Interventions from the Global South

Mohan Dutta 0:03
ICA Presents.

Mohan Dutta 0:18
Kia ora koutou katoa. From the International Communication Association Podcast Network, this is Interventions from the Global South. In this podcast we listen to the voices of community organizers, activists and intellectuals from and of the Global South, imagining different worlds. My name is Professor Mohan Dutta from Massey University in Aotearoa, New Zealand. Today we have the pleasure of having with us Professor Rafael Grohmann from Brazil.

Mohan Dutta 0:55
Rafael is a professor at Unisinos University in Brazil, the coordinator of the DigiLabour Research Lab and the principal investigator of the Fairwork Project in Brazil. He’s also the director of the Platform Cooperativism Observatory in Brazil, funded by Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, and a founding member of Labor Tech Research Network. His work focuses on platform labor, worker organization, and data platform coops both inside and beyond academia.

Mohan Dutta 1:32
Today, we will discuss digital sovereignty, and how scholars from the Global South engage platforms distributing academic work, as well as the platforms hosting other forms of labor. We will talk about how translation into multiple languages impacts the way that scholarship and journals are perceived, and also about the open data movement and academic research climate in Brazil and other Global South countries.

Mohan Dutta 2:03
Welcome, Rafael. It's a pleasure to have you here.

Rafael Grohmann 2:07
Thank you, Mohan. Thank you, ICA, for having me in this amazing podcast.

Mohan Dutta 2:12
What in your understanding is the Global South?

Rafael Grohmann 2:15
The Global South is not [a] homogenous thing. Brazil or India or China cannot [be] understood as the same thing in a label as Global South. And [on the] other hand, Global South can be co-opted by Global North because the colonial and Global South things are the fashion now in the Global North.

Rafael Grohmann 2:41
There are fissures regarding how we researchers from Global South can penetrate the mainstream circuit of academic work and communication and media research around the world. Recently, a Brazilian colleague called Ana Suzina published in Media, Culture and Society about English as lingua franca, or how English as the standardized way to understanding academic knowledge can be a sterilized way of academic knowledge. So I think we from Global South can offer other ways of knowledge, but this cannot be understanded as a box or thing We cannot understand ourselves as only researchers of, on and from Global South, because we can offer other things too.

Mohan Dutta 3:43
That's beautiful, Rafael, how you have complicated the idea of Global South -- not just as space but really thinking through the question of power. This idea that Global South as a box often works to reproduce a cultural category that actually limits the possibilities and imaginative spheres that emerge out of these spaces. What are some strategies that are vital to articulating this alternative imaginaries?

Rafael Grohmann 4:14
It's a political commitment to publish in Portuguese and in Spanish too. Because imagine that in Brazil, there are about 70 or 75 academic journals in Portuguese in media and communication research. In Latin America, there's a tradition in publishing in Spanish and Portuguese, because many people in Brazil and other countries of Latin America does not understand, and don't read, in English. So it's very powerful to us.

Rafael Grohmann 4:51
And this is another thing: that Latin America and other countries from Global South have a strong tradition of really open science and really open access. Not a Taylor and Francis or Sage open access, but public policies around academic research. These can be an alternative -- and a strong perspective -- to produce and circulate knowledge beyond the borders of academic production in the Global North. We researchers from Global South have to publish in the main journals of the Global North, because it's important to struggle with the Global North in their own language, too.

Rafael Grohmann 5:37
I have seen that many Global North universities have offered Global South job positions, like, 'we need professors working on Global South perspectives.' Now to survive, many Western universities need our knowledge. It's a very complicated thing regarding migration, power, and knowledge and so on.

Mohan Dutta 6:05
That seems to be an interlocutor -- or translator, or a mediator -- role that sometimes scholars have to play in terms of bringing the voices of the South into the North, right. But even in sort of playing that kind of role or building that kind of platform. There are processes of erasure written in ante, because you're translating into a language in terms that are palatable or acceptable to the Global North.

Rafael Grohmann 6:35
Yeah, and this is a kind of process that Ana Suzina's saying about the role of externalization regarding the English as lingua franca, because the English as a standard language is not only a question of language, it's a question of how you think about these things and how can be the ideal format, ideal of quotations and direct feelings regarding phrases and so on. And this can be a type of a erasure on other communities.

Rafael Grohmann 7:16
Another example from one of the greatest Latin America researchers in communication theory: that's Jesús Martín-Barbero. Jesús Martín-Barbero published in Spanish, and in Portuguese too, a book called 'From Media to Mediations: Communication, Power and Hegemony.' When this book is translation into English, the name is the inverse: "Communication, Power and Hegemony: From Media to Mediations."

Rafael Grohmann 7:51
The powerful concept of Jesús Martín-Barbero is the concept of mediations regarding how it's not focused only on media things, but regarding all sociability in all types of rituals, and so on. So the translation of his book to English erasures some of his powerful things regarding Latin America communication theory.

Rafael Grohmann 8:19
When a journal invites people from Global South universities to editorial board of a journal, this is a type of, 'okay, we have 99% of Global North researchers, but we need to have one people from the Global South.' There is also emergence of European and North America researchers saying that they are experts of the Global South. And this is another type of co-optation and erasuring our knowledge, too.

Mohan Dutta 8:53
I want to come to that example of platformization of science that you talk about. On one hand, the examples that you offered create powerful registers for thinking about how openness mediated through platforms is a way for building infrastructures of equality in generation of knowledge. On the other hand, you have a small set of techno-capital, particularly in the publishing sector, that reproduce these inequalities in knowledge production; ironically, in the name of open science. So could you reflect upon that dialectic between resistance and co-optation?

Rafael Grohmann 9:37
The Silicon Valley ideology is that we offer a business with a common good, or with social good purposes. This is a type of media and PR strategy, also in the platforms of academic publications. Last year in Journal of Communication, my colleagues and me, leaded by Thaiane de Oliveira, published an article on the view from Latin America regarding open science and open communication. We say that open science in Latin America is not a functionalist thing. It's regarding infrastructures, regarding public infrastructures related to science and technology and innovation. Regarding the real digital sovereignty of Latin America, Universities in Latin American countries.

Rafael Grohmann 10:36
For instance, I know that Sage has a type of platform, Sage Path. Sage Path is like a Tinder for academic publications. And we say to Sage, okay, my article is searching for your ideal date, or ideal love, regarding academic publication. We Latin America can offer a history of free, or open, access regarding our journals in other academic publications.

Rafael Grohmann 11:11
For us, it's a type of knowledge that need to be circulated to all the people of our countries. We think about civic platforms too - like alternative views of Uber or even Deliveroo and other labor platforms. I think we can expand this Latin American approach to other countries, and it's a challenging thing but we need to build alternative ways to Taylor and Francis and Sage journals. We know that is very difficult, because science costs money. And we researchers from Global South, we suffer from unpaid work in many, many, many ways. And these are racialized and gendered and also colonized perspectives, okay? We have a huge amount of unpaid work regarding reviewers, regarding editors, and so on. This is a trick[y] thing, but we need to at least imagine alternatives and not only to reproduce. And another thing Thaiane de Oliveira - my colleague that wrote and led this article - is struggling for is regarding multilingualism. And the multiple language we can offer in academic conferences and academic journals, and so on.

Mohan Dutta 12:42
I would love to hear a little bit more about the history of real open access, as you describe it within Latin America.

Rafael Grohmann 12:50
The Brazilian government in 70s and 80s built an infrastructure for journals. That the journals are free and open is mandatory to apply for funding in Brazil. We have no... I forgot the name of the charges.

Mohan Dutta 13:11
Article processing costs. APCs.

Rafael Grohmann 13:14
Yeah, APCs. There's no APCs in Brazil. So all the journals in Brazil are located in public infrastructures and other types of platforms. And even in a Latin American reality, many people don't know how to read all the things and many people have no formal education. So how many people read academic articles? It's another tricky thing to understand these things. So for us in Brazil, we are building now how these open access journals can be connected to a broader public scholarship and a broader science communication perspectives.

Mohan Dutta 14:00
So I want to come to this question that you articulated a little bit earlier about this concept of digital sovereignty. What does digital sovereignty mean for you, and what does it look like?

Rafael Grohmann 14:14
Digital sovereignty is a type of word that is in fashion now… Jesús’ sovereignty platform capitalism with surveillance capitalism. It’s really interesting how some words like convergence in the past, or our cyberculture or transmedia - now, one of the words in fashion, our buzzword, is digital sovereignty. And for me, a digital sovereignty when applied from Global North perspectives can be understood as, okay we a country of North America or Europe need to protect our lines and protect our border lines regarding digital things, because we need to protect our citizens. But from a Global South perspective, these words can be understood in a reframing way, in the context that many countries -- even Brazil -- can be understood as dependent on platforms from U.S., mainly.

Rafael Grohmann 15:25
We need to build our own public infrastructures, our own infrastructures regarding digital technologies, and also artificial intelligence and other types of knowledge. And not only to protect our citizens or protect our frontiers, or something like that; but it's like survival. Because we don't want to be a dependent country. We have a country that depends on data and platforms and infrastructures, even data centers, and so on from United States of America. This can be understood like a new version of dependency and geopolitics, and also about power relations regarding digital platforms and platform creating.

Mohan Dutta 16:18
I would love for you to share with us the work that you're doing with coops, particularly thinking about the continuity of precarity in the Global South, right. How then, within that context, does the idea of cooperatives or worker organizing offer an alternative way of organizing that can potentially challenge this global work infrastructure of capitalism?

Rafael Grohmann 16:42
I was researching platform labor five years, since 2018 or '17. I published recently an article on South Atlantic Quarterly saying that we need to go beyond a platform cooperativism world to put alternatives to labor platformization context. Because platform cooperativism was born in New York City, in a New York City landscape of coops, and we need to go beyond coop and beyond platform.

Rafael Grohmann 17:20
In the Global South. We are building many types of technologies and many types of worker-owned technologies. It is not ready-made formula. This is an emergent process. And this can be understood more as a laboratory of class struggles, as experimentation process and prototyping process. In Brazil, there are many interesting movements and collectives of women and queer and trans people working as writers and building their own infrastructures in a feminist intersectional perspective. Many times I saw discourse saying, okay, platform coops not working because they reproduce precarity, and so on. Okay, but we need to imagine alternative ways to face platform labor, to face platformization of labor. I'm the principal investigator in Brazil for Fair Work Project. And I really believe that Fair Work principles can be used to not reproduce precarious conditions in platform coops -- or I prefer the term worker-owned platforms because it's not the type of coops, but this need to be connected to a broader landscape and broader public policies.

Mohan Dutta 18:56
I want to move toward wrapping up by sort of turning to that question of co-option that you articulated earlier, because that seems to be a vital theoretical question for the Global South. So what then are ways in which one can turn to the question of culture in the Global South as a transformative register that actually is critical of this co-option and resists it?

Rafael Grohmann 19:24
I really like a quotation from David Harvey. Haid contradictions have the nasty habit of not being resolved, but merely moved around. And this is a powerful thing, because the contradictions is here in our academic work. The academic work -- and all of the work -- in capitalism is also expression and expropriation, or creation and exploitation in the same time.

Rafael Grohmann 19:58
For me, one of our most important epistemic challenges is not only understand the contradictions, but put the contradictions moving with others at the same time. It's very hard to do, but it's amazing when we can.

Rafael Grohmann 20:19
For instance, Syed Mustafa Ali and others said, AI is a modern and colonial knowledge and power. So is it possible to decolonize AI? But other researchers say, okay, it's really possible to imagine an decolonizing AI perspective I don't have the answer, but I really love this debate in a productive way. I'm interested, really, in this debate regarding the power and limits of the coloniality perspectives to understand AI or understand many other issues in media and communication research.

Mohan Dutta 21:01
The Global South has been the site of various interventions, if you will, that have been carried out by the forces of colonialism and empire -- and capitalism, really. Thinking about that kind of interventionism from the North, Latin America has been the bed of experimentation with neoliberal policymaking, you know, in many ways. So if interventions, then, that challenge the Global North are also to come from the Global South, what are some of the big picture kinds of threads that you see that are necessary for us to actually imagine and make possible another world?

Rafael Grohmann 21:38
This is a really great question. For beginning, I think that one of the first steps is to hear more the voices from the Global South in mainstream perspectives. One main challenge is how we can connect this many types of knowledge and many types of academic publications. Last year in the Brazilian Association of Communication program, we organized a talk series with journal editors from Brazil and outside Brazil, with Africa, Asia, Peru and Global North. I think the first step is that we need to strengthen our conversations between Global South and Global North in English, Portuguese, Spanish and other languages, too. And this is a first step, and from these conversations, we can imagine together alternative ways, even to media and communication theory, media and communication research. And what are the epistemologies of communication, and what are other authors we need to recover to understand emerging issues or historical issues.

Mohan Dutta 22:57
Kia ora. And in much solidarity with you there Raphael as you imagine an alternative politics in the context of Brazil and offer many lessons within the broader picture of the universal emergent from the Global South. Lovely chatting.

Mohan Dutta 23:19
This episode of Interventions from the Global South podcast series is presented by the International Communication Association Podcast Network. The show is sponsored by the Institute for Advanced Study in the Global South at Northwestern University Qatar, producing and promoting evidence-based storytelling focused on histories, cultures, & media of the Global South.
Our producer is Ilana Arougheti. Our production consultant is Nick Song. Our executive producer is Aldo Diaz Caballero. The theme music is by Sleeping Ghost. If you’d like to hear more about the participants on this episode, as well as our sponsor, please check the show notes in the episode description. Thanks for listening.