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Table of contents (8 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
Gennaro Ascione explores the transformative potential of decolonizing knowledge through a radical reconsideration of the historical and epistemological role that the intellectual reference to science plays in the construction of concepts. This ground-breaking work challenges social theorists to think globally beyond modernity, bringing together social theory and science in an unprecedented way. Importantly, it makes accessible a new space of missing theorization for further developments and inquiries in the field.
Reviews
“European modernity defines itself by its claims of universality and the transcendence of time and space, claims which are most evident in its self-understanding of science at the heart of its project of Enlightenment. In this important book, Gennaro Ascione dismantles the epistemological underpinnings of the project of modernity to reveal relations of domination specific to it. These relations derive from Europe's colonial past and far from transcending time and place, as Ascione powerfully demonstrates, European modernity remains trapped by its contradictory impulses to truth and power. This book is necessary reading for anyone interested in understanding the new wave of anti-Eurocentric critique within the social sciences.” (Gurminder K. Bhambra, author of Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Social Sciences (2007) and Connected Sociologies (2014))
“This highly innovative text proposes a bold critical journey into the epistemologies of the social sciences to announce a radical shift in purpose and perspective. Drawn through, across and beyond the existing premises and practices of what constitutes sociological and historical “knowledge”, Ascione invites us to dismantle a fetishised modernity as it fractures in the critical complexities of a world that refutes, refuses and resists its semantics. Opposed to the image of scientific neutrality – whose presumed universality paradoxically always mirrors only Occidental concerns – we here confront modernity as a multiplex mode of power. This book profoundly helps us to understand how agendas emerging from the manifold powers and possibilities that mark and divide the planet today dispute that modernity and disseminate critical dissonance in its planetary pretensions.” (Iain Chambers, University of Naples l’Orientale, Italy, author of “The Post-colonial question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons”, 1996 and “Mediterranean Crossings”, 2007)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Science and the Decolonization of Social Theory
Book Subtitle: Unthinking Modernity
Authors: Gennaro Ascione
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51686-2
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan London
eBook Packages: Social Sciences, Social Sciences (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-137-51685-5Published: 22 August 2016
eBook ISBN: 978-1-137-51686-2Published: 12 August 2016
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XI, 256
Topics: Social Theory, Knowledge - Discourse, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Sociology of Culture, History of Science