Call for Articles. Interwar Sociologies: Critical and Comparative Reconsiderations

Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai Sociologia

Interwar Sociologies: Critical and Comparative Reconsiderations

Call for Articles*

Acknowledging the growing interest in the research of social science histories in Central and Eastern Europe in the 20th century, the special issue on Interwar Sociologies: Critical and Comparative Approaches programmatically avoids reifying notions such as „interwar sociology,” which has become a shorthand for competing canonizing projects during both state socialism and the postsocialist period. Instead, its take is much more flexible, critical, and inclusive of the various types of research retrospectively subsumed under or fallen out of the present-day understanding of the sociological inquiry. It seeks to historicize and contextualize sociological knowledge production in Central and Eastern Europe in the period between the First and Second World Wars by focusing on the development of concepts, institutions, groups, research practices, or schools of thought in a comparative perspective.

Systematic comparative research on interwar sociologies is needed in order to overcome the limitations of nation-centred historical accounts of sociological thought and research, as well as to shed new light on regional and transnational encounters, transfers, and cooperation in the field of social sciences in or outside of Europe.

Articles should critically engage with the „givens” of existing research on the various sociologies in the period between the two World Wars:

• the criteria used to define a current of thought/group/research as „sociological”;
• the chronology of the interwar period, specifically its isolation, in analyses, from the prewar and postwar periods;
• the conceptualization of comparisons between various sociologies in terms of discourse, practice, and networks;

• the analysis of the self-positioning and stakes of the actors within the field of „sociology.”

Contributors are also encouraged to broaden the perspectives over the topic of interwar sociologies and explore its dimensions beyond the narrow interests of discipline-bound accounts. These include, but are not limited to:

• the role played by sociologists in national identity politics in Central and Eastern Europe: defining the nation and national culture, debating the role of ethnicity, shaping attitudes towards minorities;

• sociologies  and   the   social:   how   power   relations   and   social   issues   are represented;
• sociologies and the state: how they perceive and positions themselves towards the state, and what roles they attribute to it.

Extensive abstract, the descriptions of article’s sections (1,000 – 1,500 words) and short bibliography should be sent to: zoltan.z.rostas@gmail.com / ionutbutoi@yahoo.com and to: studiasociologia@socasis.ubbcluj.ro no later than 1.06.2016.

* The accepted articles will be published in Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai Sociologia, Volume 61 (XLI), 2, 2016 (December).

For information on Studia UBB Sociologia, see: http://studia.ubbcluj.ro/serii/sociologia/index_en.html