Thinking through Critical Social Science- Re-thinking Subjectivity and the Sociologist through James Baldwin and Stuart Hall

• In Event: 2213 - Complicity and Cooptation: How Sociology has Changed Society, for Better and for Worse

Abstract

How are researchers complicit in replicating systems of oppression and how can research be accountable to the subjects of that work? In response to the emergence of positivist strands in 20th century sociology, contemporary approaches to the discipline have attempted to re-situate the scholar as both a subject and perspectival viewpoint in research (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). Critiques of positivism have led scholars to question their own positionality in relation to the structures of power that reproduce systems of oppression for the subjects of their research. Reflexive sociology and qualitative or ethnographic approaches that seek to expose the power disparities between researcher and subject aim to make the author both accountable to their subjects while also exposing potential biases located within the researchers own identity. While such approaches aim to expose the limits or scope of a scholar’s own power privilege, they too often fail to firmly interrogate the role the scholar holds in maintaining those same structures they seek to critique. Rather than exposing the dynamics of power, by exposing their relationships to structures or identities seen as privileged, scholars often reify or re-identify these very same structures of power. The authors of this paper suggest a re-thinking of scholarly accountability to subjects through a phenomenological understanding of complicity that understands identity categories and social hierarchies not as fixed but constantly in flux. The authors suggest that a phenomenological approach to studying academic complicity and accountability, drawn from the works of James Baldwin and Stuart Hall exposes the dynamics by which sociologists operate within and in support of structures of power. Both Hall and Baldwin interrogate subjectivity as relational and subjectives not located in static identities but rather as constantly floating signifiers of class, race, gender or political power.

Authors

• Alexandre White, Johns Hokins University

• Ricarda Hammer, Brown University