Wiebke Keim

Gauging and Engaging Deviance is at once a creative and challenging work. It is not just a critique of the sociological canon, but an imaginative reconstruction that is generous to all nooks and crannies of the planet. It is also a memorial to modernity's victims, whether they were perceived to be deviant or not. Its broad historical range, its geographical spread, and its attention to race and power create a conceptual grammar through which we can speak of the key challenges, traumas and violence of the contemporary period. Through its pages the Maroon and the Pirate meet Don Quixote, the Thug and the Apostate in a journey that takes the reader through slave factories, plantations, prisons, and extermination camps, gauging the price of what it has meant to struggle to be contrary or free.

This is the second volume from the authors (along with several others) of Gauging and Engaging Deviance, which is positioned between the ideas of deviance and defiance and attempts to uncover scripts through which notions of deviance as well as acts of defiance unravel. It argues that instead of the monologue about the binary of European modernity and its traditional backwoods, the contours are to be found in another archive, one that is made up of significant scripts or narratives of defiance that endure through subaltern people's cultural formations despite and in response to dominant ideas and ideologies. Such scripts within this archive will help sociology reconstitute itself away from its original mandate: to be part of the fixers, to help the maintenance of social order, to predict and control aberrant behaviour and to create functional individuals and ensembles. The chapters look at specific figures of discontent: the worker, the woman, the student, the artist, the migrant and refugee, the prisoner, and, as a counter-voice, the movements of reaction to their discontent, the movements of authoritative restoration.

An innovative contribution to debates on the internationalization and globalization of the social sciences, this book pays particular attention to their theoretical and epistemological reconfiguration in the light of postcolonial critiques and critiques of Eurocentrism. Bringing together theoretical contributions and empirical case studies from around the world, including India, the Americas, South Africa, Australia and Europe, it engages in debates concerning public sociology and explores South-South research collaborations specific to the social sciences. Contributions transcend established critiques of Eurocentrism to make space for the idea of global social sciences and truly transnational research. Thematically arranged and both international and interdisciplinary in scope, this volume reflects the different theoretical and thematic backgrounds of the contributing authors, who enter into dialogue and debate with one another in the development of a more inclusive, more representative and more theoretically relevant stage for the social sciences. A rigorous critique of the contemporary state of the social sciences as well as an attempt to find another way of doing transnational sociology, Global Knowledge Production in the Social Sciences will appeal to scholars of sociology, political science and social theory with interests in the production of social scientific knowledge, postcolonialism and transnationalism in research.

An innovative contribution to debates on the internationalization and globalization of the social sciences, this book pays particular attention to their theoretical and epistemological reconfiguration in the light of postcolonial critiques and critiques of Eurocentrism. Bringing together theoretical contributions and empirical case studies from around the world, including India, the Americas, South Africa, Australia and Europe, it engages in debates concerning public sociology and explores South-South research collaborations specific to the social sciences. Contributions transcend established critiques of Eurocentrism to make space for the idea of global social sciences and truly transnational research. Thematically arranged and both international and interdisciplinary in scope, this volume reflects the different theoretical and thematic backgrounds of the contributing authors, who enter into dialogue and debate with one another in the development of a more inclusive, more representative and more theoretically relevant stage for the social sciences. A rigorous critique of the contemporary state of the social sciences as well as an attempt to find another way of doing transnational sociology, Global Knowledge Production in the Social Sciences will appeal to scholars of sociology, political science and social theory with interests in the production of social scientific knowledge, postcolonialism and transnationalism in research.