5th ISA Forum of Sociology (6-11 July 2025)

This session includes contributions to enrich the history of the history of sociological self-knowledge and self-criticism. The literature seems to point to two different genealogies of "reflexivity" in sociology: 1) a reappropriation by American social science of the concept of reflexivity from positivist logic from the 1950s onwards; 2) reflexivity as the power of the subject to know itself, emerged in France as part of a philosophy of the subject. It appears that Bourdieu's call to "sociological reflexivity" (whose aim is to enable sociologists to identify the pre-scientific elements that guide their approach and to free themselves from their social unconscious) implies that he has borrowed the term reflexivity, which in fact comes from the field of philosophy. He seems to have invented a "sociological reflexivity" different from and in competition with "philosophical reflexivity".
When, in which contexts and to what extent have sociologists taken themselves, their knowledge, their practices, their socio-intellectual frameworks and their forms of reasoning as their object? When, why and to what extent have sociologists developed concepts, tools and methods that make it possible to uncover the social conditions of sociological production? How have they applied procedures of sociological objectification to themselves? Can we also trace the history of certain blind spots and resistances to self-objectification on the part of sociologists? What has been the dialogue between epistemology and the sociology of sociological knowledge? Finally, how can such a history be written, who were its main actors and contexts, and how can its periodisation be organized?