Southern Lights: Framing Horizontality in Scientific Networks

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Several critical events have helped us refocus on our lives and review our relationship with reality. The COVID-19 pandemic and climate change have had a significant impact on our lives and our scholarship. More recently, the introduction of Artificial Intelligence has the potential to reorganize how we learn and write. In this special section, we advocate for the importance of horizontal dialogues through and for globalscientific networks with a special focus on scholarly contributions from the Global South to confront current challenges. Unequal relations considered inherent to North-South collaborations are still shaping the theoretical frameworks. This special section is an attempt to overcome this uneven and also dichotomous way of relating to North-South scientific collaborations. Global South serves as a decolonial end of a pluriverse of epistemic subjects. It is regarded as a process consisting of deconstructing labels, homogeneity, sameness, and dichotomies. Such a view is in contrast with the trendy labels Global South and decoloniality have acquired in the last decade in the scientific enterprise. This special section directs us to three authors’ articles from the Global South to illustrate the emergence of new ideas. The papers raise concerns related to territoriality, methodological shifts, and the ontological turn. The value and usefulness of the term Global South is important to distinguish it from the reference to subalternity and contexts of vulnerability and poverty.