During the last four decades or so, the universalism of sociology has been more and more explicitly and visibly challenged. Scholars living and working in the West or in Asia, Africa, Latin America or the Arab world have been contesting the fact that only Western social sciences could make themselves universal and started considering that this claim to universalism relies on the establishment of an epistemic domination. This challenge resulted in various kinds of calls: for the provincialization of Europe or of the West; for the decolonization of science; for the indigenization of national or regional social sciences etc.
The expected outcome for the students are the following : an original access to the history of sociology from the mid-19th century onwards ; new insights into the hidden development of Southern sociology ; a more critical vision about how the canonization at play in sociology still excludes minorities, women and Southern sociologists. Time has come for a decolonization of the discipline.
Stéphane DUFOIX
Séminaire
English
A good knowledge of the history of sociological theories and of epistemology/
Autumn 2023-2024
Participation in the course: 15 %
Oral presentation (group of two or three): 35 %
Written book presentation (group of two or three): 50 %
One compulsory reading of a book (outside the readings from the booklet).
Syed Farid Alatas and Vineeta Sinha, « Introduction: Eurocentrism, Androcentrism and Sociological Theory », in Syed Farid Alatas and Vineeta Sinha, Sociological Theory Beyond the Canon, Londres, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, p. 1-16.
Max Haller, « A Global Scientific Community? Universalism Versus National Parochialism in Patterns of International Communication in Sociology, International Journal of Sociology, 49(5-6), 2019, p. 342-369.