Since its institutional beginnings in the nineteenth century, sociology, self-defined as a science of the modern (Western) world, has conceptualized modernity endogenously by taking the social norms, structures, and values characterizing the so-called Western societies as a universal parameter for defining what modern societies are and the processes of their emergence as the path to be followed by other, modernizing countries. Under a sociological lens, “non-Western societies” appear as economically, politically and culturally incomplete and lacking in the face of the modern Western pattern. Processes taking place on all structural levels in the non-Western world are generally interpreted sociologically as steps towards a drawn-out Westernization. To this day, most analyses of European societies ignore the fact that Europe’s economic, political and cultural transformation was triggered by a colonialist, slavery and imperialist past, conditioning today’s migratory movements. The course aims at reading sociology against its grain – exposing and disposing of its conventional, white, male, European genealogy of thought and revealing its national boundaries as limitations to knowledge of global interconnections. To this end, it brings together a set of critical approaches that engage with the post- and decolonial turn in sociology and in the social sciences more generally and explore “the underside of modernity”: subaltern knowledges, border thinking, and decolonial options.

Last modified

• 06/10/2022

Creator

• Boatcă, Manuela

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-2t23-zh20

Keyword

• canon

Date created

• 2019

Rights statement

• In Copyright

License

• Creative Commons BY-NC Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International