Decolonizing Sociology: Epistemic Inequality and Sociological Thought

Abstract

It is hardly disputable there is inequality and marginalization within our discipline along the lines of ethnicity, gender, race, sexuality, and socioeconomic status among other vectors. What more can be said about it? For my part, I would like to pose two issues to consider. The first is the question of epistemic inequality and marginalization. My claim is that confronting social inequality and marginalization within the discipline must also confront inequality and marginalization at the level of social knowledge. We must confront how certain standpoints and knowledges are subjugated by the dominant standpoint of disciplinary sociology. The second is the spatial scale of inequality and marginalization within the discipline. My claim is that confronting social inequality and marginalization within the discipline also should compel us to consider global inequality and marginalization, which in turn requires that we transcend disciplinary sociology’s analytic bifurcations. Below I take each of these issues in turn.