Cultural Sociology: Hermeneutics, Semiotics, Dialectics

Cultural Sociology: Hermeneutics, Semiotics, Dialectics

Notwithstanding its academic success, cultural sociology has largely avoided more philosophical discussions about its relation to cultural studies, the human sciences and the Geisteswissenschaften. In this session, we want to probe the theoretical logic of cultural sociology/anthropology and explore more systematic interchanges between hermeneutics, semiotics and dialectics. The interchange between the three major approaches to the “products of the human spirit” that come from different traditions should not only stimulate dialogue between German Geisteswissenschaften, American pragmatism, French structuralism and critical theory (broadly conceived), but should also try to actualise them to take into account the contemporary challenges of digital technology, intercultural communication, crumbling globalization and the rising of postcolonial discourses, in troubled times. This session will welcome papers that address these issues either through rereading of the classical tradition in the light of its contribution to the interpretation of contemporary problems or through an investigation of how the various approaches deal with classical problems in the interpretation of the meanings of social life. By focusing on the epistemological and theoretical dimensions of sociological analysis, papers should seek to raise some specific problems regarding the ways cultural sociology, cultural studies and the Geisteswissenschaften can deepen and widen their own project in order to produce the genuine synthesis which, presumably, they can only develop together.