GSP Workshop (summer 2012)

Description of the workshop

Details

• Title: GSP Students’ Research Workshop: Metaphor, allegory and parable in global sociology
• Lecturers: Wiebke Keim, Meri Yeranosyan
• Time and Place: Friday 09:30‐11:30 premises of the BMBF Project, "Social Science Knowledge", in Hansastraße 9

Description

The course seeks to explore the meaning of semantic figures such as metaphors, allegory and parable in popular narratives, conceived of as crystallizations of collective social knowledge. We would like to work on interpretations of those forms of narrative that have been largely marginalized in academic debate and see what the discipline of sociology can learn from these alternative views on society. The course takes up suggestions provided by the indigenization of knowledge debate, initiated by Akiwowo and discussed, among others, in International Sociology. The course fundamentally builds on the book “Voices That Reason. Theoretical Parables” by Ari Sitas (2004) – an attempt to ground sociological insights in popular narratives originating in the oral culture of the KwaZulu-Natal region, to which Sitas attributed a “theoretical surplus value”, and to extend the project proposed by the author. Anzaldúa’s “Borderlands/La Frontera” is another example that experiments with various types of narratives, including poetry, songs and oral history.

The aim of the course is to familiarize students with the fundamental ideas of the parables project, to encourage them to search for similar popular narratives in their own cultural formations and to collectively discuss ideas and methodological tools in order to work on the relevance of these narratives for sociology. Students will be asked to go through their own epics, i.e. various forms of storytelling, and see what knowledge is there. The fieldwork required for data collection should follow the principle of “doing sociology of people for people with people”, an approach that we will work on in the course. In order to be able to analyse the material, participants will be familiarized with discourse and metaphor analysis and with methods in oral history. The course is organized in the form of an intensive research workshop with a reduced number of participants. Besides the weekly two‐hour course, participants spend about one day as interns in the project “Universality and Acceptance Potential of Social Knowledges” during their first semester at the University of Reiburg in order to intensively work on their chosen topics (Fridays after the course). They continue their work during the following two semesters. In the second semester, Ari Sitas and Amrita Pande together with guest lecturers Paolo Vignolo (Universidad Nacional de Colombia) and Sumangala Damodaran (Ambedkar University, Delhi) offer a course on “Sociology of Art and Popular Culture” at UCT. The students’ group organizes a symposium at which they present their results in their last semester back in Freiburg. Participants are encouraged to base their theses on the outcomes of the course.

Selected Literature (alphabetical order)

• Adésínà, Jìmí (2001): Sociology and Yoruba studies: epistemic intervention or doing sociology in the ‘vernacular’? In: Annals of the Social Science Academy of Nigeria No. 13: 57‐91.
• Akiwowo, Akinsola (1986): Contributions to the sociology of knowledge from an African oral poetry. In: International Sociology 1 (4): 343–358.
• Akiwowo, Akinsola (1991): Responses to Makinde/Lawuyi and Taiwo. In: International Sociology 6 (2): 243–251.
• Akiwowo, Akinsola (1999): Indigenous sociologies – extending the scope of the argument. In: International Sociology 14 (2): 115–138.
• Anzaldúa, Gloria (1999): Borderlands. La frontera. 2nd edition, San Francisco, Calif: Aunt Lute Books.
• Lawuyi, O.B; Taiwo, Olufemi (1990): Towards an African sociological tradition: a rejoinder to Akiwowo and Makinde. In: International Sociology 5 (1): 57–73.
• Makinde, A. Akin (1988): Asuwada principle: an analysis of Akiwowo’s contributions to the sociology of knowledge from an African perspective. In: International Sociology 3 (1): 61–76.
• Sitas, Ari (2004): Voices that reason. Theoretical parables. Pretoria: Unisa.