Rethinking the use of the term ‘Global South’ in academic publishing

Abstract

‘Global South’, a term frequently used on websites and in papers related to academic and ‘predatory’ publishing, may represent a form of unscholarly discrimination. Arguments are put forward as to why the current use of this term is geographically meaningless, since it implies countries in the southern hemisphere, whereas many of the entities in publishing that are referred to as being part of the Global South are in fact either on the equator or in the northern hemisphere. Therefore, academics, in writing about academic publishing, should cease using this broad, culturally insensitive, and geographically inaccurate term.

Teaching and researching International Development: Amplifying voices from the Global South

“…Throughout this article, we use the term ‘Global South’ in line with Amarante et al (2022) and Medie and Kang (2018b), which are most relevant to this study. However, we note the growing literature that engages with the contentious, multivalent and problematic nature of this term, which is beyond the scope of this paper (see, for example, da Silva, 2021; Kloß, 2017; Tripathi, 2021; Waisbich et al, 2021). We also refer to authors and their institutions as Northern (or Southern), but we recognize that this is an imprecise term that does not distinguish among particular biases that are Eurocentric, Western‐centric or Anglo‐centric.…”