Language and social knowledge

Abstract

In this piece, I argue that a heightened attention to language in Reed’s (2011) interpretive epistemic mode will help further theorizing of the relationship between meaning and the social, and hence strengthen the case for interpretation. Reed’s (2011) framework of ‘landscapes of meaning’ would benefit from weaving in the significance of language to meaning-making: both because it would make room for variations in landscapes across (linguistic) space, but also because it would incorporate an understanding of language, and therefore interpretation, as a practical and historically changing activity. Finally, I suggest that paying attention to the uneven travel of language issues a productive challenge to the analytical distinction Reed maintains between the normative and the interpretive epistemic modes, given that not every epistemic mode is seen as equally legitimate in relation to dominant forms of making sense of the world, and given that subjects do not have equal access to interpretive landscapes.

Queering Translation, Translating the Queer

“…Given how much scholarship has been produced within cultural sociology, and how much debate has occurred about the place of culture within the field, it is quite surprising that sociology would pay little attention to language itself. Elsewhere, I have argued that cultural sociology would benefit from a heightened attention to the linguistic component of meaning-making, both because language provides the very context in which meaning, and therefore the social, is produced, and also because it is within given linguistic structures, possibilities and limitations that we as scholars produce our understanding and interpretation of the very social world we observe (Savcı 2017). My own way into making room for the linguistic within the social, and bridging sociology and queer theory became "translation."…”