Critical Sociology of Knowledge

by

Prabhdeep Singh Kehal, Laura Garbes, Michael D. Kennedy

• LAST MODIFIED: 29 May 2019
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199756384-0221

Introduction

This bibliography curates scholarship around understandings people identify as knowledges—their production and legitimating institutions and their experiences and embodiments, with an emphasis on those excluded from the canonizations of knowledge. This “knowledge cultural sociology” (KCS) recognizes the importance of the Mannheimian tradition, and its extensions, that explains how social relations and positions shape the articulations and validations of knowledge. However, KCS also situates knowledge within systems beyond those who produce and consume it. KCS views knowledge as itself necessarily contested, as struggles over its qualities reflect social locations and articulate social practices. KCS works to understand how knowledges’ symbols, schemas, institutions, and networks shape the terms of social reproduction and transformations; as such, it demands consideration of different kinds of knowledge cultural products and modes of communication. KCS is thus necessarily grounded in the question of what constitutes knowledge, and for whom and with what interests and expectations. This KCS intervention focuses on 21st-century work. This decision aims to engage scholarship that extends and challenges a 20th-century canon, including works from the 20th century signals scholarship yearning for expansion. The bibliography is not comprehensive, though it marks how knowledge is valued and ignored. To focus on this century and move beyond sociology allows engagement with ways of knowing and being that sociology has historically minoritized, moving consideration to structures and processes validating some kinds of knowledge over others. KCS is not canonization, but works toward liberation, toward a knowledge activism mobilizing knowledge in consequential public ways alongside more familiar scholarly ambitions. KCS seeks to move scholarship beyond familiar networks and self-reproducing knowledge hierarchies grounded in race, gender, sexuality, religion, and world region. It seeks to move dialogue beyond familiar self-referential walls and identify new and ignored ideas, meanings, references, and authorities for constituting knowledges of consequence, reframing contests along the way. For example, instead of asking how excellence and diversity can be combined in knowledge production, KCS asks instead what anti-racist knowledge excellence looks like. Given the politics of epistemology, accounts of epistemology ought to foreground the contexts and power relations in which those sensibilities are formed and communicated; thus, the references below move generally from concept to context. Likewise, sections moving toward global, postsocialist, and postcolonial discussions inform ontologies and epistemologies organizing scholarly work and public consequence. But this begins with what might be identified, in this entry at least, as the greatest hits of KCS.

Greatest Hits

This KCS “greatest hits” introduces themes elaborated on throughout later sections. To move knowledge beyond the academy’s walls, this section offers access to this knowledge project for those without access to the full edition of this encyclopedia entry, due either to their own membership fee or their institutional affiliation. KCS asks, “What shapes knowledge production?” Rodríguez-Muñiz 2015 reveals the ontological myopia in scholarship on the poor. Rodríguez-Muñiz provides an analytical, “cultural diagnostics” approach to knowledge production, useful to KCS scholars in reflecting on inherited limitations in disciplinary knowledge production. Like Rodríguez-Muñiz, Turnbull 2003 challenges sociology’s modern epistemological frameworks. Turnbull shows that sociologists impose a universalizing framework in the search for rationality, rather than analyzing a heterogeneous and dynamic social world. They then offer alternative epistemologies decentering rationality to understand the unpredictability of social worlds. Part of Turnbull’s arational heterogeneous social assemblage is the social situatedness of knowledge. The bibliography asks, “How is knowledge situated in culture and identity?” Wolfe 2016 provides a contextualized history of race as a concept, linking it to its colonial roots as a political project of exploitation. Snorton 2017 builds on this history, illuminating in this racial history of transness how subaltern identities intersect and coarticulate over time to shape current normativities. KCS is committed to understanding how knowledges relate to power. The bibliography explores how power operates in solidifying hegemonic discourses. Fraser 2015 aims to understand how hegemonies and counter-hegemonies are utilized in the struggle for legitimation of advanced capitalism. KCS is always cognizant of the political stakes of knowledge. Fraser traces how hegemonic discourses constrain the perception of agency within the system. Knowledge regimes have been used to oppress and silence, and knowledge cultures serve as meaningful sites of resistance to hegemonic discourses. This bibliography examines how KCS can provide a lens toward social transformation rather than stopping at diagnosis. Nelson 2002, after revealing the white heteronormativity implicit in the “raceless/genderless” world of digital technology, offers a collection of Afrofuturist works reimagining the present, turning the social order on its head. Chari and Verdery 2009 also challenges conventional world distinctions, moving the engagement of a post–Cold War world that joins postcolonial and postsocialist studies. Taken together, these works preview the critical and reflexive diagnostic work of understanding how knowledge is constituted, its situatedness, and both its hegemonic power through institutions and its potentially transformative role in resistance and creations of better futures.

• Chari, Sharad, and Katherine Verdery. 2009. Thinking between the posts: Postcolonialism, postsocialism and ethnography after the Cold War. Comparative Studies in Society and History 51.1: 6–34.

  DOI: 10.1017/S0010417509000024E-mail Citation »

  Proposing to liberate each “post” from its respective regional foci, the authors propose a post–Cold War approach to knowledge production. They juxtapose “native” knowledge authorities from postcolonial and postsocialist traditions to recognize the knowledge cultural power of the West’s “privatization,” “marketization,” and “democratization” in their ethnographic present. They invite ethnographers to apprehend traces of the past as they emerge as signs of the tenuous reworkings of empires and their successors.

• Fraser, Nancy. 2015. Legitimation crisis? On the political contradictions of financialized capitalism. Critical Historical Studies 2.2: 157–189.

  DOI: 10.1086/683054E-mail Citation »

  Fraser refines Habermas’s 1970s argument on Legitimation Crisis by noting both the abiding and transforming legitimation crisis of advanced capitalism as a condition wherein public opinion is cast against a system that is not delivering. Fraser elaborates on how hegemonies and counter-hegemonies work in that contest, around suppositions on the subject positions and capacities for agency available to social actors and the structure and operation of the reigning social order.

• Nelson, Alondra. 2002. Afrofuturism. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.

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  With this introduction to a special issue of Social Text, Nelson marks the assumptions of digital technology’s raceless/genderless fiction. Nelson argues for an understanding on how multiplicity works to deflect and buttress structures of power, and turn oppressive binaries on their head. Finding forms of Black diasporic creation threatening Western knowledge monopolies, the author sets the stage for what has become a major movement of imagining alternative futures.

• Rodríguez-Muñiz, Michael. 2015. Intellectual inheritances: Cultural diagnostics and the state of poverty knowledge. American Journal of Cultural Sociology 3.1: 89–122.

  DOI: 10.1057/ajcs.2014.16E-mail Citation »

  Rodríguez-Muñiz develops a cultural diagnostics approach to explore the “inherited cultural infrastructures” shaping knowledge production around poverty. They find a kind of “ontological myopia” that limits the study of the poor and their lifeworlds, rather than one that could find a more relational and comprehensive approach. More than an analysis of a particular field, this account enhances the discipline’s capacity for more reflexive and cultural work.

• Snorton, C. Riley. 2017. Black on both sides: A Racial history of trans identity. Minneapolis, MN: Univ. of Minnesota Press.

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  Snorton’s narrative of transness and Blackness reforms the history of transness, often beginning in the mid-20th century. Snorten interrogates how gender is understood as mutable, and traces how slavery and the production of racialized gender enabled this understanding. Using various archive materials from the mid-19th century to present-day violences, Snorton reconstructs the theoretical and historical trajectories of Blackness and transness, showing how the negation of Blackness makes transnormativity possible.

• Turnbull, David. 2003. Masons, tricksters and cartographers: Comparative studies in the sociology of scientific and indigenous knowledge. New York: Taylor & Francis.

  DOI: 10.4324/9780203304587E-mail Citation »

  In decentering rationality in our modern epistemological framework, sociologists open up the potential of analyzing the messiness of life; that is, the unpredictability and arationality of human action. Turnbull introduces epistemologies alternate to the technoscientific way of thinking that are centered in modernity, to argue for a sociology of knowledge that is locally situated and acknowledged as a heterogeneous social assemblage rather than a coherent, universalizing framework.

• Wolfe, Patrick. 2016. Traces of history: Elementary structures of race. New York: Verso Books.

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  Wolfe provides a historically and contextually grounded conceptualization of race that improves analyses of neocolonialism. Wolfe’s framework and approach unpack how race remains a relevant construct bound in exploitation, despite its changing and different meanings throughout history. The articulation of race at once critiques resurgent claims of racial biological essentialism and provides a pathway for understanding how race can be used to continue to exploit.