Spirit out of bounds returns to the East: The closing of the social sciences and the opening of independent thoughts (original) (raw)
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The fabric of Post-Western sociology: ecologies of knowledge beyond the “East” and the “West”
The Journal of Chinese Sociology
For several centuries, the history of the West has merged with the history of the world. The global economy of knowledge is structured around epistemic inequalities, hegemonies, and dominations. A clear division of scientific practices has developed among academic “peripheries,” “semi-peripheries,” and “core.” The question of epistemic injustice, which includes the indigenization of knowledge, was posed very early in the twentieth century in China, Japan, and Korea without being linked to coloniality, which was the case in Indian sociology. Based on the production of an epistemology shared with Chinese sociologists, we proposed a Post-Western sociology to enable a dialogue—on a level footing—addressing common concepts. This sociology also addresses concepts situated in European and Asian theories that consider the modes of creating continuities and discontinuities as well as the conjunctions and disjunctions between the knowledge spaces situated in different social contexts. We aim ...
Decolonizing the 'Global': the Coloniality of Method and the Problem of the Unit of Analysis
Global Historical Sociology: Theoretical and Methodological Issue, 2016
What should 'global' stand for in order to qualify 'historical sociology' when it aspires to move beyond its Eurocentric foundations? The answer to this question lies in the ability to investigate the limits that Eurocentrism imposes on the possibility of reformulating the world as a unit of analysis, and simultaneously in tackling the centrality of the colonial question in methodological and epistemological terms, rather than exclusively in historical terms.
Science and the Decolonization of Social Theory: Unthinking Modernity
This book addresses the ideological figure of modernity, its presumed historical significance as an era, and its theoretical adequacy as a frame. It shows how science is evoked to prevent the sociological imagination from elaborating non-Eurocentric categories and terminologies that are more adequate for a global age. The idea of modernity should not only be contested, but radically unthought in its foundational assumptions. These assumptions inform concepts such as secularization, emancipation, the 'global' and accumulation of capital. This book frees these concepts from ethnocentrism and discloses a path toward a new, non-Eurocentric, global social theory. Gennaro Ascione explores the transformative potential of decolonizing knowledge through a radical reconsideration of the historical and epistemological role that the intellectual reference to science plays in the construction of concepts. This ground-breaking work challenges social theorists to think globally beyond modernity, bringing together social theory and science in an unprecedented way. Importantly, it makes accessible a new space of missing theorization for further developments and inquiries in the field. http://www.palgrave.com/gb/book/9781137516855
‘Western hegemony’ in the social sciences: fields and model systems
The Sociological Review Monographs, 2016
Forthcoming 2016 in: Julian Go and Monika Krause (eds.) Fielding Transnationalism. Sociological Review Monograph This paper discusses the role of privileged research objects ('model systems') in producing patterns in transnational knowledge production. In its approach it follows Bourdieu's call to focus on contexts of production and forces internal to disciplines as well as his insistence on practice. Learning from work in science and technology studies it also considers material objects of knowledge and spaces of knowledge-production. It discusses the case of sociology and argues that conventions surrounding privileged research objects matter relatively independently of authors' national origin or fieldposition. Examining model systems, I argue, can contribute to our understanding of how some well-established inequalities are produced and reproduced. This focus adds specific stakes to the debates about global knowledge production: we can discuss the problem of neglected cases in ways that are not always included in current reflections that draw on general political-rather than specifically knowledge-political-categories.