De Sousa Santos lived in Berlin for a few years and returned to his hometown of Coimbra, where he briefly worked as a lecturer in the Faculty of Law. 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 traveled 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, the spirit of which he considers 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, one of the most prestigious and highly competitive international financial institutes for scientific excellence in Europe. The project was initiated in July 2011 and 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 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.”
Ideology
De Sousa Santos has been 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 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.
Select works
His PhD thesis has not only been considered 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. Among his most recent and relevant publications are:
Toward a New Common Sense: Law, Science and Politics in the Paradigmatic Transition
Toward a New Legal Common Sense. Law, globalization, and emancipation
