Discovering Sociology Across the Globe
Our intention with Discovering Sociology is to be broad and inclusive in our approach to understanding the social world. Yet there is always scope to explore different countries and regions in more detail, and this section of the website is dedicated to developing this further.
In Chapter 7, we highlight the global nature of inequality and racism and how our knowledge of the world is structured by the country in which we live. Indeed, sociology as a discipline has been critiqued for taking a Western perspective that excludes perspectives and ways of knowing from the global south, including how the West gained from subjugating other geographic regions. Bhambra and Santos (2017) contend that while early European sociology focussed on the characteristics of modernity and how they transformed societies across the world, it neglected “the historical processes of dispossession, enslavement, appropriation and extraction [that were] central to the emergence of the modern world” (p. 4). Bhambra and Santos call for sociology to be more aware of this history and even reconsider how it approaches the study of societies across the world.
Coexisting with this moral imperative to consider the inequalities within sociology is the nature of globalization where countries across the world are becoming increasingly interconnected. In Chapter 9, we use Therborn’s (2000: 154) definition of globalization that refers to “tendencies to a world-wide reach, impact, or connectedness of social phenomena or to a world-encompassing awareness among social actors.” Yet it is still vital, as Bhambra and Santos (2017) argue, to ensure that the sociological approach to understanding the globalized world is truly global and not biased toward Western perspectives.
Sociological critiques of Western perspectives are not new in sociology. Edward Said (1978), for example, introduced his notion of orientalism forty years ago. Orientalism refers to the ways in which people in the West applied simplistic and cliched theories to understand the Oriental world, combined with a presumption of Western superiority. More than this, however, Said argues that orientalism referred to “a Western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the orient” (p. 4).
Said has been seen as one of the founders of what is called postcolonial sociology. Julian Go (2013) argues that postcolonial scholarship, while broad, “shared overaching themes, all of which arose in response to the historical process of decolonization and the new condition of postcoloniality” (p. 5). That is, as European colonial empires broke apart, particularly after World War II, a host of sociological questions about what would happen in these contexts arose. Importantly, concepts and theories that addressed such problems extended beyond Western sociological theories and engaged with theories of other countries and academic disciplines (e.g. Rodríguez, Boatcă and Costa 2010). Similarly, sociology has become more diverse as a discipline, recognizing more actively its troubled history and remembering the contributions of scholars previously marginalized because of their race or class (see Chapter 2).
As such, in this component of the website, we discuss a range of concepts and social problems from different parts of the world. While our aim has been for Discovering Sociology to be as broad and expansive as possible, we use the additional space of the web to provide a wider range of geographical contexts and social theories. These are not all located in postcolonial theory – much of which would be quite inaccessible to the new reader – but seek to raise questions related to many countries across the world.
Click here to launch the interactive map, or alternatively download the documents via the list of links below.
France and Refugee Camps | PDF Document | (0.18Mb)
Decolonising the Curriculum | PDF Document | (0.21Mb)
The Sunflower Movement and Taiwan | PDF Document | (0.16Mb)
Blood type discrimination in Japan | PDF Document | (0.17Mb)
Zwarte Piet the Netherlands and the Politics of Blackface | PDF Document | (0.22Mb)
Class and naming practices in Australia | PDF Document | (0.17Mb)
South Africa and the Problem of Rape | PDF Document | (0.18Mb)
Marriage and Radical Social Change in Malta | PDF Document | (0.26Mb)
Further reading
Bhambra, G.K. (2017). Brexit, Trump, and ‘methodological whiteness’: On the misrecognition of race and class. British Journal of Sociology, 68 (S1), S214-S232.
Cohen, R. & Kennedy, P. (2013). Global Sociology. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
References
Bhambra, G.K. and Santos, B.d.S. (2017). Introduction: Global challenges for sociology. Sociology. 51(1): 3-10.
Go, J. (2013). 'Introduction: Entangling postcoloniality and sociological thought'. In J. Go (Ed.) Postcolonial Sociology. London: Emerald. (pp. 3-34).
Rodríguez, E. G., Boatcă, M., & Costa, S. (2010). Decolonizing European sociology: Transdisciplinary approaches. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
Said, E.W. (1978). Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
