ALICE Background – “Reinventing Social Emancipation”
Reinventing Social Emancipation Website
The ALICE project, Strange Mirrors, Unsuspected Lessons: leading Europe towards a new way of sharing experiences is a legacy of the Reinventing Social Emancipation project (EMANCIPA) coordinated by Boaventura de Sousa Santos from 1999 to 2001. EMANCIPA’s project began from the growing awareness that the Social Sciences had exhausted their ability to renew and innovate. Pursuing an approach that involved reinventing social emancipation, it began to explore what is now termed the “Epistemologies of the South,” fostering an understanding of knowledges and practices that have been made invisible mainstream social sciences. The work was carried out by a team of 69 researchers and resulted in a series of publications in various languages. The publications resulting from some of these studies focus on the theme of “counter-hegemonic globalisation” and cover various initiatives, organisations and movements in six countries – South Africa, Brazil, Colombia, India, Mozambique and Portugal – and six social areas: participatory democracy; alternative production systems; emancipatory multiculturalism, justices and citizenships; biodiversity, rival knowledges and intellectual property rights, and new labour internationalism.
EMANCIPA’s Main Publications in English:
Santos, Boaventura de Sousa (Ed.) (2005), Democratizing Democracy. Beyond the Liberal Democratic Canon. London: Verso.
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Santos, Boaventura de Sousa (Ed.) (2006), Another Production is Possible. Beyond the Capitalist Canon. London: Verso
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Santos, Boaventura de Sousa (Ed.) (2007) Another Knowledge is Possible. Beyond Northern Epistemologies. London: Verso
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Santos, Boaventura de Sousa (2010) (Ed.), Voices of the World. London: Verso.
