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ОглавлениеThe Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP) was founded by social scientists who wanted to use their research, scholarship, and teaching to make the world a better place (Galliher and Galliher, 2001; Kolb, 1954). Debating the best strategies and practices for achieving this goal have remained a significant part of the organization’s history.
SSSP President David Smith (2017) challenged us to “globalize” our study of social problems. He accurately argued that, as American sociology evolved as a discipline to focus on “society” as a concept, it did so within an increasingly narrow scope and specious project. The United States and Western Europe became the prototype of “society” while other groupings were examined as deviant subcultures and/or underdeveloped nations. From the Chicago School (Abbott, 2017; Low and Bowden, 2013) through the structural-functionalism of Parson’s Cold War nationalism (Gilman, 2003; Latham, 2011) to theories that suggested a global political and ideological consensus around Bell’s (1960) End of Ideology and Fukuyama’s (1992) End of History and the Last Man, all came together to produce a deeply flawed yet dominant core for social science. The seemingly seamless modernist framework nurtured American sociologists and their global cohort to develop an increasingly elite, corporate, professionalized, patriarchal, and Eurocentric enterprise under the guise of objective inquiry and scientific analysis.
The rise of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements in the second half of the 20th century birthed a more radical sociology that questioned the limitations of “society” as a concept and the triumphalism of western intellectual hegemony in general. Smith suggests, borrowing from previous SSSP President Evelyn Nakano Glenn (2000), that only a movement for “international citizenship” might offer a way to transform the exclusionary rhetoric and politics of the old liberal, modernist tradition with a more international, yet still liberal, narrative of global citizenship and human rights. For sociologists to support such reform movements and fulfill the SSSP mission, Smith and Glenn both concluded that we needed to be more global.
Smith and Glenn are right about sociology. But their analysis still begins with the Chicago School’s Eurocentric, nativist model—a modernist intellectual framework for an elite white discipline. While both SSSP presidents recognized the foundational flaws of this approach (Smith promoted a Marxist critique of capitalism and Glenn the work of critical legal studies in deconstructing the inherent racial supremacy of citizenship narratives), they still recast liberal sociology in ways that left intact the barbarism of the original fallacy—capitalist exploitation, settler colonialism, environmental degradation, and white supremacy. The possibilities of a more radical analytical project engaged in challenging these forces get squelched when limited by the professional conventions and traditional models. It is one thing to suggest rethinking the economic and political structures of contemporary society to see how our scholarship might analyze them and promote change. It seems quite another to suggest a radical sociological project whose global perspective dismantles the very disciplinary foundations of the enterprise and suggests restructuring and reparations must be a baseline.
For example, if global racial capitalism was a primary force shaping the institutional and ideological origins of sociology as a discipline, how different might our work have been if social science had been alternatively formed by the anti-racist and anti-colonial social science of Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. DuBois, Jane Addams, Zora Neale Hurston, C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, Amílcar Cabral, and so many other radical social scientists (for example Deegan, 1988; Giddings, 2009; Go, 2017; Hurston, 2010; Itzigsohn and Brown, 2020; Manji and Fletcher, 2013; Morris, 2017; Robinson, 2000)? What if we pursued a more radically expansive theoretical and political praxis that began with a social scientific pursuit against colonialism and toward human liberation? Envisioning what might have been may ultimately be a futile endeavor, but the pressing calls for more global frameworks, analysis, and engagement must elicit such radical sensibilities and musings.
The global nature of the current pandemic has forced us to focus once again on the inherent integration of international economic development, unequal and oppressive social and political systems, and in its most basic forms, the neoliberal death march that threatens our very health and survival as people and a planet. Like the “existential crisis” of global warming, COVID-19 is living proof that changes in climate, capitalist development strategies, and the living and working conditions of displaced peoples around the globe will continue to create grave risks for everyone. As Mike Davis wrote recently, “The current pandemic expands the argument: capitalist globalization now appears to be biologically unsustainable in the absence of a truly international public-health infrastructure. But such an infrastructure will never exist until social movements break the power of Big Pharma and for-profit healthcare” (2020, p. 35). Only by reframing our sociological analysis might we also reposition ourselves as radical scholars in legion with political movements for human liberation and planetary sustainability.
In the face of these challenges and possibilities, I am honored, as 2020–21 SSSP President, to introduce Social Problems in the Age of COVID-19: Volume 2: Global Perspectives, published by Policy Press. I am always impressed by the breadth, depth and richness of my colleagues’ work, exposing and analyzing the ways in which forms of power and oppression impact marginalized populations both in the United States and around the world. In this volume, they pay particular attention to how local experiences and conditions shed light on global dynamics, and how global patterns of human activity and structural power permeate every nook and cranny of global suffering. Even more notable and crucial at this moment are chapters that shed light on how we as scholar activists and radical intellectuals can work with others to challenge the global forces of white supremacy and capitalist exploitation—now melding into a powerful vision of fascism around the world. Now more than ever we have an opportunity to inform a new sense of historical and political global analysis with the call for—and commitment to—an international radical response. The germination of such a movement for radical sociological work can be found within these pages as they pour out in solidarity and struggle.
Corey W. Dolgon, President of the Society for the Study of Social Problems, 2020–21
Key Resources
Abbott, Andrew . 2017. Department and Discipline: Chicago Sociology at One Hundred. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bell, David . 1960. The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
Davis, Mike . 2020. The Monster Enters: COVID-19, Avian Flu and the Plagues of Capitalism. New York: OR Books.
Deegan, Mary Jo . 1988. Jane Addams and the Men of the Chicago School, 1892–1918. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers.
Fukuyama, Francis . 1992. The End of History and the Last Man. London: Hamish Hamilton.
Galliher, John F. andGalliher, James M. 2001. “Doing Justice to Elizabeth Briant Lee: The Co-founder of the SSSP.” Social Problems, 48(1): 66–70.
Giddings, Paula J. 2009. Ida: A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching. New York: HarperCollins.
Gilman, Nils . 2003. Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Glenn, Evelyn Nakano . 2000. “Citizenship and Inequality: Historical and Global Perspectives.” Social Problems, 47(1): 1–20.
Go, Julian . 2017. “Decolonizing Sociology: Epistemic Inequality and Sociological Thought.” Social Problems, 64(2): 194–199.
Hurston, Lucy Anne . 2010. “Zora Neale Hurston: Pioneering Social Scientist.” In The Inside Light: New Critical Essays on Zora Neale Hurston, edited by Deborah Plant. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO.
Itzigsohn, José andBrown, Karida L. 2020. The Sociology of WEB Du Bois: Racialized Modernity and the Global Color Line. New York: New York University Press.
Kolb, William L. 1954. “The Impingement of Moral Values on Sociology.” Social Problems, 2(2): 66–70.
Latham, Michael E. 2011. The Right Kind of Revolution: Modernization, Development, and US Foreign Policy from the Cold War to the Present. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Low, Jacqueline andBowden, Gary . 2013. The Chicago School Diaspora: Epistemology and Substance. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Manji, Firoze andFletcher, Bill . 2013. Claim No Easy Victories: The Legacy of Amilcar Cabral. Dakar: CODESRIA.
Morris, Aldon . 2017. The Scholar Denied: WEB Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Robinson, Cedric J. 2000. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Smith, David A. 2001. “Globalization and Social Problems.” Social Problems, 48(4): 429–434.
Smith, David A. 2017. “Globalizing Social Problems: An Agenda for the Twenty-first Century.” Social Problems, 64(1): 1–13.
