300851 Lektürekurs Southern Theory (Raewyn Connell) (S) (WiSe 2023/2024)

Raewyn Connell (Website):

“In the 1980s I had been living and teaching in Australia but writing and teaching about theorists who almost all came from the other side of the world, from societies that had very different historical experience. I gradually became bothered by the incongruity. I wondered what was the significance of global power for the social theory that was produced in the imperial centre, and exported to the rest of the world. […] I argued that what sociologists call ‘classical theory’ is a myth, created much later than the lives of Marx, Weber & Durkheim, and that the real origins of European sociology were deeply bound up with empire and the problems of colonialism. Some sociologists didn’t like that at all.
Critique by itself is inadequate: one needs to show alternatives. So I went looking. It took time; fourteen years in fact, hunting bookshops in Africa, quizzing colleagues in South America, searching dusty shelves in the library stacks in Australia, and searching online as well. And there is a rich archive, not always in academic genres but intellectually powerful, focused on the problems posed by colonialism and post-colonial societies.
The result was the book ‘Southern Theory’, published in 2007 and still in print. It brings the critique of classical theory up to the present, showing how the theories of Giddens, Colemen and Bourdieu, and the theory of globalization, are constructed from global-North points of view.
It has five chapters telling the stories of social thinkers from sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, Iran, India, and Australia. There’s a chapter about the land, a topic little discussed in Eurocentric theory but enormously important in indigenous thought and politics. The final chapter offers ideas for a more inclusive and democratic social science.”

In diesem Lektürekurs setzen wir uns intensiv mit dem Werk „Southern Theory“ von Raewyn Connell auseinander. Dafür widmen wir jede Sitzung einem Kapitel und ziehen bei Interesse zusätzliche Quellen zur weiteren Kontextualisierung hinzu. Erwartet wird die Bereitschaft zur wöchentlichen intensiven Lektüre eines Kapitels sowie die Motivation, aktiv an den Diskussionen teilzunehmen. Das Buch ist englischsprachig; die Plenumssitzungen werden in deutscher Sprache abgehalten.

Bibliography

Connell, R. (2007). Southern Theory: The global dynamics of knowledge in social science (1. Auflage). London: Routledge.