Multiversity – Citizens International

ABOUT MULTIVERSITY

Multiversity is an educational and research project committed to a rigorous critique of modern knowledge frameworks and the epistemological, moral, and political assumptions underlying contemporary academic disciplines. We challenge forms of knowledge shaped by intellectual imperialism, academic dependency, and the captive mind. In their place, we advocate for creative and critical engagement with indigenous knowledge — recognizing its diverse origins, its emergence through dialogue across knowledge traditions, and its context-driven application.

Our discourses are guided by a collaborative approach between knowledge traditions, non dogmatic and non hegemonic in its orientation, and directed towards addressing the problem of the world and its contradiction, especially concerning the marginalized class.

Multiversity Project: A Brief History

The Multiversity project began in a meeting in February 2002, at the behest of S. M. Mohamed Idris, founder of the Consumer Association of Penang (CAP), the Third World Network (TWN, also in Penang), and a host of other organizations, as well as Claude Alvares, a public intellectual, scholar, and activist based in Goa.

The meeting convened in Penang and was attended by twenty people from India, Malaysia, the United States, New Zealand, and the Emirates and the agenda was to discuss the contemporary politics of knowledge systems and the consequences of the imposition of the West upon the entire world.

They were focussed as well on the various ways in which the decolonization of academic disciplines can be attempted and achieved, and the role that activists and intellectuals of the South, whether based in the South or the North, can play in harvesting theories of knowledge, livelihoods and lifestyles, and forms of political awareness that are calculated to create more genuine forms of equality, justice, and plurality.

Following this meeting, few more conferences were organised in collaboration with various partners associated with the project, amongst them are: Redesigning Social Science Curricula (2004), International Conference on Academic Imperialism (2010), International Meeting on Resisting Hegemony (2010), Decolonising University (2011), followed by a number of seminars at universities in few selected countries.

Citizens International, as one of the convenors of the project, has also facilitated in the publications of few series: Dissenting Knowledges Pamphlet Series (ed. Vinay Lal), Radical Essentials Pamphlet Series (ed. Yusef Progler).