Cartographies of epistemic expropriation: Critical reflections on learning from the south

Abstract

There are increasing efforts within Anglophone geography to take seriously and learn from knowledges produced in the global south. Although this move is usually based on ethical and political motivations of Anglophone geographers, there are competing sets of pragmatic and parochial motivations that pose tensions. The value of learning from the south is often only implicitly made and few attempts have been made to map the evolving forms and distribution of values generated through engaging southern knowledges. Critically reflecting on my own engagements with Latin American, and particularly Argentine, knowledges, this paper argues that current enthusiasm with southern epistemologies may be paving the way for the intensification of epistemic expropriation: the extraction and valorisation of knowledge in a depoliticised context elsewhere. The paper develops the notion of epistemic expropriation to direct attention to how south-north circulations of academic knowledge may be complicit in the geographically uneven valorisation of academic labour and the depoliticisation of knowledge’s concrete use-values. In the process of learning from Latin American knowledges, particularly around territory, I have generated clear value for my own career progression, and for Anglophone geographers, while it is less clear what my Argentine counterparts have gained. Moreover, in abstracting knowledges from their particular terrains of struggles, particularly the experiences of Greater Buenos Aires, I have facilitated a depoliticisiation of grassroots ideas and practices. The final section argues that practices of epistemic expropriation are reinforced and sustained by Anglophone hegemony in “international” geography, posing dilemmas for those engaging with southern knowledges.