Conviviality/Convivialisme Studies and the Renewal of Sociology

This session lays on a strong assumption: recent debates on conviviality and convivialisme carried out in diverse disciplinary fields address some central theoretical, epistemological and methodological insufficiencies of contemporary social sciences and particularly sociology.

At the epistemological level, different authors have used conviviality approaches for overcoming anthropocentrism and sociocentrism, which are inherent to sociology. They reject the separation, that constitutes sociology, between nature and culture, human beings and other living beings in favor of an understanding of rural and urban settlements as multispecies entanglements.

From the theoretical perspective, studies on conviviality and convivialisme argue that societies represent much more than assemblages of structures and actors driven by utilitarian motivations. Accordingly, societies are living webs of interdependence based on convivial relations. This does not lead to a romanticized picture of contemporary societies since inequalities and asymmetries are seen as integral components of convivial configurations.

Methodologically, different authors have been working on the development of convivial methods able to overcome artificial and often extractivist divisions between academic and non-academic knowledge / researcher and researched. Accordingly, social research is a dialogical process for producing transdisciplinary knowledge, that should be based on transparent and symmetrical exchanges between academic and non-academic knowledge producers.

The papers in this session explore potentials but also deficits and failures of conviviality/convivialisme studies to renew sociology including both conceptual-theoretical papers and papers devoted to discuss methods and concrete experiences of conducting convivial research.