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Decolonizing the social sciences
Abstract
This article unpacks some complexities of ‘decolonizing’ in Ireland, a complicated semiperipheral ‘mixed colony’, in which rhetorics, logic, and grammar are simultaneously colonial and decolonial, interrupting and complicitly reproducing divisive and dehumanizing colonialities of knowledge and being. The global call to decolonize academia invites Irish social scientists to confront significant social divisions, economic precarities, and epistemic erasures. I present ‘decolonial repair’ as a doubled figure of return and mending, engaging the decolonial work of double translation: centring anti-colonial thought and enacting horizontal dialogue. Facing partly obscured colonial wounds that remain difficult to countenance, a doubled repair re-approaches transformation via renewed engagements between non-Occidental demands for decolonization and ambiguous legacies of extraversion. Unpacking elisions, complicities, and precarities of Irish social science, this article teases out what ‘decolonizing social science’ might entail in a semiperipheral, white(ly) post-colony. In keeping with the scope of this journal and the defining role of sociology in the social sciences, this article focusses on sociology as a lens for discussing the broader, constitutive elisions, turns, and complicities of Irish social science. The broader aim and hope is to help unpack some of the challenges, projects, and pitfalls involved in this Special Issue's focus on ‘decolonizing academia’.
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The authors came to know each other through an emergent “whisper network” at their European host institution that promotes itself and is internationally recognized as progressive, transformative, anti-patriarchal, and de-colonial. Drawing on autoethnographic reflections, we aim to critically unpack the different interconnected layers of power and how cult-like dynamics around a Star Professor have enabled an abusive research culture where its reputation should be untouchable. While we have unique stories, there are many connecting dots among our experiences which allowed us to reflect collectively on analytical concepts such as “sexual-power gatekeepers”, “academic incest”, “intellectual and sexual extractivism”, “gaslighting”, “institutional witch-hunt”. Many young female researchers, who experience harassment, strive to build up their graduate or post-doctoral academic careers working in a precarious labor environment facing institution abandonment and even violation of basic professional ethics. Few understand how academic institutions and their internal dynamics constrain young researchers from standing up and talking publicly. With this chapter, we want to join the growing critical call from within academia for an urgent paradigm shift and strive toward a more caring, collaborative, transformative, and interdependent community.
Over the past several decades, higher education in what is currently known as the United States has been shaped by marketization and privatization. Efforts to critique these developments often rely on a contrast between a bleak present and a romanticized past. Unsettling the University offers a different entry point—one informed by decolonial theories and practices—for addressing these issues. I outline the colonial violence underlying three of the most celebrated moments in US higher education history: the founding of the original colleges, the creation of land-grant colleges and universities, and the post–World War II "Golden Age." Unsettling the University invites readers to confront universities' historical and ongoing complicity in racialized exploitation, expropriation, and ecological destruction; to reckon with how the past has shaped contemporary challenges in higher education; and to accept responsibility for redressing harm and repairing relationships in order to reimagine a future for higher education rooted in social and ecological accountability.
Culture is a way of life, an authorising platform for both lifestyle choices and intellectual analysis. How do we begin to frame the reality that nations are made up of citizens who experience their national history differently? In answering this question and arguing for culture as plural, present and the now, this paper looks to Lesotho, South Africa and Zimbabwe as case studies. The case studies draw parallels along shared colonial histories of the three countries as part of framing the idea of an official culture. Distinct historical moments across Lesotho, South Africa and Zimbabwe are cited as part of governance of cultural diversity and the shaping of national unity. The central argument, among other sub-arguments, herein is that the governance of cultural diversity and the shaping of national unity, in part, is about open dialogue on how a nation's history is experienced differently.
This short article provides an auto-ethnographic perspective on the history of Irish sociology. It is based on the author's experience of Irish sociology, including: experiences as an undergraduate student in the late 1980s and later as a research assistant; a PhD in the US during the 1990s, starting during mass emigration but completed as the ‘Celtic Tiger’ emerged and sociology grew; 5 years in Ireland as a head of department, leading up to the financial crash and the decade between crash and COVID-19. Finally, the article concludes with some general observations about sociology in Ireland today, its promise and the perils that face it.
2021 has been a year for looking back as well as forwards. In this article, I reflect on the state of languishing induced by lockdown, and the intensification of uncertainty in our everyday lives. I offer some biographical details of the early years of my career, which has largely been within a single institution, Maynooth University. The late Professor Liam Ryan was my boss and later my friend from 1990 until his death in 2015. His (typically) acerbic insights on the state of Irish sociology were recorded in 1984 for an issue of the Sociological Association of Ireland Bulletin. Re-visiting his prognosis today, I reflect on North–South relations in the discipline, on the challenge of forging a public role for Irish sociology, and on the growth of a precariat within the academic discipline. I conclude with some comments on the enduring relevance of sociology as we come to terms with post-pandemic life.
This article argues for a theoretical synergy between critical race theory (CRT) and decolonial thought. The author propounds that while CRT and decolonial thought have different scopes, we can synergize them in analysis. Specifically, decolonial thought’s transnational focus on coloniality complements CRT’s ‘presentist’ focus on national racialized social systems. The author displays the efficacy of this theoretical synergy by discussing Brexit Britain and Trumpamerica. While CRT is helpful for analysing how these political projects built upon contemporary post-racial ideology and racialized emotions, it struggles to deal with the postcolonial melancholia that runs through both political moments. Decolonial thought is thus required to tease out the transnational, historical dynamics of coloniality embodied in Brexit Britain and Trumpamerica. This is particularly apparent in the way both projects involve a desire to return the nation to its imperial glory, and to keep those who are deemed to be opposed to Western civilization – particularly ‘the Muslim’ – outside of the nation’s borders.
This essay analyzes racialized exclusions in sociology through a focus on sociology’s deep epistemic structures. These structures dictate what counts as social scientific knowledge and who can produce it. A historical analysis of their emergence and persistence reveals their connections to empire. Due to sociology’s initial emergence within the culture of American imperialism, early sociological thought embedded the culture of empire’s exclusionary logics. Sociology’s epistemic structures were inextricably racialized, contributing to exclusionary modes of thought and practice along the lines of race, ethnicity, and social geography that persist into the present. Overcoming this racialized inequality requires problematizing and unsettling these epistemic structures by (1) provincializing the canon to create a transformative epistemic pluralism and (2) reconsidering common conceptions of what counts as “theory” in the first place.
Gender inequality within the university is well documented but proposals to tackle it tend to focus on the higher ranks, ignoring how it manifests within precarious work.
Based on data collected as part of a broader participatory action research project on casual academic labor in Irish higher education, the article focuses on the intersection of precarious work and gender in academia. We argue that precarious female academics are non‐citizens of the academy, a status that is reproduced through exploitative gendered practices and evident in formal/legal recognition (staff status, rights and entitlements, pay and valuing of work) as well as in informal dimensions (social and decision‐making power). We, therefore, conclude that any attempts to challenge gender inequality in academia must look downward, not upward, to the ranks of the precarious academics.
Undergirded by the perspective of historical materialism in dialogue with black Marxism and Marxist feminism, this article constructs an account demonstrating the significance of racism to the making of modernity. The analytic returns of unthinking Eurocentric sociologies in favour of a more unified historical social scientific approach include the unmasking of the intimate relationship between capitalism, class struggles and racism, particularly how capitalist rule advanced through a process of differentiation and hierarchical re-ordering of the global proletariat. From the 17th-century colonization of Virginia to Victorian Britain and beyond, racism formed an indispensable weapon in the armoury of the state elites, used to contain the class struggles waged by subaltern populations with a view to making the system safe for capital accumulation. Additionally, situating an account of racism within the unfolding story of historical capitalism as against the postcolonial tendency to locate it within the civilizational encounter between the West and the Rest helps make transparent the plurality of racisms, including the racialization of parts of the European proletariat. This explanation of the structuring force of racism and the differentiated ways in which the proletariat has been incorporated into capitalist relations of domination has important implications for emancipatory politics. A race-blind politics risks leaving untouched the injustices produced by historic and contemporaneous racisms. Instead, an alternative approach is proposed, one that invites movements to wilfully entangle demands for economic justice with anti-racism and thereby embrace and demystify the differences inscribed into the collective body of the proletariat by capitalism.
‘Unconscious bias happens by our brains making incredibly quick judgements and assessments without us realising. Biases are influenced by background, cultural environment and experiences and we may not be aware of these views and opinions, or of their full impact and implications. This article opposes this point of view by arguing that bias is not unconscious but is (un)conscious and linked to Charles Mills’ ‘Racial Contract’ and its ‘epistemologies of ignorance’. These epistemologies emerge from what the Equality Challenge Unit (ECU) calls ‘our background, cultural environment and personal experience’. Asserting that racism stems from ‘unconscious bias’ diminishes white supremacy and maintains white innocence as a ‘will to forget’ institutional racism. In equality and diversity training ‘unconscious bias’ has become a performative act to move beyond racism through training to participate in a constructed ‘post-racial’ reality. The article argues that through decolonizing ‘unconscious bias’, ‘white fragility’ and ‘self-forgiveness’ we can begin to see hidden institutional whiteliness at the base of (un)conscious bias.
In this interview, Denis O’Hearn presents his views of Ireland’s historical and contemporary status in the capitalist world-system and which countries Ireland could be profitably compared with. He discusses how Ireland has changed since the publication of his well-known work on "The Atlantic Economy" (2001) and addresses questions related to the European Union and the looming break-up of Britain as well as contemporary Irish politics on both sides of the border. O’Hearn also touches on the current state of Irish academia.
In just a decade, the international university rankings have become dominant measures of institutional performance for policy-makers worldwide. Bolstered by the façade of scientific neutrality, these classification systems have reinforced the hegemonic model of higher education – that of the elite, Anglo-Saxon research university – on a global scale. The process is a manifestation of what Bourdieu and Wacquant have termed US “cultural imperialism.” However, the rankings paradigm is facing growing criticism and resistance, particularly in regions such as Latin America, where the systems are seen as forcing institutions into a costly and high-stakes “academic arms race” at the expense of more pressing development priorities. That position, expressed at the recent UNESCO conferences in Buenos Aires, Paris, and Mexico City, shows the degree to which the rankings have become a fundamental element in the contest for cultural hegemony, waged through the prism of higher education.
Sociology is usually represented as having emerged alongside European modernity. The latter is frequently understood as sociology's special object with sociology itself a distinctively modern form of explanation. The period of sociology's disciplinary formation was also the heyday of European colonialism, yet the colonial relationship did not figure in the development of sociological understandings. While the recent emergence of postcolonialism appears to have initiated a reconsideration of understandings of modernity, with the development of theories of multiple modernities, I suggest that this engagement is more an attempt at recuperating the transformative aspect of postcolonialism than engaging with its critiques. In setting out the challenge of postcolonialism to dominant sociological accounts, I also address `missing feminist/queer revolutions', suggesting that by engaging with postcolonialism there is the potential to transform sociological understandings by opening up a dialogue beyond the simple pluralism of identity claims.
The paper analyses how educators employed on non-permanent contracts in the non-compulsory education sector in Ireland have fared during the Covid 19 pandemic. These employees were starting from a low base in relation to the terms and conditions of their employment when their places of work dramatically pivoted online in March 2020. We argue the impacts of the pandemic were disproportionate, with people reporting such things as increased workloads, exclusion from HR update communications and little supports in creating workspaces in their homes. In this sense, we foreground how participants’ places of work often assumed that all employees, precarious and permanent, had the same level of access to resources.Furthermore, given the gendered nature of caring responsibilities and the high proportion of women respondents in the research, we highlight the extent to which the pandemic increased caring responsibilities and impacted on female participants’ capacity to work. Overall, we demonstrate how the Covid 19 pandemic hasn’t, in itself, created unsatisfactory working conditions, rather, it has both exposed and accentuated existing shortfalls and further proved, if such proof was needed, that short-term actions compound the many problems with precarity in post-compulsory education work.
This review essay discusses decolonial and revisionist approaches to the sociological canon, centring on a major new work, Colonialism and Modern Social Theory by Gurminder Bhambra and John Holmwood (2021). The challenge to ‘classical’ social theory and the demand to reconstitute the theory curriculum come in the context of increased visibility for wider decolonial agendas, linked to ‘fallist’ protests in South Africa, Black Lives Matter and allied antiracist organizing, and calls to decolonize public and civic spaces and institutions such as universities, effect museum restitution, and colonial reparations. The review identifies continuities and complementarities with Connell’s critique of the sociological canon, though Colonialism and Modern Social Theory takes a different tack from Connell’s Southern Theory (2009). Bhambra and Holmwood’s opening of sociology’s canon converges with Connell’s recent work to align a critical project of global and decolonial public sociology with a pragmatic programme for doing academic work differently.
International social work is caused through current confrontations. It deals with the consequences of colonization, de-colonization, globalization and indigenization. This requires a “border thinking” and new focus on local and indigenous knowledge. Taking the colonial wounds as a chance, the creation of a diverse world based on older forms of knowledge would be imaginable. Especially, social movements of population that have been marginalized in colonialism are seen as subject of hope. Our aim is to encourage the re-appropriation and re-interpretation of concepts and content from repressed and forgotten traditions and an interculturalism as an exchange and negotiation. Both recognize local indigenous knowledge and transform this into a practice of international social work; this is the main thesis of our article.
The architecture and evolution of Harriet Martineau's sociological epistemology epitomize an essential tension between abstract theory and concrete empiricism. The body of Martineau's intellectual work demonstrates a major conceptual shift, from early religious convictions to subsequent rejection of all metaphysical systems. How to Observe Morals and Manners lies midway in this journey. The epistemological and biographical route to Martineau's adamant repudiation of metaphysics was long, personally tumultuous, and grounded fundamentally in empirical studies of social conditions. I focus here on the give-and-take between metaphysics, empiricism, and rationality in Harriet Martineau's sociological work. Part one of this essay highlights the major epistemological points advanced by Martineau in How to Observe Morals and Manners. The second, longer part outlines Martineau's epistemological development as a social theorist and locates How to Observe Morals and Manners within her intellectual biography as a whole.
Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui explores the possibilities for decolonization through an analysis of the "multicultural" state as an ongoing practice of coloniality that recognizes and incorporates indigenous people but only as static, archaic figures defined by a continuous relationship to an idealized past. As Cusicanqui demonstrates, this truncated recognition subordinates indigenous people, depriving them of their contemporaneity, complexity, and dynamism and, therefore, of their potential to challenge the given order. Coloniality and its relations of domination, she claims, are also reproduced in the knowledge production of academic scholars of decoloniality, primarily from the global North. These academics, she argues, appropriate the language and ideas of indigenous scholars without grappling with the relations of force that define their relationships to them, thus decontextualizing and depoliticizing these concepts and marginalizing indigenous scholars from their own debates. Counterposing the Aymara concept of ch'ixi - a parallel coexistence of difference - to multiculturalism and hybridity, which incorporates and flattens or distorts difference, Cusicanqui shows that decolonization must be not only a discourse but also an affirmative practice.
In this paper I explore the situation of feminist academics, positing a tension between the demands of feminist research and the norms of academia. Feminist research, I suggest, may be subject to de-legitimisation on the grounds of supposed lack of objectivity, to marginalisation from the main body of a discipline and to conceptual hostility when operating within the main body of a discipline. I then show that the situation of feminist academics can be conceptualised as a double bind: a set of circumstances in which an agent is given a set of competing demands, with no possibility of receiving clarification as to which demands to pursue. I argue that this interpretation of the situation of feminist academics is helpful because it prompts constructive ways of thinking. It encourages feminist academics to adopt a non-judgemental attitude towards ourselves and towards others, and it reminds us to fix our sights on long-term strategies. These suggestions in turn lead me to urge a renewed solidarity between feminists in academia. The form of solidarity I advocate is action based and inclusive, spanning disciplines, genders and research specialisms. Such solidarity can enable positive responses to the double bind facing feminist academics.
Objective
The objective of the article is to examine the way in which social work in Ireland evolved from practices of philanthropy in the late 19th century to a distinct professional strategy in the present.
Results
The results of archival research show that philanthropy in Ireland was provided almost exclusively by religious organizations and was constructed within a discourse of sectarianism and rivalry between the two main denominations, Catholic and Protestant, up to the 1960s. It is only in the past 30 years that social work has become firmly established as a secular strategy.
Conclusions
It is concluded that although social work is now clearly distinct from voluntary and religious-based social work practices, some of its present principles and practices remain continuous with its historical antecedents.
The familiar canon embodies an untenable foundation story of great men theorizing European modernity. Sociology actually emerged from a broad cultural dynamic in which tensions of liberalism and empire were central. Global expansion and colonization gave sociology its main conceptual framework and much of its data, key problems, and methods. After early-20th-century crisis, a profoundly reconstructed American discipline emerged, centered on difference and disorder within the metropole. The retrospective creation of a ''classical'' canon solved certain cultural dilemmas for this enterprise and generated a discipline-defining pedagogy, at the price of narrowing sociology's intellectual scope and concealing much of its history.
CR: The New Centennial Review 3.3 (2003) 257-337
In “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System” (Lugones 2007), I proposed to read the relation between the colonizer and the colonized in terms of gender, race, and sexuality. By this I did not mean to add a gendered reading and a racial reading to the already understood colonial relations. Rather I proposed a rereading of modern capitalist colonial modernity itself. This is because the colonial imposition of gender cuts across questions of ecology, economics, government, relations with the spirit world, and knowledge, as well as across everyday practices that either habituate us to take care of the world or to destroy it. I propose this framework not as an abstraction from lived experience, but as a lens that enables us to see what is hidden from our understandings of both race and gender and the relation of each to normative heterosexuality.
The article explores the relationship between genocide and the settler colonialism. The author asserts that though the settler-colonial logic of elimination has manifested as genocidal-they should be distinguished. The article further analyzes the negative and positive dimensions of settler colonialism. While on the one hand it attempts to dissolve native societies, it also establishes a new colonial society on the seized land base.
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