Generations Later: The Same Furious Passage of the Black Graduate Student

In this article, the author relies on a narrative based format to explore the interactions between everyday race-making processes and the white space of academia. Recognizing the unique ways systems of power interact with their experiences in the social world, they chronicle their engagements detailing the pervasive ways rules of white space are placed. The article recognizes three informal rules of white space in academia: the accepted reification of white sociological thought; the acceptance of white professional standards; and the continued centering of white comfort.

Sociology for sustainability science

Sociological insights are often underutilized in sustainability science. To further strengthen its commitment to interdisciplinary problem-driven, solutions-oriented research, sustainability science can better incorporate fundamental sociological conceptions into its core. We highlight four aspects of sociological thought that we consider crucial for advancing sustainability science research: (1) social construction and critical realism, (2) structure and agency, (3) historical specificity, and (4) collective action. We draw on examples from sociology to support a dynamic understanding of how social relations interact with the bio-geo-physical world. This necessary integration of sociological insights, we argue, is critical to generate comprehensive assessments of the causes and consequences of human-induced environmental change, and tend to be overlooked or oversimplified within the field of sustainability science. Beyond that, it can stimulate the development and implementation of viable solutions to sustainability challenges.

The Racial Structure of Sociological Thought: Colonial Modernity in Historical Sociology

Racism is central to colonial modernity, a global historical project tied to colonialism and imperial governance. Racism and its diverse historical manifestations should in theory be key areas of study for historical sociology: the displacement of populations, the dispossession of lands, genocide, slavery, the coercive exploitation of workers of color, and the creation of a way of seeing people through race. Yet, historical sociological scholarship has to date failed to address how racism and colonialism have structured the modern world. This, we argue, is the result of two problems: First, historical sociology’s ontology and vision of modernity does not see colonialism as central to and constituting the modern world. Second, historical sociology’s Weberian roots produced a methodological approach that detaches theoretical categories from specific historical contexts in the pursuit of generalization. This approach cannot capture the historicity of theory and thus address the subfield’s racial structures of knowledge. As an alternative, we propose that previously silenced anticolonial sociologists provide a different model for historical sociology, one that emphasizes the centrality of colonialism and empire in the constitution of modernity and locates theoretical categories in this historical context. We argue that to overcome the racial underpinning of its knowledge structures, historical sociology has to rebuild itself in this anticolonial mode.

The genesis of Western European sociological thought in the works of G. V. Plekhanov

The article presents the results of the analysis by G.V.Plekhanov of the genesis of Western European sociological thought based on the consideration of the social ideas of the French materialists of the 18th century, the rudiments in their philosophical systems of the historical approach to the study of society and understanding the causes of social inequality and injustice as well as overcoming them. The sources and content of the philosophical and historical theories of the French historians of the Restoration period are revealed, those who recognized the struggle of classes as the cornerstone of the social, political and mental development of European society, including the interpretation of the concept of “social environment” as a set of economic relations of classes, which was a contribution to the history of sociology. The analysis of the sociological views of utopian socialists and representatives of German classical philosophy is conducted. It was revealed that a significant contribution to the development of the theory of society were the ideas of social progress and the creation of a new social science that served the cause of social organization, developed by the utopian socialists, as well as the statement that the future of society is decided in the sphere of social and economic relations, and not political and legal ones. It is emphasized that Hegel’s application of dialectics to the analysis of social changes meant undoubted progress in the development of sociological thought, which consisted in the advancement of the idea of the regularity of the social process. The methodological basis of the author’s study of the problem of the genesis of Western European sociological thought in the works of G.V.Plekhanov is made up of dialectical-materialistic and comparative-historical methods, as well as the method of textological analysis and historical-philosophical reconstruction.

The ‘duplex’ perspective as an attempt to resolve the key sociological dilemma

This article is a review of the books by the famous Czech sociologist, head of the Historical Sociology Chair of the Faculty for Humanities at the Charles University (Prague), Jiří Šubrt Historical Processes, Social Changes, and Modernization in the Sociological Perspective (Moscow: RUDN; 2017. 248 p.), Antinomies, Dilemmas, and Discussions in the Contemporary Sociological Thought: Essays on Social Theory (Moscow: RUDN; 2018. 280 p.), and Individualism, Holism and the Central Dilemma of Sociological Theory (Bingley: Emerald Publishig; 2019. 184 p.). All three works focus on the key sociological dilemma - individualism versus holism, which has been the main scientific interest of J. Šubrt in recent years. The relevance of this dilemma is obvious: individualism declares the subjectivity of the person, while holism insists on the objectivity of the supra-individual social reality, and this contradiction hinders the development of theoretical knowledge. Therefore, it is necessary to try to resolve this contradiction, which Šubrt does by critically analyzing the previous attempts to resolve this dilemma and by considering it in the ‘duplex’ perspective that reflects both voluntarist and social principles.

THE CITY AND PUBLIC RELATIONS IN THE WORKS OF CLASSICS OF EUROPEAN SOCIOLOGICAL THOUGHT

Urban studies has occupied and continues to occupy a special place in the system of sociological knowledge. G. Simmel, F. Tennis and E. Durkheim paid great attention to the problem of the genesis and evolution of large and small cities, the devel- opment of urbanization processes, various aspects of integration, mobilization and social activism within a single urban space. Classics of European sociological thought laid a powerful theoretical and methodological foundation for the scientific study of the institute of public relations in the social space of European cities of the late XIX – first half of the XX centuries. Their fun- damental differences between the countryside and the city, the specifics of private and public life in small and large cities, the antagonism between community and society, organic and mechanical solidarity, the progress of civilization and the parallel growth of social deviations allow a more adequate approach to the study of the institute of public relations, but in re- lation to modern realities, which are characterized by the processes of digitalization and globalization, the rapid develop- ment of high technologies, new opportunities for social interaction, which become available not only for the elite, but also for ordinary citizens. Without effective public relations, it is difficult to imagine the activities of city authorities and services, trade firms, corporations, police, educational and cultural institutions. We consider public relations as a universal socio-cultural mechanism that allows us to establish and maintain effective public communications between management entities and segments of the urban social environment that are important for their activities (individuals and social groups) in the mode of dialogue and search for joint solutions to current problems.

Thinking Europe Otherwise: Lessons from the Caribbean

The article makes a case for Europe as a creolized space, or Europe Otherwise. It argues that, in order to account for both the transregional entanglements and the internal hierarchies that European colonialism and imperialism have produced since at least the sixteenth century, we need to unlearn received notions of Europe as an unmarked category; and that theoretical and empirical lessons from the Caribbean are central to relearning Europe differently. To conceive of Europe as a creolized space thus means to draw attention to the decisive shifts that its colonial possessions operate in both its historical legacies and its present borders when consistently taken into account. Such reconceptualization entails a simultaneous creolization of theory so as to reinscribe into sociological thought the experiences of peoples and regions racialized as non-European, non-Western, and non-White alongside the multiple entanglements between Europe and its colonies. Drawing on Caribbean perspectives on creolization, I first discuss how creolizing Europe contributes to countering the definition power of ahistorical and unmarked categories. Subsequently, I propose to rethink Europe as a political, cultural, economic, and discursive formation from its current colonial borders in South America and the Caribbean Sea. Finally, I argue that focusing on Europe’s colonial possessions in the Caribbean today and their corresponding geographical referent, Caribbean Europe, is one way to effectively creolize established understandings of Europe’s colonial history as a thing of the past, of a white Western European identity as the norm, and of the European Union as confined to continental Europe. Recent crises in the Caribbean – from the 2017 hurricanes to Brexit – are used as a magnifying glass in order to make Europe’s ongoing colonial entanglements theoretically and politically visible.

The Sertão and Its Representations

In Brazilian social thought, the sertão is understood more in a symbolic than a geographic manner and thus does not have a precise spatial characterization. As a result, many places have been identified as such in the history of Brazil. Analyzing the vast repertoire of meanings given to the idea of sertão, the absence of the state can be seen as a characteristic that distinguishes it, irrespective of the period considered. In this sense, the relations between space and social thought or between space and interpretations of Brazil are emphasized, highlighting the sertão–coast dualism which emerged following the publication of Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sertões as one of the possible ways of understanding the historical formation of the country. This dualism can be observed in distinct periods ranging from the literature about the scientific missions in the early 1900s to the debates about the construction of Brasília in the middle of the same century. Representations of the sertão in medical writings, sociological thought, literature, and film evince the resilience of this category as an ongoing metaphor for understanding Brazil.