Knowledge and Global Power is a ground-breaking international study which examines how knowledge is produced, distributed and validated globally. The former imperial nations - the rich countries of Europe and North America - still have a hegemonic position in the global knowledge economy. Fran Collyer, Raewyn Connell, João Maia and Robert Morrell, using interviews, databases and fieldwork, show how intellectual workers respond in three Southern tier countries, Brazil, South Africa and Australia. The study focusses on new, socially and politically important research fields: HIV/AIDS, climate change and gender studies. The research demonstrates emphatically that 'place matters', that research and scholarship are shaped by global relationships. But it also shows that knowledge workers in the global South have room to move: they can set distinctive agendas and form local knowledge.
Associate Professor Fran Collyer is a sociologist at the University of Sydney. Her recent books include Mapping the Sociology of Health and Medicine (2012), for which she won the Stephen Crook Memorial Award for the best Australian monograph 2014, and the Palgrave Handbook of Social Theory in Health, Illness and Medicine (2015).
Raewyn Connell is Professor Emerita at the University of Sydney and is one of Australias leading social scientists. Her work has been translated into nineteen languages, and she is a long-term participant in the labour and peace movements. Her recent books are Southern Theory (2007), about social thought beyond the global metropole; Gender: In World Perspective (with Rebecca Pearse, 2015); and El género en serio: Cambio global, vida personal, luchas sociales (2015).
João Maia teaches in the School of Social Sciences (CPDOC) at Fundação Getulio Vargas, Rio de Janeiro. He researches the history of social sciences, Brazilian social thought and sociological theory in the Global South. His recent work in English has appeared in Current Sociology and International Sociology.