Abstract
With this issue, I assume my role as the editor of ISRB for the next four years. I would like to thank Devorah Kalekin-Fishman for having safely steered this unique ISA publication for its first four years, to have helped establish it as a reference for sociologists worldwide, and above all for a smooth and uneventful transition. The majority of reviews that appear in this issue were solicited by her, and as evident they show the hard work that an editor has to do in order to navigate the vast terrain of contemporary sociology as conducted in a variety of scholarly traditions around the world.
I would like to use this opportunity to invite all ISA members and anyone interested in contemporary sociology from a global perspective to help me as we move to the next phase in the life of this journal. My overall aim is generic enough: to enhance the usefulness of the journal to its current and prospective readership. To that end, proposals and suggestions are welcome from anyone, whether they pertain to issues and debates that we ought to cover more effectively; to specific new publications; or to more general strategic planning. I very much hope to focus a little more on one of the original main goals of ISRB, and that is to substantially cover sociological literature not available in English, including important local debates that are less known but could be of significance to an international community of sociologists. The proposition that a very local debate might be significant to those sociologists who may inhabit a very different social, political, economic or academic environment takes us all the way back to foundational concerns of sociological knowledge, namely how to generalize with enough sensitivity to the variety of local contexts, how to theorize while enjoying local nuance and variation, and how to enjoy theoretical and methodological activity while being rooted in some real life events somewhere. It is impossible, I think, to imagine a genuinely global sociology without having at its core a gnosis whose life energy draws from something that is actually living yet unseen: the very local stories, the ones that are most likely to be glossed over either because we are trained to look at world or macro pictures, or because those who know them do not feel that they could be properly understood and appreciated by outsiders. If in my tenure as editor of this journal I manage to establish at least tentatively an agenda that programmatically fights against this dual bias, then I would say that ISRB has definitively moved into the next stage of its life as a genuine vehicle for a global sociology.
The two review essays with which this issue opens focus on issues of public sociology, but each brings up in its way the salience of central current world issues to sociological perspectives. Ran Greenstein surveys a number of public intellectual debates in Israel that shed light on how questions of collective identity, peace and trauma are negotiated in an environment with uncertain future and many options. Turan Kayaoğlu discusses Islamophobia, a neologism that is associated with immigration as well as geopolitical debates, and seeks to explore the extent to which this otherwise amorphous designator of an attitude has attained anything like a definitional or perspectivist rigor, so that it may guide research more intelligibly.
The reviews are divided afterwards into several sections. They begin with broad questions of modern families in a variety of world contexts, including child migration in Africa, family culture associated with ‘compressed modernity’ in East Asia, the practice of family photography in Europe, transnational adoption, and the theoretical question of the family itself as a ‘practice’ rather than an ontological entity. Communal conflict and coexistence, a theme that also informs some aspects of the debates on migration, occupy seven reviews, which show the diversity of ways by which we could explore these interrelated themes. From a survey of Jewish communities in Latin America to an account for the rise of multiculturalism in Canada, these reviews can be apprehended even more richly when read in conjunction with neighboring reviews of the idea of citizenship in the context of multi-ethnic states in East Africa, migration debates in Europe, and an interesting anthology on the relation between place rootedness and migration.
In light of the ongoing wave of global protests, it seems only natural that sociologists would pay more attention to social movements literature. In this issue, six reviews are devoted to new and old forms of social movements, both at local and global levels, as well as to theoretical literature that is likely to become more pertinent as we explore further the specific details of the current moment in history. The rest of the reviews in this volume cover current debates of interest to many sociologists, including neoliberalism, modern culture, sociology of art and architecture, health and risk, as well as theoretical interventions on conflict, ethnomethodology, and gender knowledge.