METHODOLOGICAL FORUM:CREATIVE AND CRITICAL SOCIOLOGY FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
METHODOLOGICAL FORUM:CREATIVE AND CRITICAL SOCIOLOGY FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Summary/Abstract: Methodology does not unfold as a separate domain of scholarly practice, isolated from epistemology and ontology. It is not a technical domain. While it is often construed as autonomous, it remains a site of struggle, of conflict and alliance, where both the opening and the foreclosure of thinking space can occur. In this forum, we chose to treat it as a site for expressing our sociological imagination, rather than a site for an organised exercise of technical skill, implicated in the construction and confirmation of epistemic authority. The pursuit of an integrated view on methodology, epistemology and ontology, and the affirmation of methodology as one of the domains of the sociological imagination are not without critical stakes. The link from methodology to precision, in the sense of following strict protocols for generating and organising evidence, is a positivist route, and it often produces deeply impoverishing consequences for the sociological endeavour. Therefore, a critique of positivism, and of its institutional, intellectual, and emotional modes of operation is part and parcel of this revisiting of what methodology is and what it can be.

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