By Raewyn Connell
Raewyn Connell is an Australian feminist sociologist and Professor Emerita at the University of Sydney, best known for co-founding masculinity studies and developing the influential concept of hegemonic masculinity. Her work spans gender, class, education and global social theory, including the notable book Southern Theory. Connell has published extensively and is widely recognised for reshaping how sociologists understand gender and power.
Much of the discussion of post-colonial or de-colonial issues is pitched at a highly abstract level, speaking of epistemologies, cultures, and broad frameworks of knowledge. However, the intellectual labour that actually creates and circulates knowledge is mostly organised and sustained in particular institutions. They are universities, colleges, schools, research institutes, government departments, newspapers, electronic media corporations, and so on.
Here the concept of the coloniality of power, developed by the Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano, is important. Quijano observed that the institutions of colonial societies embedded an orientation towards the imperial centre, an orientation that persisted after political independence.
The coloniality of power is a striking feature of universities in the post-colonial world. With few exceptions, they look towards the elite universities of the global North for models of how to organise themselves, how to teach and do research, and for recognition of the research they do. This is a highly practical approach. If a university is looking for fee-paying students, or a researcher is looking to influence a field, the global North is vital because it is the great node in global academic communication networks.
Two counter-strategies have emerged. The Chinese state, mobilising the economic resources of its new capitalism, has concentrated funding in a group of elite universities which are having an impact on global statistics. At much the same time, Brasil launched the project of a global-South bibliographical database (SciELO) as an alternative to sources such as Web of Science that are strongly biased towards the global North.
References
There is a very large literature on these subjects. Here are some valuable collections of research and theory, in several fields, that will provide ways into the debates.
- Kerry Carrington, Russell Hogg, John Scott and Máximo Sozzo, eds. The Palgrave Handbook of Criminology and the Global South. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
- Wendy Harcourt, ed. The Palgrave Handbook of Gender and Development. Palgrave, 2016.
- Eric Macé, ed. An Invitation to Non-Hegemonic World Sociology. Rowman & Littlefield, 2024.
- Leandro Rodriguez Medina and Sandra Harding, eds. Decentralizing Knowledges: Essays on Distributed Agency. Duke University Press, 2025.
