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Boaventura de Sousa Santos

Personal Life: Boaventura de Sousa Santos was born November 15th, 1940 (age 76 years) in Coimbra, Portugal.

Education: Boaventura de Sousa Santos earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Coimbra in his hometown graduating in 1963. He then went to Berlin for a post-graduate course in the Philosophy of Law. He began to move away from Law, opting for a doctorate in the United States, on the sociology of law, which he pursued at the University of Yale at the end of the 1960s. He has described his experience at Yale to be a “dizzying transformation, both academically and politically”. He moved from criminal law to Criminology, then to the Sociology of Law and, finally, Sociology. While earning his PhD at the University of Yale from 1969 through 1973 he was exposed to the political ideology in the United States of America. In the midst of the Civil Rights movement, the radicalization of the black movement, resistance to the Vietnam War, and the first student strike at Yale de Sousa Santos became a Marxist. He took classes with the last Hegelian in US philosophy departments, J.N. Finlay and participated in study groups that met to read and discuss Das Kapital.

Career: A couple years after living in Berlin he returned to his hometown, Coimbra, where worked as a lecturer in the Faculty of Law for a short time. In 1973, he became one of the founders of the School of Economics at the University of Coimbra, where he opened a Sociology course. In the mid 1980s, he began to structurally adopt the role of a researcher whose understanding the world extended beyond a Western understanding of the world. He has been involved in research in Brazil, Cabo Verde, Macau, Mozambique, South Africa, Colombia, Bolivia, Ecuador and India. He has travelled widely, giving classes and lectures while also extending his range of experiences of learning in the process.

He was also one of the driving forces behind the World Social Forum (WSF). The very spirit of WSF is essential to his studies of counter-hegemonic globalization and to promoting the struggle for global cognitive justice, an underlying concept of “Epistemologies of the South.”

His most recent project - ALICE: Leading Europe to a New Way of Sharing the World Experiences - is funded by an Advanced Grant of the European Research Council (ERC), one of the most prestigious and highly competitive international financial institutes for scientific excellence in Europe. The project was initiated in July 2011 and will continue for the next five years. This project enabled him to gather a team of young researchers from various different countries and academic backgrounds that are committed to collectively developing the lines of research that have emerged from the epistemological, theoretical-analytical and methodological premises of his work that have been consolidated over many years. The main idea underlying Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s research project ALICE is to create a decentered concept ion of the anti-imperial South in which Africa and Asia also find their place in a broader and more liberating conversation of humankind. A double premise of ALICE is to bring to light the notion that the “Eurocentric world has not much to teach the wider world anymore and is almost incapable of learning from the experience of such a wider world, given the colonialist arrogance that still survives.”

Works: His PhD thesis was not only a landmark in the Sociology of Law, but has greatly impacted his life. In 1970 Boaventura de Sousa Santos travelled to Brazil in order to do field work for his doctoral dissertation. His work was focused on the social organization of construction of parallel legality in illegal communities, the favelas or squatter settlements. His fieldwork was based on participant observation, lasting several months, in a Rio de Janeiro slum where he experienced the struggle of the excluded against oppression first hand as learned from the wisdom of men and women struggling for subsistence and for recognition of their dignity. He has published widely on globalization, sociology of law and the state, epistemology, democracy, and human rights in Portuguese, Spanish, English, Italian, French, German and Mandarin.

Ideology: He became engaged in an authentic process of discovering Marxism. While acknowledging the limits of Marxism, Santos has more recently described Marxism as an “ongoing discovery.” While in Berlin he was immersed in a university community that bred democratic values, albeit in the context of the Cold War. Being in Berlin also allowed for the experience of the stark contrast between the communist influence in the East of Germany and the liberal democratic ideology in West Germany. In the mid 1980s, he began to structurally adopt the role of a researcher whose understanding the world extended beyond a Western understanding of the world. His PhD thesis was not only a landmark in the Sociology of Law, but has greatly impacted his life. His fieldwork was based on participant observation, lasting several months, in a Rio de Janeiro slum where he experienced the struggle of the excluded against oppression first hand as learned from the wisdom of men and women struggling for subsistence and for recognition of their dignity. Boaventura de Sousa Santos believed in the importance of the social scientist striving for objectivity not neutrality.