Knowledge and Global Power is a ground-breaking, large-scale international study which examines the processes and politics by which knowledge is produced, distributed and validated globally. Identifying how the former colonial nations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – the rich countries of Europe and North America – continue to dominate the global knowledge economy, Fran Collyer, Raewyn Connell, João Maia and Robert Morrell examine how these institutionalised power relations continue to affect the opportunities and experiences of knowledge producers in both ‘Northern’ nations and the majority world of the global ‘South’. The working lives of ‘Southern’ researchers in new, socially and politically important research fields, which traverse the disciplinary spectrum (HIV/AIDS, climate change and gender studies), are shown to demonstrate emphatically that ‘place matters’, in ways that will profoundly affect future understandings and discussions of research, scholarship and knowledge itself. But it also shows that knowledge workers in the global South have room to move, setting agendas and forming local knowledge.
