Book Review: Fran Collyer, Raewyn Connell, João Maia and Robert Morrell, Knowledge and Global Power: Making New Sciences in the South (2019)

In July 2019, I attended the World Congress for Environmental History, hosted by the Federal University of Santa Caterina in Florianopolis, Brazil (UFSC). I was there because its history department is home to an energetic environmental historian who had gathered around her a large group of postgraduate students and the institution was actively seeking to host major international conferences. UFSC is a comprehensive research university, yet its scholars work in the intolerable climate of Jair Bolsonaro’s fascistic, populist rule, which includes frequent attacks on knowledge and independence. As an Australian with a fellowship at a wealthy institution whose resources allowed me several international trips per year, it was impossible not to be profoundly conscious of the disparity in opportunities for contributing to a global scholarly conversation. Colleagues gathered from around the world, but many who were meant to join us could not: last-minute visa or budgetary snafus halted their mobility. Even with a short and direct flight from Buenos Aires, a colleague from Argentina could not attend because of the parlous financial situation of his research institute. This experience was front of mind when reading Knowledge and Global Power. This work places Australia, Brazil and South Africa within the same frame of analysis as members of the ‘global South’ or ‘southern tier’, structured by history and current political economic conditions to be subservient members of the global knowledge economy. Authored by two Australians, a South African and a
Brazilian, this book begins from the premise that there is a ‘global knowledge economy’. However, participation and recognition within that economy is unevenly distributed among ‘knowledge workers’—that is, researchers, although the authors remind us of the huge body of support workers necessary for original investigations to occur.