Research Committee 07 is the only IPSA Research Committee expressly focused on the Global South, where we define ‘Global South’ as the experience of marginalisation which can be location-agnostic.
Building academic networks and professional solidarities among Global South researchers is challenging given the unequal universe that is mainstream academia. Calls to critique inequality and decolonise academia now emanate fashionably from Global North locations but still within the structural frameworks of university, tenure, peer review and publication as defined by the North, in an earlier time. Researchers located in and working in the Global South fall off the edge of even the periphery of this world. They face financial, linguistic, infrastructural, bureaucratic and legacy barriers that serve as an elaborate gatekeeping complex that excludes them. Effectively then, international academic conferences and even Reseach Committees like this one are mainly accessible to a small number of Global North researchers working on and then speaking as the Global South and Global South-based researchers who are very privileged.
Participants in this roundtable will highlight and explicate these barriers to participation, suggest reforms and remedies and imagine alternative routes to better inclusion.