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Problematizing Global Knowledge and the New Encyclopaedia Project

Theory, Culture & Society will commemorate its 25th anniversary in 2007. This provides us with the opportunity to reflect on the project of a journal committed to theorizing culture and society. Since its inception the journal has endeavoured to promote and debate innovative or challenging theory, for example, in special issues and sections devoted to postmodernism, globalization, reflexive modernization, digitalization, multiculturalism, performativity, vitalism, complexity and so on. As to be expected, the prime focus has been on theorizing culture and society in the context of profound changes in the contemporary world, and the emergence of new interdisciplinary fields of study in the social sciences and humanities. Nevertheless, even though ‘the new’ and ‘progress’ have been subjected to persistent critique in the pages of this journal, we need to reflect more on the relevance and impact of our theorizations in the circuits of global knowledge. This raises questions not only about the authority of our formulations, but also about the addressee. The analysis of the globalization of culture and knowledge has been a central concern of the journal, yet it is also important to give greater consideration to our participation in the globalization of a western-centric knowledge. This is especially the case if we remain confident that the theorizations we feature are necessarily legitimated because they are the latest, and by corollary the most advanced. In this special issue we seek to refocus attention on these questions and address the topic of the globalization of knowledge and its critique. As will become clearer in this introduction, the development of the New Encyclopaedia Project has enabled us to think through these issues about the production and circulation of knowledge in a way which opens up a more dialogical space of engagement with different globalizing knowledges and their modes of authorization. In considering these questions, we are trying to use, in what we hope proves to be a new way, an old form, namely, the encyclopaedia. A great deal of discussion and experimentation has gone into both the epistemological and the practical problems of how to reactivate this form as a forum for critique and for the production of new knowledge that would reflect the plurality of perspectives and interests that emerge in the flux of globalization and digitalization. Our overall goal is to open up the process of production and authorization of knowledge to greater questioning, along with the generation of new agendas for research that are sensitive to the broader questions of relevance, authority and public education.