Colloque international - "Post-Western Sociology. From East Asia to Europe"
This conference is organized to celebrate and debate around the publication in March 2023 of Laurence Roulleau-Berger, Li Peilin, Kim Seung Kuk, ShujiroYazawa (eds) Handbook of Post-Western Sociology. From East Asia to Europe. This event aims to become a touchstone in a larger and international debate on what makes a global sociology intense scientific cooperation and intellectual exchange on non-hegemonic sociology. It will close a period of intense scientific cooperation and intellectual exchange on non-hegemonic sociology.
Indeed from 2006 onwards with Professor Li Peilin and sociologists from the CASS, the Beijing University (Beijing), the Tsinghua University (Beijing) and the Renmin University of China (Beijing) we all started drawing the outlines together of a dialogical space between Chinese and European sociology. This intense collaboration has been developing concepts on the de-Westernization of social sciences, with the epistemological objective to go beyond the East/West dichotomies and binary thought.
Since 2012, after the realization of different research programs, we decided to set up a scientific program to co-produce a Post-Western sociology in order to open a dialogue “ à parts égales” sharing theories and theories located in both China and Europe. The CNRS and the ENS of Lyon played a key role in opening a space for scientific collaboration with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the Universities of Beijing, Shanghai and Nanjing, especially with the creation in 2013 of
the International Associated Laboratory Post-Western Sociology in Europe and in China. We created an epistemological and multi-situated space where the circulation of concepts and theories prevents dichotomies between Western and non-Western knowledge.The Ecole Normale Supérieure of Lyon and the CNRS Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences strongly supported this IAL, convinced that it would have an international impact.
Then, throughout our aim to better define the proper epistemological meaning of post-Western sociology in recent years, we have invited some international sociologists with a wealth of experience studying non-hegemonic sociologies to join us, including Professors Shujiro Yasawa, Dai Nomiya and Yoshiyuki Yama from Japan; Professor Kim Seung-Kuk, Chang Kyung-Sup, Han Sang-Jin and Shim Young-Hee from South Korea; Professor Svetla Koleva from Bulgaria; Professor Sari Hanafi from Lebanon.
For over three decades, Western hegemonies received criticism from non-Western and Westernized intellectuals living and working in the heart of the West. A considerable portion of post-colonial critique came from universities in the North. The “Westernization” and “de- Westernization” of knowledge have often gone hand in hand in showing that weapons against Western domination were manufactured in the Western empire. The political decline of colonial empires failed to recognize knowledge developed outside the “imperial” borders.
In this conference , we would like to offer a glimpse beyond the “East” and the “West” by opening the horizons to a wealth of self-directed narratives by societies worldwide, thus laying the foundations for a Post-Western space. This is a place where “Western” and “non- Western” sociologies can intersect and interact, forming shared divergent understandings of a myriad of ethnoscapes. Since more than 15 years now, we have produced a Post-Western Sociology to enable a dialogue on common concepts and concepts situated in European, Chinese, Japanese and Korean theories, to consider the modes of creation of continuities and discontinuities, the conjunctions and disjunctions between knowledge spaces situated in different social contexts, to work on the gaps between them.
From the production of epistemologies of the Souths and the re- easternization of the westernized East we will introduce the idea of the demultiplication, the complexification and the hierarchization of new epistemic autonomies vis-à-vis Western hegemonies in sociology and the new epistemic assemblages between European and Asian sociologies (Roulleau-Berger 2016 ; Xie Lizhong, Roulleau-Berger, 2017; Roulleau-Berger, Li Peilin, 2018) . In fact, epistemic autonomies become plural and diversify, even hierarchize among themselves, without this dynamic of recomposition of the geographies of knowledge in the social sciences being really perceived on the side of the Western worlds.
In this conference we will discuss different definitions of Post-Western Sociology, improve the post-Western theory, aiming to produce an
ecology of knowledge, co-produce a Post-Western Space in a cross- pollinization process. The growth of sociology with different characteristics in different countries is the basis for the formation of global sociology as a post -Western sociology. The new debates mean that sociologists in non Western countries are consciously thinking about how global sociology, as a post-Western sociology, has been formed.
In the post-Western sociology doing with or doing together looks still central in the fabric of sociological knowledge when taking into account alternative political economy of knowledge. In order to move forward in the production of the paradigm of post-Western sociology, we have to share more common and local knowledge by producing crossed sociological perspectives on common topics, by doing fieldwork in Europe and Asia, by comparing our ways of conducting quantitative and qualitative research in different research programs. In this conference we will open new theoretical and methodological spaces to promote hybridization and creolization of sociological knowledge in non-hegemonic ways.