It’s our first TL;DR Shorts of 2025 and what better way to kick off a new year of thought-provoking content from our amazing research community than to critically assess whether the terms we use to increase inclusion are fit for purpose. This is something that Joy Owango, the Founding Director of the Training Centre in Communication, or TCC Africa, tackles in today’s episode. We use the term “Global South” a lot, particularly when we are mindful of to better represent the challenges and opportunities of underrepresented researchers and their outputs on the global scale of research. However in this TL;DR Short Joy discusses the challenges of using the term, and whether it may be doing more harm than good.
Joy acknowledges the need to have a term that refers to both the geographic region of the Southern hemisphere and also the economic Global South, especially when describing the differences in access to funding and research information, and opportunities to collaborate on a global scale due to a lack of visibility of research outputs or the inability to attend conferences half a world away.
However, using Africa as an example, Joy expresses concern about the fact that, while it is easy to use the four major commercial capitals of the continent to represent the entire region, the resulting outlook is underrepresenting vast swathes of communities across the continent, so that when solutions are proposed, they do not adequately serve the needs of the many, only of the few that were represented.
Do you have any ideas for how we can better represent our communities across the world? Get involved in the conversation on our many social media channels using the hashtag #TLDRShorts, and let us know if you’d like to suggest future contributors for our series or suggest some topics you’d like us to cover.
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