups that challenge the usual individualist style imposed by academic promotion. The promotion of dialogues that are located in power relations while at the same time challenging them enables possibilities for the cross-pollination and mutual imbrication of theories and practices.