Postcolonial and Decolonial Transformations Study Group

Our contemporary world is shaped by historical – and in many cases ongoing – processes of colonialism, enslavement, and imperialism, and the development of racial capitalism. Much sociology, however, fails to engage with these processes as constitutive of the making of the modern world. This study group on Postcolonial and Decolonial Transformations (PDT) aims to better understand these historical processes as a central aspect of the sociological project.

It further seeks to examine their political, economic, social, and epistemological consequences in the present. The PDT Study Group questions the disaggregated nature of much sociological thought and aims to rethink sociology in the context of its many entanglements. This means eschewing simplified binaries of ‘East’ and ‘West’ or ‘developed’ and ‘underdeveloped’ and instead examining how these concepts have been abstracted from their broader, connected, contexts. The Group will also address the marginalisation and silencing of subjects, both historically and in the present, and will pay attention to the multiplicity and intersections of such issues.