Events

Exeter-Fudan Global Thought Network Symposium 2026

Thinking Across Contexts: Disciplinary Knowledge and Its Limits

This symposium examines how knowledge changes across historical, cultural, and political contexts. Bringing together scholars from Exeter and Fudan, it invites work on situated and comparative approaches, decolonial and non‑Western epistemologies, and the limits of universal disciplinary frameworks.

Event details

How is knowledge shaped by where it is produced? What happens when disciplinary frameworks travel across historical, cultural, and political contexts?

Across the Humanities and Social Sciences, scholars are increasingly questioning the limits of universalising theories and reasserting the importance of locally grounded, historically situated forms of understanding. From debates about contextualism and transhistoricism to the decolonial turn’s critique of Western-centrism, the production of knowledge is being re-examined in light of global inequality, geopolitical instability, climate crisis, and technological transformation.

The 2026 Exeter-Fudan Global Thought Network Conference invites participants to explore the entanglements between disciplinary frameworks and contextual knowledge. Bringing together colleagues from across our two institutions, the conference seeks contributions that foreground local meanings, situated epistemologies, and transhistorical processes from a range of disciplinary perspectives.

We welcome papers addressing themes such as:

  • Contextualism, transhistoricism, and situated knowledge within specific disciplines

  • Decolonial and non-Western epistemic practices

  • Intercultural, comparative, and multi-sited approaches that connect knowledge across contexts

This intentionally broad call (submission portal available here) aims to foster dialogue across disciplinary boundaries and encourage participation from scholars working in diverse fields across the Humanities and Social Sciences.