Entre 23 e 27 de fevereiro ocorrerá o IV Fórum da International Sociological Association (ISA) com o tema Challenges of the 21st Century: Democracy, Environment, Inequalities, Intersectionality.
Como parte das atividades do Research Committee on Conceptual and Terminological Analysis (RC35), que é coordenado por David Strecker (University of Frankfurt) e Arthur Bueno (University of Frankfurt), será realizada na manhã e na tarde do dia 24 a sessão temática Metamorphoses of Sociology: What Can We Expect of It and Do about It?, organizada por Paulo Henrique Martins (UFPE) e André Magnelli (Ateliê de Humanidades).
Disponibilizamos no nosso site a proposta da sessão e a programação e o resumo dos trabalhos que serão apresentados e debatidos.
Metamorphoses of Sociology: What Can
We Expect of It and Do about It?
Session organizers
Paulo Henrique Martins (Universidade Federal de Pernambuco)
André Magnelli (Ateliê de Humanidades)
Chair
André Magnelli(Ateliê de Humanidades)
Session Description
Sociology is a relatively recent science whose end may be near. Born in modernity, it may be a victim of its deconstruction, to which it has contributed. In this time of mutations, we wonder: is sociology living a crisis and, if so, what does the near future hold in store for it? To answer these questions, we plunge into perplexities: but what is sociology? What can it know? What is it good for? What should it do? Or rather, what can we expect of it and do about it ?!
In this session we wish to reflect on the crisis of sociology in the face of a general crisis of our time. It is necessary to debate it from researchers’ perspectives from different countries and regions. What interpretations are there about the crisis, and what outlets are being proposed? It is important to reflect on the history of sociology from its diverse culture and theoretical perspectives; to articulate its history with the present, connecting the crisis of sociology with that of society and universities; and to reconstruct the experiences of classical sociology with disciplinary connections and theoretical and empirical plurality. In order to reflect critically on the limits of deconstructivist approaches – which are too attached to the discourse, thus reinforcing the current fragmentation process of reality and disconnection from its complexity -, we want to think about the possible metamorphoses that allow sociology not only to understand but also to respond to the challenges of the present time.
Oral Presentations
Parte I
Wednesday, 24 February 2021
10:45-12:15
Sociology of Crisis and the Crisis of Sociology
Felipe MAIA
Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora (UFJF), Brazil
Start Time: 10:45
Abstract:
How the study of crises could help us to understand the propalled crisis of sociology? Sociology has not been indifferent to the many crisis in the world. In fact, crisis of democracy, capitalism and the Anthropocene are main topics on recent debates in the field. We could even feel a new mood in sociology concerning the production of big narratives, diagnosis of times or ontologies of the present.But we probably cannot acknowledge yet how the present crises are reshapping sociological knowledge and intellectual activities, or even if it is effectivelly happening. In this paper I will draw on recent studies of crises to offer some insights into these questions and to evaluate the possibilities of new diagnosis of times. I want to explore theoretical, conceptual and methodological challenges present in this kind of sociological work, i.e.: How are these works related to more classical diagnosis of crisis? How far have we gone in a more stabilised concept of crisis? How do desciptive and normative questions are adressed? Is it possible to offer a more totalising view of the crisis?In this effort I want also to argue that the study of crises can be a good way to renew the relevance of the discipline both inside the sciences and the public sphere.
Critical Theory of Coloniality and Internal Colonialism
Paulo Henrique MARTINS ALBUQUERQUE
Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE), Brazil
Start Time: 11:00
Abstract:
The importance of refounding and unifying the theoretical debate on coloniality in the current world context is justified by the urgency of clarifying the new types of colonization that neoliberal capitalism is promoting by expanding the culture of consumerism and controlling the available material and symbolic resources. The development of the postcolonial debate in Latin America suggests that a Critical Theory of Coloniality is being formulated worldwide, articulating critical theory in the North and the various emerging sociologies in the South. The debate on internal colonialism is a way of analysis of this approximation of the geopolitics of knowledge by highlighting the complexity of interethnic, national and class conflicts in the dynamics of colonial power. The debate on internal colonialism may be the necessary connection to unite the many existing approaches to postcolonialism, including those on imperialism, dependence, and decoloniality.
Human Being? What Do You Mean? the Sociological Crisis from the Subjective Point of View
Adrian SCRIBANO
National Scientific and Technical Research Council, Argentina
Start Time: 11:15
Abstract:
If sociology faces a crisis, it is because society is going through profound transformations. Within the framework of the consolidation of the normalized societies in the immediate enjoyment through consumption, the notions and practices regarding of what should be understood by the social subject are being vertiginously modified.In the second part of the last century, Bourdieu, Giddens, Archer, Habermas, Bhaskar, Melucci, and many other sociologists and social scientists have discussed and developed various ways of understanding what it means to be a social agent.This paper seeks to propose an approach to the notion of the person as a basis for discussing the necessary and urgent changes in the current sociology crisis. To achieve this objective, the following argumentative strategy is proposed: a) The connection between society crisis and crisis of sociology is summarized, b) the differences and similarities between individual, agent, actor, subject and person as central nodes of the crisis in society is explained, c) is indicate how the above situation is connected to the missions and visions of sociology and, finally propose a possible discussion agenda.The paper proposes a dialectical view of the social person as a clue to reconstruct a notion of sociology that allows us to elaborate a utopian view of a possible society.
The Specter of May 1968 in the 21st Century: A Brief Social History of Postmodern Tribalism
Luis BARROS,
Universidade Federal do Ceara, Brazil
Time: 11:30
Abstract:
Postmodern thinking has become widespread in the social sciences and humanities with consequences that we are still trying to assess. I will address the current state of sociological thinking by looking at historical events that have recently shaped the discipline, focusing special attention on the events of May 1968. From the 1960s onward, sociological thinking took on an anti-enlightenment bent with the rise of critical theory, identity politics, post-structuralism, and postmodernism. Thus, the primary purpose of this paper is to provide an interpretation of sociology together with an analytical reconstruction of its recent trajectory
Parte II
Wednesday, 24 February 2021
14:15-15:45
Social Engagement and Sensitizing Concepts in Social Sciences
Silvia CATALDI
Sapienza University of Rome, Italy
Gennaro IORIO
University of Salerno, Italy
Start Time: 14:15
Abstract:
For a long time, the prevalence of positivist and neo-positivist positions has meant that in social sciences the issue of value-freedom was confused with the absence of values. In the history of social thought, a parenthesis has been represented from the Sixties and Seventies of the last century, in which there was been a participatory and committed awakening of all human and social disciplines (Galtung, 1967; Gilli, 1971; Diamond, 1974; Scholte, 1971; Leclerc, 1972). Subsequently, the following decades were characterized by the emergence of fragmented and specialist knowledge where values and social engagement seem have no space.However, nowadays, different voices converge on the need for engagement of social sciences, especially in the face of contemporary challenges, such as the ecological, political and social ones. On this track, for example there the public sociology (Burawoy, 2005), the postcolonial thought (de Sousa Santos, 2014), the approach of co-responsibility and collective responsibility towards future generations (Apel, 1990; Jonas, 1979) and the collective experience that has given rise to Convivialist Manifesto (AA.VV., 2013). A common point of all these proposals is the search for a new “universal point of view”, or rather in the words of some authors, a “pluriversalism” or “universalism of many voices”.Starting from this basis, the paper aims at the development of a sociological imagination to see the changes which can take place and imagine a new future in a perspective of social inclusiveness and the promotion of a “multiple protagonist”. In particular, the paper to focuses on a new interpretation of a category of human action, love-agape action, with the aim of investigating its potential, both in analytical terms and in terms of design and action.
Theoretical Pluralism and the Foundations of Sociological Reasoning
Thiago PONTES
Universidade Federal da Paraíba (UFPB), Brazil
Start Time: 14:30
Abstract:
As social scientists, we are very familiar with, and habituated to, the (epistemological grounded) necessity of establishing the theoretical and conceptual presuppositions of our investigations. This scientific procedure is undoubtedly correct. The priority of the rational in the construction of the object is well established within our scientific community – even the neopositivists concede that. Neverthless, however necessary this theoretical priority may be, it is not sufficient in itself to explain and justify the prevaling theoretical pluralism in our discipline – and in the social sciences in general – without receding into relativistic apories we are all well acquainted with.In this paper, we propose to integrate this justifed inquiry of the rational conditions of possibility of the social life with the less perceveid, but equally important, question: how must the social reality be (i) if sociology, and (ii) if different, rival, and under some respects irreconcilable, sociological theories, are to be possible? (We can observe that the well known argument about different scientific paradigms is not an answer: our question is precisely how they can be antagonstic in several respects, compossible, and claim to be objectively and empirically grounded, at the same time.)In pushing this unavoidable questions to all its extent, we can, maybe, integrate the foundations of the social sciences in our proposal of a mode of existence that is historical in its constitution, and embraces multiple determinations (the same social act can, at the same time, be characterized by its ‘economic’ constraints, its ‘moral’ dimensions, its affective bonds, or rather its inner ambivalence, etc.) that are just derivatively analitical: they are first, and foremost, existentiallly co-inherent in the nature of social life itself.
Behaviour of Very Large Social Units after ‚Religion‘ and ‚Society‘
Haimo SCHULZ MEINEN
Institute of Sociology, Germany
Start Time: 14:45
Abstract:
After the deconstruction of key terms as ‚religion‘, ‚society‘ and ‚nation‘ as un-helpful to investigate neutrally, the scientific interest still is there how to deal and analyze social phenomena, including large and very large social units. In the last century the german macrosociologist Norbert Müller („Civilization Dynamics“ I, II, 1989, 1991) has given remarkable inputs how to use the findings of materialistic US-american cultural anthropology to describe „Very Large Social Units“ which we live in. Climate change responsability is just one indicator to show that even after scholarly deconstruction of terms we cannot stop investigating. This paper contributes to postdeconstructivist understanding and prediction of Very Large Social Units. „Over the last two decades, a growing number of academics who study ‘religion’ have noticed that the idea that is foundational for their scholarship is fiction as something that is made, built, or constructed. This insight opposes notions of ‘religion’ as a thing or phenomenon that has always existed everywhere in one form or another and that continues to manifest itself in different traditions and configurations throughout the globe. Proponents of ‚critical religion’ understand religion to be a somewhat incoherent, rather recent concept that is projected as an anachronism onto history. According to this view, ‘religion’ is a modern, discursive product of differing, context-specific, dynamics of power with particular relation to the politics of colonialism and statecraft.“ (Naomi Goldenberg, 2019) Similarly, this paper attempts to deconstruct ‚society’ and ‚nation’ to come up with a suggestion how to adopt anthropological terms and findings. –
A Social Theory of Differentiation and Integration
Naoki ISO
Keio University, Japan
Start Time: 15:00
Abstract:
In this presentation, I reconstruct Simmel’s sociological theory as a social theory of differentiation and integration. In Über sociale Differenzierung (1890), he examinted the indivisible relation between the social differentiation and the expansion of each social group. He developped the idea in Soziologie (1908). Although he did not use the concept of integration, his idea can be interpreted as a social theory of differentiation and integration. Social integration and social differentiation both involve the reorganization of social boundaries. Simmel (1909) examined in the essay “Bridges and Doors” about coming and going between the boundaries of different groups or societies. If the door overcomes the distance between the two banks, which is now visualized and measured by the bridge, then the door, in a clearer form, expresses that separation and union are only two aspects of the same act. i develop Simmel’s ideas and connect them to John Urry’s sociology of mobilities. In your mobile lives, social differentiation and social integration occur reciprocally and simultaneously. By reconstruciting Simmel’s sociological theory as a social theory of differentiation and integration for the mobile lives, I will show a better understanding of apparent paradoxes of the contemporary societies which seem at the same time deeply divided and globally connected.
Discover the complete RC 35 schedule by clicking below
