Editorial: Repurposing management knowledge production in the Global South context

BackgroundCurrent evidence of interprofessional collaboration suggests the importance of measuring and identifying the current state of the health professions’ interprofessional competencies. Therefore, this study was aimed at measuring the interprofessional competencies of health professionals in the Global South context using the validated CICS29.Materials and methodsThis was a cross-sectional study involving 300 healthcare professionals of a newly established teaching hospital. Prior to the measurement of interprofessional competencies, the 29-items CICS29, which has been translated into Indonesian language, was revalidated using a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). The 29 items of CICS29 were grouped into six subscales and each item was measured using a 5-point Likert scale. Data on gender, age, type of profession, and the length of working experience was also collected to identify whether discernible differences between grouping variables exists.ResultsPrior to measuring the interprofessional competencies, the validity of the instrument was established. Based on the CFA, the same six-factor model was found in the current study. The Indonesian CICS29 was reliable, with Cronbach alpha values of 0.921 for the whole instrument and that of each subscale ranged between 0.656 and 0.726. The mean total score of CICS29 was 128.53 (out of 145), ranged from 123 to 133.40 obtained by pharmacists and dentists respectively. No significant differences of CICS29 scores were found between grouping variables.ConclusionThe current study has revealed relatively good interprofessional competencies of healthcare professionals working in a newly established teaching hospital in the Global South healthcare context. Measuring the interprofessional competencies serves as baseline for further intervention to nurture and maintain collaborative practice. In addition, the current study has further proven the cross-cultural validity of CICS29, thus appropriate to be utilized in different setting and context.

Gowri Vijayakumar's book, At Risk: Indian Sexual Politics and the Global AIDS Crisis, provides an excellent ethnographic account of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), sex workers, queer, and transgender activism, and the transformation of sexual culture in India. Drawing on a compelling range of sources, including oral history interviews, popular press stories, medical journal articles, public health monographs, and reports of the governments, nongovernmental organizations, donors, and United Nations agencies, the author traces how AIDS and ideas of sexuality associated with it arrived in this country during the age of globalization and gradually became “the ‘fulcrum’ for constructing difference around race, caste, gender, and class” (p. 6). While exploring the experiences of the AIDS crisis, material practices of the state, and sociopolitical mobilizations in the global South, the book masterfully illustrates the myriad ways in which HIV prevention programs affected and reshaped the everyday lives of the sexually marginalized. During the mid-1990s, India came to be understood as at risk of becoming what Africa had already become. Scientists, policymakers, and media persons marked AIDS in this country as a Western vice—a sexually transmitted infection, which chiefly spreads through indiscriminate heterosexuality and homosexuality. It was anticipated that the conservative value system and single partner sex life of Indian adults will prevent the infliction of foreign sexual promiscuity into society and thereby reduce the risk of their exposure to AIDS. Vijayakumar shows the initial identification of AIDS as Western was gradually replaced with the theory of African origin of the disease. Soon a heated debate ensued about whether India will face an Africa-like crisis or not—one which located India within a global map of the AIDS epidemic. Increasing cases of female prostitutes in several parts of the country gave experts credence to claim India's AIDS epidemic as heterosexual, more similar to the African epidemic than Western homosexual ones. Indian sex workers and African sojourners (mainly students) were labelled as high-risk groups. Consequently, they faced many repressive measures taken by the state. In the wake of rising Hindu fundamentalism in the 1990s, these two groups were also stereotyped as hypersexual and perilous to the moral foundation of Indian society. The accounts of a looming crisis were thus, Vijayakumar argues, informed by the gendered, racial, and religious forms of inequality, exclusion, and oppression. However, in all these epidemiological narratives, the LGBTQIA+ community was rendered largely invisible. The strategy of isolating and criminalizing the gendered and sexual others was largely influenced by the colonial and postcolonial policies of containing deviant sexuality to control sexually transmitted diseases. But such a policy of containment in the early stages of the Indian AIDS response had some unanticipated outcomes. Vijayakumar reveals how the attempt of containing the risk among sex workers, sexual minorities, and transgender people paved the way for the necessary but conditional incorporation of these high-risk groups into the state programs for AIDS prevention. With the establishment of a relatively autonomous, semi-independent agency, the National AIDS Control Organization (NACO), the Indian response to the crisis shifted from a strategy of criminalization and marginalization to a strategy of incorporation. However, it would be wrong to assume that switching to the policy of inclusion was driven by any urge for adopting an enlightened strategy by the state. The inexorable demands from the high-risk groups for participation in the AIDS programs forced the state to acknowledge the functionality of these groups in the planning and execution of the program. The involvement of international donors in policy formulation also necessitated a reconfiguration of the ways through which the state could respond to the crisis. The author narrates how global funding and the engagement of civil society in the program gave the NACO a distinct hybrid structure. In this process, the Indian AIDS response constructed multivalent spaces within which the sexually marginalized could not only actively engage with the state but also find out new ways of asserting sexual identity. The scenario thus involved a “paradigm shift” from narrow biomedical approaches looking at AIDS as merely a public health challenge toward more rights-based approaches. It is intriguing that the Indian HIV prevention program was almost identically translated in Kenya, though “the circulation of best practices was never as simple as it looked on paper” (p. 151). The differences and similarities between the conditions of these two countries largely informed how AIDS experts approached transnational exchange to manage the epidemic. India–Africa collaboration, according to Vijayakumar, helped a somewhat sexually conservative state like India gain the status of a model nation within “the global AIDS field.” Thus, the book demonstrates how a catastrophic crisis was defined and contested in one global South context and then repurposed in another global South context. It undoubtedly serves as a welcome contribution to the expanding sociological field of sexual humanitarianism.

This article aims to shape understandings of the geographies of informal education by exploring an aspect of education that has been broadly overlooked by geographers to date—apprenticeships—within a Global South context. Drawing on qualitative research conducted in Accra, Ghana, where young male and female apprentices learn a trade alongside master craftspeople, the nature of the apprenticeship system and how it is evolving are explored. The article develops an analytical framework for examining the dynamics of informal education with three core elements: the people and everyday praxes; the materialities, technologies, and spatialities of the learning process; and the regulatory apparatus. The apprenticeship system in Ghana is shown to be constantly evolving, with some aspects of the learning process remaining informal, some being formalized, and still others informalized; the extent and nature of these processes vary between trades and over time. The article thus demonstrates how the boundary between informal and formal education is far from clear-cut, with processes of informalization and formalization occurring concomitantly. Calls are made to expand the agenda of geographies of informal education in both the Global North and South to incorporate livelihood-related issues, including apprenticeships, and geographers are challenged to rethink the informal–formal divide within education. This timely research thus forms part of broader trends to consider how addressing the Global South forces a rethinking and revisioning of theoretical frameworks. Key Words: Africa, apprenticeship, education, Ghana, informal.

Dominant narratives of women’s suffrage have been shaped in ways that marginalize Pacific women’s experiences. Such narratives have emphasized the struggles of Global North women to achieve individualized political empowerment, primarily through the right to vote, from the late 19th century. By measures of struggle, individual empowerment and temporality, Pacific women have been characterized as passive recipients of the vote in the late 20th century. In this article, we contest these narratives through foregrounding Pacific women’s political contributions, and reconsidering how suffrage is defined in Global South contexts. By revisiting the Pacific women’s suffrage story and highlighting activism that mirrors and extends the strategies adopted by suffragists around the world to claim political voice, we put forward a more comprehensive picture of women’s franchise in the Pacific. In doing so, we uncover tensions between collective conceptualizations of political empowerment and the individual rights-centred approach favoured by dominant suffrage narratives.

This article presents a systematic literature review on sustainable and smart cities, aiming to identify the main challenges and thematic approaches discussed in scientific publications from 2017 to 2025. A total of 31 articles indexed in the Web of Science database were analyzed using thematic and bibliometric techniques. The findings reveal a growing convergence between the paradigms of urban sustainability and technological innovation, while also exposing significant barriers to implementation, particularly in Global South contexts. Key obstacles include the fragmentation of indicators, institutional misalignment, governance limitations, and the prevalence of exclusionary technocentric approaches. The study highlights the need for integrated strategies that combine citizen participation, social equity, and ethical use of technology. It provides both theoretical and practical insights for researchers, policymakers, and urban managers seeking to foster fairer, more resilient, and sustainable cities.

Victims often face not only primary trauma but also secondary victimization from adversarial justice systems, exposing psychological blind spots. This study conceptually examines how trauma-informed justice aligns with victimology and restorative justice to advance empathetic and equitable legal responses. Using a conceptual normative method, it synthesizes secondary data sources through thematic triangulation. Findings reveal that trauma-informed justice is guided by five principles—safety, trust, collaboration, empowerment, and choice—shift justice toward healing and accountability. Originality lies in framing trauma-informed justice as a bridge between victim-centered and restorative paradigms, contributing a theoretical foundation for trauma-responsive reforms in Global South contexts.

Following a number of prominent concepts in urban planning, like participatory planning or self-help housing, co-production has started to gain momentum in the global South context. While it is has been long discussed as a means of service provision, the term is more and more often used in the broader sense of urban governance and policy planning. This understanding goes beyond the aspect of scaling-up successful co-productive infrastructure focused projects; rather, it indicates a different format of engagement for prompting urban stakeholders into planning citywide urban solutions. This article discusses the distinction between the different levels of co-production and their inter-linkages, and it investigates the relevance of positioning co-production as a factor framing urban governance. This includes a discussion on three main contradictions that can be identified within the current discussion on co-production. Finally, it identifies a set of arguments for elaborating the role of co-production in a policy and urban governance setting.

Hip-hop has become a global platform for articulating cultural and political identities, especially for marginalized communities. This study examines how race, gender, class, and place are represented in hip-hop lyrics through rhetorical and linguistic strategies. Utilizing a structured codebook, five tracks from the United States, United Kingdom, and Global South contexts were analyzed using both qualitative and quantitative methods. The analysis revealed that identity markers such as race and class frequently appear alongside rhetorical devices like metaphor, intertextuality, and naming, which enhance political commentary. Linguistic forms such as African American Vernacular English, code-switching, and alliteration were also found to reinforce cultural authenticity and resistance. These findings demonstrate that hip-hop lyrics function as more than artistic expression; they are discursive tools that challenge dominant ideologies and assert marginalized experiences. This study contributes a replicable analytical framework for examining identity in popular music and highlights the role of hip-hop as a global cultural force for social critique and community formation.

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) tools into postgraduate supervision in higher education has accelerated globally, offering opportunities to enhance efficiency in research processes and academic mentoring. However, limited empirical evidence exists regarding the risks and challenges of this integration, particularly within Global South contexts such as South Africa. This study investigates the challenges associated with the use of AI tools in postgraduate supervision from a South African perspective. Anchored in a constructivist paradigm, the study adopts a qualitative research design, employing semi-structured interviews with 20 purposively selected participants—10 postgraduate students and 10 supervisors from faculties that are actively integrating AI into supervisory practices. Data were analysed thematically using qualitative content analysis. The findings identify six key challenges: increasing dependence on AI that may erode students’ critical thinking and originality; insufficient digital literacy and institutional support; financial and sustainability constraints; the questionable reliability and accuracy of AI-generated outputs; ethical dilemmas and limited cultural contextualisation; and resistance to technological change among supervisors. While acknowledging the potential of AI to enhance research productivity and the quality of supervision, the study cautions against its uncritical adoption, which may compromise academic integrity, creativity, and equity. It recommends institutional strategies, including subsidised AI access, structured training on ethical and critical AI use, the embedding of digital literacy in postgraduate curricula, and the fostering of collaboration with AI developers to ensure culturally relevant systems. A context-sensitive approach is essential to balance the affordances of AI with the preservation of human intellectual agency and critical scholarly engagement in postgraduate supervision.

This article explores the challenges of conducting ethnographic fieldwork with right-wing and far-right male LGBTI+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex people, as well as all other sexual orientations, gender identities, and expressions) activists in Brazil – a society characterised by complex racial dynamics – from the perspective of a male, non-white and non-heterosexual researcher based at a European academic institution. It questions the assumption that racial difference inevitably hinders such fieldwork for non-white ethnographers and challenges the notion of ethnonationalism as a universal feature of the radical right. Instead, it argues that in Global South contexts, non-ethnic forms of nationalism create distinct, intersectional pathways to field access. To navigate these, the article suggests the strategic mobilisation of visible (gender, sexuality and race) and invisible (social, cultural and mobility capital) ethnographic tools to negotiate acceptance and presence in the field. The findings illuminate the relational and intersectional power dynamics shaping encounters with right-wing and far-right activists, as well as underscoring the methodological and interpretative value of ethnographic research for studying the radical right.

The COVID-19 pandemic restricted most economic and social activities, impacting travel demand for all transportation modes and especially for transit. We hypothesize that the shifts in travel demand varied by socioeconomic status, and we assess the differential impact of COVID-19 in the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) patronage across various socioeconomic groups in Bogotá. We built a database of frequent transit users with data collected by smartcards in Bogota’s BRT system between January and October 2020. For each user in the database, we labeled their home and work stations. Transactions at other stations are classified as “other.” The stratum (a government socioeconomic classification of residential units in Colombia) of a BRT station’s service area was assigned using an estimated probability vector for each user belonging to a specific stratum; this data is validated with aggregate strata distributions in the 2019 household travel survey. Our study found that the reduction in transactions for lower-strata users is significantly less than that of the middle and high strata. The magnitude of this difference varies over time but stabilizes after the end of the lockdown. The growth rate of “other” transactions per thousand people is greater than the growth for home and work locations, especially for the lowest strata. Other studies have shown that the radius of gyration (Rg) (a measure of how far individuals travel away from home) has decreased about 50% after the lockdowns. Our study shows that when measuring Rg only for users who continued using BRT, the Rg slightly decreased for lower and medium strata but increased for high strata. The contribution of this study is a method to classify BRT transactions of frequent users by strata, as well as a description of trends in BRT use by strata to expand our understanding of the COVID-19 lockdowns impacts in the Global South context. These results are a starting point to inform policy and decision-makers to guide the recovery efforts to improve transit accessibility and level of service for captive users such as low-stratum users.

The “Wheel of Logics”: Towards conceptualising stability of regimes and transformations in the Global South

Journal ranking systems have evolved from evaluative instruments into powerful mechanisms of research governance in higher education, shaping academic careers, institutional strategies, and accreditation outcomes. Within business and management education, the Association of Business Schools (ABS) journal ranking system has become one of the most influential and contested evaluative regimes. This article offers a critical-conceptual review of the ABS journal ranking system, reframing it not as a neutral technical device but as a governance mechanism that structures legitimacy, incentives, and conformity across business schools. Integrating scholarly literature, policy documents, and accreditation frameworks, the review examines the origins, evaluative logic, global diffusion, and consequences of the ABS journal ranking system. It shows how the system reinforces Anglo-American epistemic dominance, incentivizes conservative and prestige-driven research behavior, marginalizes interdisciplinary and practice-oriented scholarship, and contributes to global academic inequalities, particularly in non-Anglophone and Global South contexts. By linking debates on journal rankings to business-school accreditation regimes and contrasting them with outcome-based engineering accreditation models, the study reveals a misalignment between journal-centric evaluation and mission-driven, impact-oriented education. A regional analytical case from Turkey further illustrates how ABS-oriented governance logics interact with national quality-assurance and accreditation systems, highlighting mechanisms of adaptation and institutional tension. Overall, the article consolidates major critiques of the ABS journal ranking system to underscore the importance of responsible research assessment and to outline pathways toward more transparent, pluralistic, and mission-aligned research evaluation in business education.

Small‐scale fisheries support millions of people globally, but if poorly monitored and managed, they can negatively impact threatened marine species like sharks. We explore approaches to assess the ecological sustainability of an extremely data‐limited, small‐scale fishery for blacktip sharks (Carcharhinus limbatus) in Goa, India. We use an adapted expert elicitation approach, modified to suit local fishing communities, to collect data on shark catch and develop exploratory population models to understand conditions under which the fishery could be sustainable. An estimated 13,881–15,616 newborn blacktip sharks are targeted and captured annually by gillnets across our study sites. Our adapted expert elicitation protocol can serve as a rapid, cost‐effective, and inclusive method to obtain critical data for conservation planning, especially in data‐limited, Global South contexts. Our population models reveal that the current levels of shark harvesting are unlikely to be sustainable and can only continue if harvest rates are reduced by at least half and if the current local shark population is relatively high. Our study provides crucial information to inform conservation decision‐making, highlighting the need for urgent intervention to regulate Goa's shark fishery. Working with the local community and understanding the socio‐economic dimensions of this fishery can help identify appropriate conservation interventions.

The rise of large language model (LLM) chatbots, such as ChatGPT and Gemini, is transforming academic writing support in resource-constrained higher education systems like Bangladesh’s. This qualitative study explores how 12 Bangladeshi university students experienced and evaluated the usability and ethical implications of these tools during a structured academic writing task. Using moderated one-on-one sessions, think-aloud protocols, and Bangla-language interviews, the analysis identified ChatGPT’s intuitive interface, mobile accessibility, and time efficiency as key strengths. However, participants faced challenges with prompt formulation, repetitive outputs, and Gemini’s less intuitive, search-oriented design. While both tools aided ideation and drafting, concerns emerged about fabricated citations, over-reliance, and diminished critical thinking, raising academic integrity issues. These findings highlight the need for context-sensitive AI literacy, clear institutional policies, and user-centered, transparent HCI design. The study offers a comparative perspective from a Global South context, characterized by limited digital resources and evolving AI adoption, contributing actionable insights for policy, pedagogy, and design.