コース情報

This course offers an overview on key approaches and debates in Global Social Theory. While sociology and social theory has long claimed universal knowledge but extrapolated from a select number of cities or states in the global north this predominance has been receiving increasing criticism. In response, global social theory is not merely concerned with phenomena that (now) appear everywhere in the world and that could be compared to reveal their specificities. Rather, over the past four decades several strands of scholarship have offered global approaches to social theorizing that account for the interconnectedness of our world, along with the interdependent asymmetries and related epistemic inequalities and injustices that characterize the social world and sociological knowledge production.
In this course we will read and discuss key thinkers in global social theory, from world-systems theory to neoliberalism and dispossession, post-colonial and decolonial thought, southern theory, pluriverse, and others. In going through these themes, one of our objectives is to find ways to make possible that “there is no universal sociology” while “we are still working toward finding some universal concepts and values” as former president of the International Sociological Association Sari Hanafi has put it.