Sociology of the Common World In the Age of Multilayered Fractures and Polarization

This session is a response to a world increasingly fractured and polarized by global hegemony, ideological antagonism, gender and generational divides, national rivalry, ethnic conflict, and civilizational mistrust to search for the conditions under which we can still talk about coexistence across deep divisions.

The in-between common world, as a key theoretical concept, is a historically emerging world in which civilizations are already entangled through risk, economy, technology, migration, ecological crisis. We already live in a world where our actions affect one another, where crises cross borders, and where meanings circulate beyond their original cultural locations.

Our task is to bring these resources into an in-between common world where they can illuminate one another. Such dialogue is not easy. But this difficulty is precisely why it is necessary. A divided world cannot be healed by power alone, nor by moral preaching, nor by abstract universalism. It requires a communicative space in which different traditions can test, reinterpret, and transform their own claims in relation to others.

The in-between common world is both a reality and a task. It is a reality because we are already interconnected. It is a task because this interconnection has not yet become a just, reflexive, and humane common world. Therefore, the session welcomes all creative attempts to explore this task from the chosen theoretical perspectives, not only the Western but also the East Asian traditions of Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism as well as the Indian, Latin American, and Muslim thoughts.