Global Sociology as a Renewed Global Dialogue
iacchos | Louvain-la-Neuve
After its heyday in the 1990s, global sociology has come under harsh criticism by approaches that include subaltern, postcolonial, decolonial, feminist and gender studies, and Southern theories together with other “epistemologies of the South.” Beyond their heterogeneity and divergences, these approaches converge in challenging the legitimacy of global sociology, which has been identified with Eurocentrism and the domination of Northern/Western sociologists.
The epistemic agenda propounded by these critical theories combines two steps. The first is the deconstruction of the inherent Eurocentrism on which global sociology and most of our discipline’s cognitive frames are rooted, as Sujata Patel has argued. This challenges Western-dominated forms of producing and diffusing knowledge as much as Eurocentric worldviews. Enrique Dussel has shown that coloniality and the conquest of the Americas are not a side issue of modernity but a foundational event on which modernity has been built and through which it keeps reproducing itself. Western subjectivities have constructed themselves in a relation of domination over “others.” To analyze the social actors, mechanisms, and institutions that have built, maintained, reproduced, and updated these forms of social and epistemic domination is an essential task for today’s social sciences. It includes reflexive analysis of their own past and current role in reproducing this social and epistemic system.
The second step is to pay attention to and give visibility to worldviews, experiences, and knowledge that have been “invisibilized” and denied by the modernization process. Indigenous, ecological, feminist, peasant, and minority movements have made this a significant part of their emancipatory struggles. It is also an urgent task for sociologists in the Global North and the Global South. For professional sociologists, this step notably includes revealing the contributions to our disciplines by researchers, actors, authors, and scholars that have been ignored for too long.