Toward a Decolonial Lexicon

This presentation introduces to ISA constituents a collective project that is currently underway, bringing together scholars from the Arab region along with Berlin-based scholars. Designed to investigate the historical genealogies of 60 essential sociological concepts in Arabic, English and French, the presentation outlines how the project emerged out of a felt need to provide an infrastructure for decolonizing sociology at the root level, namely the level of its basic concepts. The focus on one world region, the Arab World, allows us to see how the sociological knowledge was implicated in colonial processes that also affect how ideas like “society” or “religion,” for example, acquire meanings that cannot be easily disentangled from relations of power although, once in use, what they signify seems to evolve in relation to various sociopolitical dynamics and perspectives of the communities of knowledge formed around them.