In the first episode of Season 2, we discuss the divide between Global North and Global South using Boaventura De Sousa Santos’ concepts of “abyssal thinking” and “epistemologies of the South.” Both ideas revolve around how cognitive biases, gaps, double-standards, and their legal and material manifestations (e.g., Guantanamo as a zone where human rights are suspended), serve to perpetuate the exploitation and oppression brought about in Western-centric modernity via patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism. We explore how these critical concepts provide us with a vocabulary and a framework to understand the complex layering of inequalities and social changes in the increasingly interconnected global web of human-made structures. Keeping these concepts in mind for future episodes throughout the season, we invite our listeners to consider these cognitive divisions as useful tools to understand otherwise perplexing forms of inequality as intrinsic to modernity itself.
BONAVENTURA DE SOUSA SANTOS, Epistemologies of the South; Justice against Epistemicide, Routledge, New York, 2016

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