Developing the concept of society: Institutional domains, regimes of inequalities and complex systems in a global era

This article develops the concept of society to meet the challenge of cross-border and global processes. Global processes have made visible the inadequacy of interpreting the concept of society as if it were a nation-state, since there is a lack of congruence of institutional domains (economy, polity, civil society, violence) and regimes of inequality (class, gender, ethnicity). The article engages with two strands of intellectual heritage in sociological analysis of society as a macro concept: the differentiation of institutions and the relations of inequality. The concepts of society and societalisation are developed by hybridising these two approaches rather than selecting only one or the other. To achieve this, the concept of system is developed by drawing on complexity science. This enables the simultaneous analysis of differentiated institutional domains (economy, polity, violence, civil society) and multiple regimes of inequality without reductionism. In turn, this facilitates the fluent theorisation of variations in the temporal and spatial reach of social systems

Control, care, and conviviality in the politics of technology for sustainability

This article discusses currently neglected distinctions between control, care, and conviviality in the politics of technology for sustainability. We conceptualize control as the ambition to maintain fictitious borders between hierarchically ordered categories such as subjects and objects. This ambition is materialized into a wide range of Modern technological innovations, including genome editing and deep sea mining. Contrasting with control, we conceptualize values of care that constitute socio-technical practices where connections are prioritized over categories and hierarchy is countered with egalitarian commitment. In caring practices, objects are thus treated as subjects, often within political contexts that are dominated by ambitions to control. Building on care, we explore hopes for conviviality as mutualistic autonomy and decolonial self-realization to orient plural socio-technical pathways for moving beyond Modernity. We argue that such pathways are crucial for democratic transformations to sustainability. We illustrate our concepts using two brief case studies of agricultural developments. The first case discusses the politics of control in agricultural biotechnologies in Belgium. The second case reports on care within rural people's coping strategies in a south Indian "green revolution" landscape laden with control. In conclusion, we emphasize the need to situate attempted materializations of control, care, and conviviality in specific historical junctures. Situated understandings of the interplay between control, care, and conviviality can help realize sustainability that does not reproduce the centralizing, control-driven logic of Modern technocratic development

Cross-Fadings of Racialisation and Migratisation: The Postcolonial Turn in Western European Gender and Migration Studies

Looking at feminist and anti-racist approaches situated in or focused on Western Europe, especially Germany, this article investigates how racism and migration can be theorised in relation to each other in critical knowledge production. Rather than being an article ‘about Germany’, my intervention understands the German context as an exemplary place for deconstructing Europe and its gendered, racialised and sexualised premises. I argue that a ‘postcolonial turn’ has begun to emerge in Western European gender and migration studies and is questioning easy assumptions about the connections between racism and migration. Discussing examples from academic knowledge production and media debates, I suggest to think of migratisation (the ascription of migration) as performative practice that repeatedly re-stages a sending-off to an elsewhere and works in close interaction with racialisation. In particular, drawing on postcolonial approaches, I carve out the interconnection of racialisation and migratisation with class and gender. I argue that equating racialisation with migratisation carries the risk of whitening understandings of migration and/or reinforcing already whitened understandings of nation and Europeanness. To make discrimination ‘accessible’ to critical knowledge production, I engage in an epistemological discussion of the potentials and challenges of differentiating analytical categorisations. With this, this article engages with ascriptions, exclusions and abjectifications and attempts to formulate precise conceptualisations for the ever shifting forms of resistance we urgently need in transnational feminist activism and knowledge productio

A discussion on coloniality and global social theory

Publication status: PublishedAbstractThe conversation between Ali Meghji and Manuela Boatcă focuses on how modernity/coloniality may (or may not) be a productive sociological concept in the remit of global social theory and wider political movements. Speaking from within different locations in the imperial core (England and Germany respectively), we discuss how the concept of modernity/coloniality has traveled over to our respective European contexts, and the ways it has informed our sociological approaches to matters such as inter‐imperiality, creolization, decolonization, global racisms and anti‐racisms, and historical sociology. The conversational approach is meant to tease out the multiple ways that modernity/coloniality can inform different—albeit related—aspects of sociological work, and also the varying contexts from which global social theory can be produced.</jats:p

Resisting piratic method by doing research otherwise

The reconstruction of sociology into connected sociologies works towards a truly global and plural discipline. But if undoing the overrepresentation of European epistemology in sociology requires a deeper engagement with epistemologies of the South or worlds and knowledges otherwise, how can we ensure that such engagements do not simply reproduce colonial forms of appropriation and domination? Here I consider means of resisting extractive, or ‘piratic’ method in sociology research by drawing lessons from recent debates around geopiracy and biopiracy in geography and the life sciences. The core claim of this article is that any decolonial knowledge production must involve a consideration of the political economy of knowledge – its forms of extraction, points of commodification, how it is refined as intellectual property, and how it comes to alienate participating knowers. Against this I suggest a relearning of method in an anti-piratic way as a means of returning our work to the intellectual commons