| Raewyn Connell
is University Professor at the University of Sydney. She is author,
co-author or editor of twenty-one books, including Ruling Class
Ruling Culture, Making the Difference, Gender and Power, Schools
and Social Justice, Masculinities, and Gender. Her
most recent one is Southern Theory: The Global Dynamics of Knowledge
in Social Science (Allen and Unwin, 2007). She is an active
contributor to research journals in sociology, education, political
science, gender studies and related fields. Her current research
concerns transnational masculinities, neo-liberalism, and intellectuals.
Professor Connell’s keynote lecture is entitled ”Periphery and Metropole
in the History of Sociology”. Her address will explore the social
mechanisms by which centre/periphery relations are accomplished,
and sustained, in the history of sociology. Her starting-point is
the account of colony/metropole relations in the production of knowledge
in Hountondji's Endogenous Knowledge and her own Southern
Theory. She will explore concrete questions of career structure,
publication systems, the financing of research, and networks among
teachers and researchers, as the underpinning of metropolitan hegemony
in intellectual paradigms and leadership reputations among sociologists.
From this basis, she hopes to cast light on two problems. The first
is the tension between cultural pluralism, indeed incommensurability,
and metropolitan hegemony - revealed with particular clarity in
the sociology of gender, in Bulbeck's Re-Orienting Western Feminisms.
The second is the question of historical changes in the form of
metropolitan hegemony, over the 150 years of sociology's existence
as an intellectual project - through the collapse of Comtean sociology,
decolonization, neocolonialism, the formation of bodies such as
UNESCO and the ISA, the creation of the Internet, and the rise of
neoliberalism.
Eileen Yeo is Professor Emeritus of Social
and Cultural History at the University of Strathclyde and Co-Director
of the Strathclyde Centre in Gender Studies. In The Contest
for Social Science (1996) she analyzed the gender and class
aspects of the history of social science. Other publications include
chapters in The Social Survey in Historical Perspective
(ed. M. Bulmer, 1991), The Cambridge History of the Modern Social
Sciences (ed. T. Porter & D. Ross, 2003), Engendering
the Social (ed. B. Marshall & A. Witz, 2004) and Gender
in Scottish History (eds. Yeo et al., 2006).
At the conference, Professor Yeo will speak on the topic ”Central
not Peripheral: Class and Gender in Social Science 1830-1930”. The
paper will raise questions about class issues in the choice of subject
for scientific analysis and about different class practices of social
scientific work. It will then examine gender divisions of labour
in the production of social knowledge, paying special attention
to the work of social science couples at the turn of the 20th century
where she will include her new research on Patrick and Anna Geddes.
She will end by considering how canonical knowledge is created and
who is excluded from the centre on what grounds.
Saïd A. Arjomand is Distinguished
Service Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York
at Stony Brook. He is former Editor of International Sociology,
the founder and President of the interdisciplinary Association for
the Study of Persianate Societies, and author and editor of several
books, including Rethinking Civilizational Analysis (with
E. Tiryakian, 2004) and Constitutionalism and Political Reconstruction
(2007). He is currently working on developmental patterns in the
Islamic civilization in comparative perspective.
The title of Professor Arjomands talk is "Provincializing the
Metropolitan Theory: Can Concept Formation from the Periphery Redeem
the Promise of Comparative Sociology?” The thesis put forward and
defended is that a number of major concepts have emerged from the
periphery in recent years which require reconsideration and at times
drastic modification of some of the core concepts of metropolitan
social theory. Some of these concepts emerge out of self-consciously
distinctive approaches to theory such as subaltern studies, but
they mostly come from the works of public intellectuals and social
scientists dealing with social phenomena which have been significant
in the recent history of the periphery but were marginal or unnoticed
in the Western historical experience generalized into metropolitan
social theory. These include revolution, the nation-state and civilizational
perspectives on tradition, and on secularity and secularization.
By forcing us to acknowledge unsuspected variety in developmental
patterns in different civilizations and thus provincializing the
metropolitan theory, the analysis should serve us as a reminder
of Durkheim forgotten dictum to the effect that all sociology is
comparative sociology.
Johan Heilbron is a sociologist at
the Centre de sociologie européenne (CSE) in Paris, and at
Erasmus University in Rotterdam. Among his research interests are
the historical sociology of the social sciences, economic sociology,
the sociology of culture and transnational cultural exchange. Recent
book publications include The Rise of Social Theory (1995),
The Rise of the Social Sciences and the Formation of Modernity
(with L. Magnusson and B. Wittrock, 2001), and Pour une histoire
des sciences sociales. Hommage à Pierre Bourdieu (with
R. Lenoir and G. Sapiro, 2004).
Professor Heilbron’s lecture is entitled ”Toward a transnational
history of the social sciences”. Historical accounts of the social
sciences have too often accepted local or national institutions
as a self-evident framework of analysis, instead of considering
them as being embedded in transnational relations of various kinds.
Evolving patterns of transnational mobility and exchange cut through
the neat distinction between the local, the national and the international,
and thus represent an essential component in the dynamics of the
social sciences, as well as a fruitful perspective for rethinking
their historical development. In this paper it is argued that a
transnational history of the social sciences may be fruitfully understood
on the basis of three general mechanisms, which have structured
the transnational flows of people and ideas in decisive ways: a)
the functioning of international scholarly institutions, b) the
transnational mobility of scholars, and c) the politics of transnational
exchange of non-academic institutions. Each one of these mechanisms
will be briefly discussed.
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