What is Worth Defending in Sociology Today? Presentism, Historical Vision and the Uses of Sociology

Abstract

In recent years, sociology in Britain – and in national contexts influenced by British sociology – has been diagnosed by various parties as suffering from a wide range of ailments. These forms of self-criticism become ever more acute in terms of their potential effects as huge transformations in university funding regimes are brought to bear on the social sciences. But none of these critiques engages satisfactorily with what is a much more foundational and serious set of problems, namely the very nature of sociology itself as a historically-situated form of knowledge production. Sociology claims to know the world around it, but in Britain today much sociology seriously fails in this regard, because it operates with radically curtailed understandings of the long-term historical forces which made the social conditions it purports to analyse. A sophisticated understanding of the contemporary world is made possible only by an equally sophisticated understanding of very long-term historical processes, precisely the sort of vision that mainstream British sociology has lacked for at least the last two decades. This paper identifies the reasons for the development of this situation and the consequences it has for the nature of sociology’s knowledge production, for its self-understanding, for its claims to comprehend the contemporary world, and for its apparent social ‘usefulness’. A markedly more self-aware and historically-sensitive sociology is proposed as the answer to the pressing question of what aspects of sociology should be defended in the turbulent context of British higher education today.

The Survival of the Friendliest: Contemporary Indian Publishing in English at the Frankfurt Book Fair

“…Further research would benefit from taking into account the 'long term historical dynamics' (Inglis, 2014) of the Indian literary field, and exploring the conceptual frameworks opened up by engaging with non-Western social experience. This would contribute to the decolonising of knowledge of literary fields in particular, and the understanding of the production of culture in general.…”

What is ‘Fashion’ Really? The Promise of an Ecumenical Analytic for Fashion Studies and Beyond in a Globalized World

“…But where we can go beyond these scholars, again in the spirit of Polybius, is by going beyond merely comparing diferent fashion systems from across time and space, and showing how these systems may have impacted upon each other, with fashion phenomena moving across civilizational and cultural boundaries, both at particular points in the past and today. Fashion studies needs to bring to its analysis considerations of planetary connectivity that are obviously happening now and also happened, sometimes in less obvious ways, in the past [66]. Too few studies are informed by such an ecumenical orientation, and we suggest that fashion studies needs to be developed much further in this direction.…”

Editorial Statement: Tracing, Making and Locating Cultural Sociology

“…Whilst remaining open to both, we also seek to provide space for what could be called 'diagonal' approaches, deriving these either from historical perspectives -and in that sense we would want to encourage a non-'presentist' engagement with the present (Inglis, 2014) -or from other forms of multiscalar, dynamic analyses that maintain focus on economic processes, socio-cultural inequalities, and power relations.…”