How Mainstream Sociology Can Now Change in a World Context

Starting from the Japanese Sociological Society's welcome initiative, this paper will reflect on how mainstream sociology can now change in a world context.  Simply reproducing the dominant social-scientific models has produced distortedsociologies around the world, as those frameworks grow out of the unique social experience of the global centres of power in Europe and North America.  Different social theories, research methods, and agendas for research are all generated from thesocial experience of colonization, cultural domination and neoliberal globalization, which in turn differ across the globalSouth.  For bodies like ISA, the problem is how to bring different intellectual projects into dialogue with each other, ina context marked by global inequality and with US and European hegemony currently being restored though new forms of hierarchy and competition in the neoliberal university.  Some recent examples of creative social-scientific work out of the South will be mentioned, including indigenous methodology, postcolonial gender theory, and research on neoliberalism.