Concept Formation in Global Studies: Post-Western Approaches to Critical Human Knowledge

The book proposes a new epistemological and methodological approach to concept formation across human and natural sciences, drawing from postcolonial, decolonial, and post-western perspectives to place new methodological cornerstones. It challenges the prejudice that heterogeneous epistemics are confined to provincial, exotic, or solipsistic particularisms and aims to address the problem of asymmetrical power relations that materialize colonial history through heterarchies of class, gender, race, ethnicity, culture, knowledge, cosmology, and ecology.

Format: Hardback
Length: 280 pages
Publication date: 11 June 2024
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

The book presents a novel epistemological and methodological approach to concept formation across human and natural sciences, transcending Eurocentrism and specism. It introduces a method that enables global epistemics to address the challenges arising from geohistorical and epistemological perspectives, which have yet to be fully explored. The book posits monstrosity as the generative grammar of a holistic approach to human knowledge and draws from postcolonial, decolonial, and post-western perspectives, as well as arts, astrology, magic, indigenous knowledge, genetics, theoretical physics, and Afrofuturism. The book seeks to challenge prevailing critical perspectives that fail to acknowledge their inability to develop appropriate methodologies for terminological and conceptual elaboration in contemporary human knowledge. It argues that once the world is recognized as a multilayered spacetime of analysis, research on large-scale/long-term processes of social change should advance in a manner that addresses the asymmetrical power relations that shape colonial history through heterarchies of class, gender, race, ethnicity, culture, knowledge, cosmology, and ecology. The book aims to dispel the notion that heterogeneous yet non-canonical epistemics are confined to provincial, exotic, or solipsistic particularisms, and proposes a different way of thinking about the relationship between the abstract and the concrete, a new relation between data or histories and concepts, and an alternative pathway to cross-cultural translation.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781538178423