'This book is a counter-story to Western ideas about the benefits of the pursuit of knowledge. Looking through the eyes of the colonized, cautionary tales are told from an indigenous perspective, tales designed not just to voice the voiceless but to prevent the dying - of people, of culture, of ecosystems.
Since its inception, social work has been plagued with its dual claims to legitimacy as a discipline and a profession. In seeking to promote its knowledge claims, social work research has increasingly relied heavily on positivism, where objectivity is defined as ‘. . . detached, unbiased, impersonal, and invested in no particular point of view’ (Lloyd, 1995: 352).
The book is a cross between a polemical broadside and a cri de coeur. Connell herself calls it an ‘experiment with truth’ (xiii). Like many established theorists writing from outside the metropoles yet with some measure of recognition there, she is deeply outraged by the invisibility of most non-metropole writing in metropolitan fora.
HREE BASIC IDEAS underlie this book. First, the understanding of the world by far exceeds the Western understanding of the world. Second, there is no global social justice without global cognitive justice. Third, the emancipatory transformations in the world may follow grammars and scripts other than those developed by Western-centric critical theory, and such diversity should be valorized.
‘The Global South’ has become a shorthand for the world of non-European, postcolonial peoples. Synonymous with uncertain development, unorthodox economies, failed states, and nations fraught with corruption, poverty, and strife, it is that half of the world about which the ‘Global North’ spins theories. Rarely is it seen as a source of theory and explanation for world historical events.
What are Indigenous research methodologies, and how do they unfold? Indigenous methodologies flow from tribal knowledge, and while they are allied with several western qualitative approaches, they remain distinct.
This paper attempts to explore how indigenous peoples respond to ecological and development challenges and how their cultures and knowledge systems can contribute to the sustainable development agenda. At first, it will look at the characteristics of indigenous knowledge and at indigenous peoples’ notions of development to understand the concepts in which traditional knowledge is rooted.
Africa Spectrum, first published in 1966 by the GIGA-Institute of African Affairs in Hamburg, is an inter-disciplinary fully refereed journal, indexed by ISI, focusing on social science dealing with Africa. In 2009 it has become an open access journal and is published in cooperation with the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation.
This book is an important contribution to social science, specifically to the field of history and politics of knowledge production. It also importantly addresses a number of specialised professional fields pinpointing critical perspectives on the contributions of African indigenous knowledge to the knowledge terrain.
The publication of this work by the African Young Scientists Initiative on Climate Change and Indigenous Knowledge Systems is based on the understanding and acknowledgement that African Indigenous Knowledge Systems (AIKS) that have been locally tested and are culturally acceptable have sustained the lives of African people over centuries against adverse effects of climate change such as drought