Over a six-year period a group of seven universities from Africa, the Asia-Pacific region, Europe and Latin America have been driving a vibrant research mobility cooperation in the emergent cross-disciplinary areas of Global South Studies.

The member universities are UCAD, Dakar/Senegal; WITS, Johannesburg/South Africa (in Africa), JNU New Delhi/India and University of Melbourne/Australia (Asia-Pacific region, UNAM Mexico City/Mexico, and UFF Niterói-Rio de Janeiro/Brazil (Latin America) and EKUT Tübingen/Germany.

Funded by the German BMBF-DAAD in two phases (“Literary Cultures of the Global South” 2015-2018; “Futures under Construction in the Global South” 2019-2020) with auxiliary funding from the South African NRF, the Brazilian CAPES, and the Mexican CONACYT, the Network organizes a series of summer schools, conferences and workshops in Tübingen and in the partner universities to further a dialogue between partners in the Global South on issues relevant to the Global South.

A programme of visiting fellowships, public intellectual fellowships and doctoral student exchanges facilitates an ongoing multi-lateral conversation between scholars from around the world. The project provides a forum for staff and students (doctoral and masters) in literary, cultural and media studies from universities from the Global South to explore the meaning, utility and applications of the term for a renewed pursuit of knowledge in their respective disciplines.

Main areas of research and publications include:

• Gender and Diversity
• Megaurban formations
• Media, representation and society
• Social inequality / social justice
• Education policies (secondary and tertiary domains)
• Indigenous knowledge
• Migration, Exile and Diaspora
• Memory and Reconciliation
• Temporalities, Subjectivity and Identities
• Environment, landscape, sustainable development and climate change
• Postcoloniality and decolonial approaches
• Geopolitics of knowledge and knowledge production economies

The project pursues excellence and innovation in the following areas:

• Fostering interdisciplinary research in the area of infra-area studies focussed on the Global South, with a high-profile series of publications in the area
• Cooperating with a wide and constantly expanding range of overseas partners located in the Global South or focussed on Global South Studies
• Nurturing of postgraduate students and early career researchers working in the area of Global South Studies, in particular through the establishment of structured doctoral programmes and research training groups or research teams
• Establishing contacts with non-university partners in civil society and developing common research agendas with them
• Informing the broad public about issues and debates in and on the Global South and fostering awareness and dialogue on these questions in the public sphere