Abstract
Three of the articles in this volume (Wood, Sieh, Corbin) were originally presented in a 2009 Sociology of Knowledge Session of the American Sociological Association. The purpose of the session was to introduce a new generation of sociologists of knowledge who were asking different kinds of questions in a subfield long dominated by the intellectual epistemologies and priorities of European-descent men quite disinterested in issues having to do with inequality in the production of knowledge or about cultural-diversity issues. In a world so rapidly changing from north to south and from west to east and with so many historically White societies no longer all that White, and in a world in which women are increasingly being heard in their own voices, conventional sociology of knowledge as the bastion of European-descent males content with exotic abstractions with no relevance in the realities of the emerging 21st century no longer holds very much water.
The question then is, how do we begin to ask new questions as sociologists of knowledge who explore rather than evade or otherwise avoid or water down or dismiss sensitive questions, such as the role of status identity politics in the production of knowledge or the cases in which knowledge that is produced is derived from the horrible dehumanization of others? And what do we do about matters that sociologists of knowledge have tended to shy away from because of their discomfort with or resistance to meanings stemming from our spiritual experiences and lives or perhaps because we prefer to romanticize how knowledge is created and institutionalized rather than acknowledge and study the politics of what really goes on? Also, as we as 21st-century people take leave increasingly from the world of the concrete geographical and venture in growing ways into cyberspace, do our traditional conceptions, such as of organizations and communities, begin to change or remain the same as we begin to build a body of research in, say, the sociology of virtual realities? How can we think about nations that we have tended to ignore in macro sociology-of-knowledge studies, such as African countries, as places in which we can try out ideas that explain emerging notions of empowerment that defies the West in thinking and in practice? How can we begin to think more deeply and systematically about what to study contextually and biographically about major societal-change issues in a think tank format, such as the 1940s-to-1960s sociological generation of African American civil rights leaders and their non-African American allies, as historically informed sociologists who acknowledge that we have missed much in examining a significant sociological generation and the movements it organized?
These are questions that are explored at length in the provocative articles that constitute this volume. It is hoped that they will inspire a movement in the sociology-of-knowledge subdiscipline to become much more expansive in what we study as the meanings undergirding empirical and nonempirical realities that we tend to examine and have yet to examine.