Call for Paper Submissions

The Global South Collective–VHSSA in collaboration with the Vietnam National University-Hanoi, we are thrilled to officially introduce our 2nd International Symposium on Global South Studies to be held at University of Education–VNU Hanoi from 22 to 24 August 2025. Following the success of the first international symposium on Global South Studies (GSS) 2024, we are delighted to announce the theme of this year’s symposium, our second, is CARE. We expect the symposium 2025 to transcend the norms and conventions of an academic gathering where the scholarship is produced merely by scholars and researchers, those in the ivory tower of academia. In GSS 2025, we understand that care is a performative act and can take forms of presentation in various socio-cultural canons. Care and the work of care are re-routed and re-configured in many scenes of everyday life through Southern theories. Raewyn Connell wrote an important text, Southern Theory (2020), while data from the periphery have occasionally been included in the considerations of theorists at the metropole, it is rarer for them to make reference to the social thought or social experience generated in the majority world. Hence, it is critical to think of some way to embody a cultural response to the colonized world, and thus, through GSS 2025 we propose global-southerning as a gerund and an act of doing to look at the body of the literature of care beyond academic work. Care is pictured, performed, and translated in daily life porous contexts, in histories and cultures, in traditions and beliefs, and in societies from the old times to the present. Performative acts and forms of care as well as narratives of care have been always evolving and shifting indeed in emerging world situations, such as under the influence of new technologies and AI, and mass media and the expansion of global popular cultures in inter-Asia. This year’s symposium theme asks the Global South Studies community to shift away from descriptive Eurocentric understandings of care framed by Global North philosophies, theories, and praxes to multi-faces and nuances of care constructed and nourished across our societies and cultures in everyday life experiences and practices (i.e., folklores, old stories, children’s literatures, traditional dances and rituals, families, education and pedagogy, and youth cultural works via movies, music videos, clothing and accessories that build their identities of care/self-care).