Culturas Midiáticas is currently accepting articles for the Dossier "Epistemologies of Communication in the Global South".

2025-07-07

In “Neither Center nor Periphery”, Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) states: “The struggle, at least ours, is a struggle between geographies and calendars.” This sentence synthesizes both a political agenda and an epistemological problem. Territories such as Chiapas (Mexico), Yanomami lands (Brazil), quilombos, favelas, and urban peripheries outside Europe and the United States are located outside the “world order” – not as peripheries, but as alternative geographies and temporalities. These are precisely the geographies and temporalities that concern us.

While Hartmut Rosa (2013) associates modernity with “social acceleration”, Dipesh Chakrabarty (2021) suggests that the advantage of non-“Western” countries (the Global South) lies precisely in their belatedness. In Brazil, this irony echoes through thinkers such as Ailton Krenak (2019), Antônio Bispo (2020), and Davi Kopenawa (2019). Krenak recalls that the end of the Indigenous world began 500 years ago; Bispo rejects the capitalist domestication of nature and labor; and Kopenawa evokes the knowledge of the forest to resist the Anthropocene. These authors, like the Zapatistas, exemplify an onto-epistemological dissidence – ways of thinking that are not captured by the coloniality of time and space (ROLNIK, 2019).

In this light, this dossier seeks to articulate dissident forms of critical thinking in the field of communication. We invite researchers interested in situated knowledges (HARAWAY, 1988), strategies of resistance (HOOKS, 2021), alternative epistemologies and pluriverses (KOTHARI et al., 2022), who ground their investigations in the perspective of the Global South and historically marginalized bodies – Black, Indigenous, LGBTQIAP+, among others – questioning ways of being, existing, and knowing that challenge hegemonic knowledge production through plural cosmologies and counter-colonial strategies.

We suggest approaching the Global South as a historically situated concept in the post–Cold War period, moving beyond development as an economic marker in favor of cultural affinities and geopolitical relationships (DADOS & CONNELL, 2012). But not without critique. As Gras (2024) points out, the term has been criticized for its “pernicious” and “misleading” character, as it includes countries geographically located in the “North.” However, the author also notes that the same argument applies to the notion of “the West,” which culturally includes countries such as Australia and Japan. In this sense, embracing both the theoretical proposition and its potential criticism, we are interested in thinking of the “South” as a theoretical construct – a conceptual operator that reveals colonial power relations and, at the same time, aggregates dissident knowledges, forging links between cultures and epistemologies that challenge the status quo.

In line with this reflection and agreeing with Iqani and Resende (2019), the “Global South” can be an Arab immigrant neighborhood in Belgium, a ghetto in the United States, or an Amerindian territory in Australia. It is a conceptual device that resonates in dissident bodies and territories, precarized by the colonial project, but also bearers of histories, cosmologies, and struggles still insufficiently discussed. It is from this understanding that this call is constituted, encouraging submissions that engage with the perspective of the “Global South” and other cosmologies – corroborating them, questioning them, and expanding them.

The following (non-exhaustive) subtopics are highlighted:

  • Dissident bodies: race, gender, sexuality, and communication politics

  • Media, platformization, and decolonial thinking: critical readings from the South

  • Memory, archives, and visualities: affects and reconfigurations of the past

  • Escrevivência: experience as method

  • Anti-racist epistemologies, decoloniality, and necropolitics

  • Educational actions, learning communities, and meritocratic discourse

  • Combating epistemicide and methodologies in communication and ethno-racial issues

  • Mestizaje, whitening, and the consequences of the myth of racial democracy in Brazilian society

  • Racism and cultural reactions (dance, aesthetics, cinema, music, etc.)

The dossier is edited by guest editors Diego Amaral (UEM) and Renata Nascimento (UFRJ), along with editor Clara Câmara (UFPB). The journal invites interested researchers to submit their contributions by September 30, 2025. Publication is scheduled for January 2026.

Information about submission guidelines can be found on the journal's website:
https://periodicos.ufpb.br/index.php/cm/index.

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