Lehre

Lehrveranstaltungen im SoSe 2021

Global Social Thought - Decolonizing the Canon

Seminar, Tuesday 4-6 pm c.t.

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.

Masterkolloquium

Mittwochs (wöchentlich) 16:00-18:00 Uhr.

Global and Regional Transformations: Theories, Trends, Interdependencies

Lecture, Wednesday 2-4 pm c.t.

Social transformations reflect interdependent processes that take place in various world regions simultaneously. Due to their focus on national societies, sociologists have hitherto underestimated these interdependencies. This has led scholars to develop new approaches able to analyze global, transnational and transregional entanglements. In its first part, this course will offer a comparative overview of these new perspectives highlighting their analytical promises and deficits. The second part is dedicated to studying global development tendencies in order to illustrate interdependencies between different regions.