Sociology Reconstructed: Histories, Concepts, Reparations - Gurminder K Bhambra

Watch Gurminder K Bhambra's presidential address from the BSA Annual Conference 2023: Sociological Voices in Public Discourse.
Abstract: The history of sociology is bound up with a historiography of modernity that fails to address colonialism. Indeed, as I have long argued, the discipline is constituted through a denial of the colonial and imperial past of Europe. This has had lasting consequences in the shaping of sociology and how it attends to social issues. We are currently living through a period of populism and xenophobia compounded by a severe economic downturn and the intensifying climate crisis.
Even a seeming ‘external’ shock like the war in Ukraine has its origins in the turmoil of European and other empires in the late nineteenth century - a period coterminous with the birth of European sociology. The long-standing failure of sociology to engage with European empires and their legacies makes it less effective in diagnoses of our times.
In this Presidential Address, I will build on earlier arguments for sociology to take colonial histories seriously and, in doing so, to reconfigure the conceptual repertoire of the discipline. Sociology’s framing of distributive justice, for example, is typically organised in relation to a politics of class within the nation; it needs, instead, I shall argue, to account for colonial inequalities globally and orient to their reparation.