5,
Inspiring panel on ‘Sociology and Social Movements in the Global South’, Social Movements in a Polarized World’ (#RC47 #RC48 #ISA2018WCS), chaired by #GeoffreyPleyers
This time #BoaventuradeSousaSantos spoke on ‘Social Movements as Knowledge Producers’: “Social Justice cannot be achieved without epistemic justice…Very often, I think sociologists are ‘incompetent rebels’, who imagine a brighter future without any instrument to work forward and complain those who are doing work in their own ways – then, sociologists are more like a conformist than a reformist, not to mention a revolutionist.”
The geographic and even economic Souths are losing their analytical usefulness in understanding the interconnectedness of diverse worlds. The root of today’s problematic social sciences is the fundamental assumption that the epistemic North is the solution to epistemic South as the problem.
When sociology and its important concepts were invented, no more than five countries could be considered as ‘developed’, and any later theoretical developments outside the core locations can only be provincially effective. On the colonial side, people are punished by ‘who they are’, the bodies are racialised and sexualised; the metropolitan side, people are punished by ‘what they do’ due to repressive culture. Yet, modern sociology and philosophy tend to generalise the metropolitan experiences to understand social struggles in colonial societies.
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#SujataPatel talked on ‘Global Social Theory: Towards Inclusivity’: Different colonialisms, in form and in essence, need diverse interrogatory methodologies that are contextually sensitive. However, we often tend to forget that knowledge production is simultaneously a labour that serves the university enterprise (research outputs) and a tool that exploits the researched (research inputs).
Pluralistic diversity v. ontological diversity: The former still tends to assume the existence of a core, letting the core define the core’s ‘others’ while appreciating their significance in a relative sense. The latter, based on an ontological assumption regarding the inherent coexistence of differences, prevents itself from territorialising any component of that coexistence.
Advice from Boaventura & Sujata to young researchers: Build a counter-university within the university and never fight alone, otherwise you can be distracted and crushed so easily by the institution. Form alliance with people from both inside and outside of university.
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6,
The integrative session on “Race and Colonial/Imperial Erasure: Sociology’s Dysfunctional Relationship with a Foundational Concept” is very interesting and informative. #ISA2018WCS
Eventually got to listen to #RaewynConnell, whose talk is about “Imperial Race, Master Science: On the Whiteness of Sociology”: Just like gender and sexuality, race has never been absent in classic period of sociology. Focusing on the development of popular sociology and ground workers such as Franklin Giddings (master science) would tell a different story of how sociology has been formed and institutionalised, in which ‘race’ has always played an important role in developing many other concepts.
It is necessary to reintroduce ‘empire’ into the discussion of race/ethnicity and racial analysis. The concept of ‘race’ was reconfigured since the 1930s in the metropole area (especially when the US started expanding its influence around the world) – from a category of global difference analysis to an innate and inherent personal feature, contributing to a long-time theoretical silence.
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Today, #SujataPatel speaks on “Race and Caste: The Story of Its Intertwining, its Erasure and its Re-Connections in the Last 200 Years”: Is the understanding of caste relevant to the understanding of race? In fact, although they have different conceptual genealogies, they are intertwined, if we recalled that ‘casta’ (from Spanish and Portuguese) means purity and cleanness in racial and lineage terms since the 15th C.
Racialising caste is to reconstruct the racial meanings of the social distinction and exclusion based on the caste system. This doesn’t mean a social analysis can and should use the two concepts interchangeably. Yet, many sociologists have constantly refused to see the entanglements, and the erasure of racial discrimination in understanding the caste influence upon individuals and society is against all castes.
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#GeorgeSteinmetz mentions the arbitrary distinction of sociology (study of ‘our’ people and social problems) and anthropology (the ‘othering process’ embedded in ‘observing’) in the late colonial age – as well as the way in which colonial powers attempted to hide their past colonial sociological work.
#VilnaTreitler reflects on the curricular deployments and developments – from “the department [of sociology] is very male, very white, very old, and very conservative” (Margolis & Romero, 1998) to “the integration of faculty and students of color in sociology graduate departments cannot be separated from the integration of race in the curriculum” (#MaryRomero, 2017).
#AldonMorris argues that #WEBDuBois’ work, theoretically and methodologically, has greatly contributed to the founding of, yet denied by, American scientific sociology – through neglecting, rejecting, omitting, remembering but re-appropriating the concept of ‘double consciousness’ and the power analysis in understanding the production and reproduction of social stratification.
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7,
The panel on “War, the Military and Societal Transformation” has broadened my horizon of understanding violence and war and its function in changing both the social and political landscapes.
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#WangHorngLuen’s “Theorizing War and Civil Society: A Two-Way Model” is very interesting, among all, combining #JudithButler’s frames of war and #ErvingGoffman’s frame analysis in a creative way.
Do you think such a model is applicable to a civil war context, in which the civic sphere is divided and fragmented; or applicable to a war involved with one of the parties is a non-state actor, e.g. the War on Terrorism and NATO-led humanitarian interventions? Why I ask is because in these cases, there could exist multiple frames of war contributed by contesting interpretations of the same series of binary codes not only within a society but also between international and domestic societies, such as the current Syrian civil war.
- Goffman’s concept of “keys”, tuning the realizing the multiple “frames”
- The alignment of different frames of war
Another example that came into my mind is Taiwan’s position in the “Greater East Asia War”, because at that time Taiwanese were colonized by Japan, so the decolonization conflict against Japan and the Japanese militarization of Taiwanese people and society were awkwardly happening at the same time, and leaving “legacy” – borrowing your word – that makes the contemporary Taiwanese society quite schizophrenic in debating and remembering that history.
- Frames of war never die, shaping and reshaping the historical discourse.
- Taboos regarding talking about the GEAW, but the memories are much brought up after a long time of repression and suppression.
In addition, wars can produce the frames of war in the post-conflict culture structure that creates and maintains a new series of binary codes in civil society. But, how about in the pre-war period – to what extent the civil and political discourses before war contribute to the war?
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#MarkAyyash argues for a novel understanding of “the flux of violence” – beyond “violence as an instrument” – and contends against Carl Schmitt-realism school and Antonio Gramsci-critical school, by referring to #ÉtienneBalibar’s accounts for civility as anti-violence, which should be differentiated from non-violence and counter-violence.
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