Consortium for Southern Epistemologies (CSE)
Consortium for Southern Epistemologies (CSE) is a research network committed to fostering, sustaining and amplifying Black, Indigenous, anti-colonial, and decolonial feminist scholarship. It centres coalitional thinking across performance, visual arts, and literature to reconfigure radical possibilities emerging from aesthetic and political practices of the global south. Through workshops, seminars, and creative collaborations with researchers, organisers, artists, and members of the public, CSE thinks through and with the methods and epistemologies grounded in global south locations to cultivate spaces for critical engagement.
It understands the global south not as a unified or monolithic site, or a fixed geographical location, but as a heterogeneous and contested space shaped by (post)colonial and settler colonial hierarchies and struggles. This heterogeneity demands nuanced critical enquiry and an active commitment to anti-colonial resistance, refusal, and reimagination.
The collective interrogates and seeks to decentre dominant forms and processes of knowledge production that often reproduce colonial hierarchies within research and praxis. It questions the legitimisation of certain knowledge as ‘reliable’ while relegating others as ‘anecdotal’, challenging the enduring dynamic in which the global north is positioned as the producer of theory, while southern epistemologies are relegated to the role of empirical source or ‘evidence’. In its place, CSE insists on epistemic justice and plurality. While engaging in pluriversal dialogues, the consortium is attentive to the specificity of the place-based context as well as the political origins of Black and Indigenous struggles and philosophies.
A particular emphasis is placed on reading groups, collective thinking, and collaborations with researchers, artists, activists, and policymakers thinking epistemically with the global south. The network centres their experiences and knowledge-making practices as central to any research and theorisation.
Through its work, CSE seeks to build an international community of scholars and practitioners who are creating room for alternative ways of doing, thinking, and feeling—modes that are often silenced or undervalued in dominant academic spaces. It embraces slow, embodied, creative, and non-linear methodologies, reclaiming their value as legitimate, rigorous, and transformative.
Research Projects
You can find out more about the research activities by clicking on the following links:
- Pluriversal feminisms and multispecies justice: Thinking with/from the Global South
- Epistemologies of the Global South (EpiGloS)
- MUTUA
- Engaging the Latin diaspora with ecofeminist struggles in Latin America
- Global Epistemologies Project: Literary Translations
Publications
Check out publications of Consortium for Southern Epistemologies (CSE).
Get in touch
If you’d like to join the network, please write to Swati Arora (swati.arora@qmul.ac.uk) and Niharika Pandit (n.pandit@qmul.ac.uk).
Members
Check out members' profiles by clicking on the cards below.
