(RES1) Relational Sociology I

Relational sociology is a broad family of ontological and epistemological approaches characterized by a common tendency to shift or reconceptualize the objects of sociological analysis from ‘things’ to relations. Relational thinking can be found in a very wide range of theoretical projects — from Marx, Simmel, Elias to Foucault, Derrida, Latour, and Butler, to Dorothy Smith, Harrison White, and Karen Barad. Within sociology, Emirbayer’s “Manifesto for Relational Sociology” as well as recent work by Crossley, Donati, Archer, and Dépelteau has established a conscious relational turn in theoretical and empirical inquiry. Relational sociology has the potential to re-imagine what the social world is made of, how we know it, and how we act within it. Researchers coming from different theoretical backgrounds and studying different empirical objects are therefore invited to engage in a dialog with each other to explore the dynamic, fluid and processual aspects of social life. Presentations can focus on general theoretical issues; relational reformulations of specific areas of study; relational analyses of empirical phenomena; or practical, political, and/or ethical implications of relational thinking. Tags: Knowledge, Networks, Theory

Organizers: Mónica Sánchez-Flores, Thompson Rivers University, Christopher Powell, Toronto Metropolitan University; Chair: Christopher Powell, Toronto Metropolitan University

Presentations

Peeter Selg, Tallinn University; Joonatan Nõgisto, Tallinn University

What is relational explanation?

Relational sociologists are united in emphasizing the special role that social relations play in illuminating the social world. However, there has been little explicit attention to how a relational perspective fits with and enables specific kinds of social scientific achievement, such as description, interpretation, or explanation. Methodological development within relational sociology requires greater clarity on scientific objectives along with criteria for success and failure. This paper focuses on explanation as a goal within relational sociology. How can relational sociology offer novel and insightful explanatory knowledge on the why of social phenomena? What characterizes the explanatory commitments of relational sociology and distinguishes explanatory success from failure? This paper explicates a concept of relational explanation – a distinctive form of social scientific constitutive explanation that is characteristic of the research programme of relational sociology. Recent developments on metaphysical grounding and constitutive explanation in analytic metaphysics and philosophy of science are used to construct a concept of relational explanation as explaining interdependent social phenomena through abductive inference to their common ground in features of dynamic and unfolding social relations. Focusing on the inherently abductive nature of relational explanation, the specificity of abduction is then clarified in view of the two prevalent logics in scientific thinking – induction and deduction – to demonstrate the essentially processual and relational character of abduction. Abduction is a processual movement from puzzling empirical phenomenon to theoretical propositions and other observations making it intelligible and then back to the phenomenon through which both the identity of the phenomenon as well as the corresponding theoretical premises and statuses of other observations can change, and the process is never completely final, since the “final” result itself is a part of the process. “Constitutive explanation” is distinct from the more usual “causal explanation,” since it presumes that both the explanans and the explanandum “can be considered separately, but not as being separate,” to use Norbert Elias’s phrase. What makes relational explanation especially challenging, however, is that, it must consider both the explanans and the explanandum as unfolding dynamic processes, not as given “explanatory factors” or “independent variables”, or “dependent variables” or “outcomes”. Thus, relational explanation is temporal and dynamic throughout, and that not only in the more usual “diachronic” sense, but also in the “synchronic” sense: it has to take seriously the ontological presumption of relationalism that every “moment” in the existence of social processes is “synchronously” constituted by its past, present, and future. We base our argument on recent analyses of “outcomes” in processual-relational sociology, and introduce relational explanation as “unfolding” (in the transitive (!) sense of the word) of explanandum, of social phenomena into their constitutive processes that can be considered separately, but not as being separate. We contrast our notion of relational explanation from structuralism, individualism and variable-centered explanations in the social sciences. We also consider its working in classical explanations of social phenomena (e. g. Marx’s explanation of commodity fetishism), and contemporary examples (such as Mark Granovetter’s explanation of embeddedness of economic relations in social relations and Abbott’s use of “linked ecologies” in explaining social phenomena.)

iowyth hezel ulthiin, Toronto Metropolitan University

Whispering to Hamburgers: A ritual of animist liberation from the instrumental object

This presentation is a sustained meditation on eating that draws evidence from a situated analysis in conversation with popular culture, using an episode of Bobs Burgers and an encounter with a bear, as texts provoking this mediation. I tell a story about eating that situates me among others who are also trying to eat me. In the attempt to engage in ethical eating practices, and to recognize the interdependencies respectfully integrated by Indigenous ways of being, I discuss the ways that people could be seen to eat other people and, crucially, that a regularized form of eating requires one to deny the instantaneous recognition of mutually perceiving intelligence in ones food. In this, I argue that rituals of transubstantiation organize the processes of enclosure that turn living vitality from personhood into abstract (instrumental) matter. In making meat, I argue that such rituals allow instrumentalization to become a process that may become untethered from eating, becoming engaged in various sites as a tool of perception, where the transformation of a person into an object only requires the appropriate perceptual frame to become engaged. Whispering to hamburgers attempts to integrate intimate encounters with personhood within the act of eating. In drawing close the intimacies held between subjects and objects, I seek to bring forward the potential for personhood to emerge during such moments of recognition, allowing for the potential to regularize such encounters. Here, one may attend to the agential experience of ones food, as wavering into and out of the recognition of its potential histories (and interrupted futures). In seriously contemplating Indigenous ways of knowing, one may create space for greater compassionate awareness of those subjectivities that fail to cohere according to the standards proposed by supremacist modes of ranking and categorization. As such, a relational and ecological awareness of one’s body also draws one into a space of interpersonal intimacy which necessitates mutual recognition, allowing for a body-full negotiation of ones encounters in ways that allow for the suffering, desire, and attentiveness of one’s food (through being potential food oneself). As such, I attempt to draw attention to rituals of transubstantiation that may equally make people into objects or objects into people. This process attempts to manage encounters provoking thanatophany. These instances of relation offer a dark reflection of ones meatness and thus morality that must be continually contested if one wishes to remain other to ones other. Yet, I argue that to recognize the horror of eating is to enable oneself to engage seriously with the relation of a biological entity requiring fuel to live. In this interdependency, rightful relations emerge from attuned attention to the insecurities of contact. I argue that in the acknowledgment that people are meat too, one can enter into encounters with food more profoundly grounded in the recognition of the vulnerability of reliance. Moreso than even this, I believe that in the continual encounters with persons who may be located everywhere and anywhere, individuals may come to recognize the vitality of the world around them, thereby recognizing the terrain itself as supporting ones existence, in the air, water, and food, but even in the ground which supports the body, the floor, the walls, the lightbulbs reveal the vulnerability of ones dependence on the world, for existence.

Benjamin Klasche, Tallinn University

A critical relational perspective on peace & security in CEE

Russia’s war against Ukraine has alerted us to the need to think about security in a more holistic, intersectional and in a deeply relational way. The war is primarily told and analyzed from the perspective of the great powers and the West and in terms of military security. To the extent that other voices are included, they typically link up to these dominant discourses. This creates a blind spot for what the story would be if told from the perspective of small states, Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), and non-military security. The effect is an unfortunate polarization and dichotomization of political and academic debates. This project aims to (re)discover the marginalized voices and to unpack the agency of the actors behind these voices in order to reconstruct academic and practical political middle grounds with important implications for understanding the prospects for peaceful change in Europe and a viable European security architecture. Our starting point is to acknowledge the fundamental connectedness of two questions typically siloed and kept apart in both mainstream security research and policy-making: whose security matters and who can speak security in regional and global politics. These questions, as noted by scholars of critical security studies (CSS) in the plural, identify the key security problematique in Russia’s war in Ukraine as well as in regional and global politics in general: the present international security thinking has relegated the majority world, and marginalised groups in the Global North (GN) to a perpetual state of insecurity.

Mónica Sánchez-Flores, Thompson Rivers University

Radical Relational Individuality: Expansiveness and Freedom

Enlightenment ideas such as the notions of human individuality, human rights and cosmopolitanism conceal their coloniality in the name of a modern civilization that has become planetary. Maldonado-Torres (2007) defines coloniality as “long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations” (p. 243). Coloniality is rooted in the colonial history of Europeans kidnapping people from Africa to enslave them as they dispossessed and exploited Indigenous Peoples and racialized non-Europeans. People all over the world today experience coloniality within the colonial matrix of power (CMP) conceptualized by Quijano (1999). Decolonial scholars tell us that the notion of universal humanity conceals the dark side of the double reality and inseparable genesis of modernity/coloniality. This means that modernity’s impulse and major achievements rest and are dependent on the simultaneous and ongoing violence of colonialism and the invention of otherness in racial classifications for the purposes of destitution and exploitation. To this day, this coloniality influences approaches to human rights, social justice and cosmopolitanism in spite of their emancipatory potential. This makes it harder to respond to the needs of the most vulnerable relational subjects and conceals processes of racialization within modern social and political theories that rely on the traditional liberal notion of individuality. Walter Mignolo (2021) says that a “decolonial cosmopolitan localism” discloses a pluriverse of possibilities for being human. I argue that cosmopolitan localism can yield a viable approach to decolonial social and political justice when using the notion of a Radical Relational Individuality that is embedded/expansive and framed within radical relational theory (Powell 2013). In this pragmatic approach, I use John Dewey’s notions of trans-action, inter-action and self-action to conceptualize Radical Relational Individuality both as embedded in its environment (social and biological) as well as a substantive option that is morally expansive (see Sanchez-Flores 2010). Radical Relational Individuality allows for simultaneous recognition of people inserted in their specific human and natural environments and a compassionate and moral approach to their absolute uniqueness. In this presentation, I contrast modern hyper-individuality with a radically relational form of individuality that can access an expansive form of ethics and refuses to be anthropocentric. This expansiveness ideally encompass everybody and everything in the form of compassion and points to a type of freedom based on love (hooks) that is different from the liberal kind that is already an organizing principle in modern society. This approach considers that modernity is inextricably linked to the experience of coloniality and presents itself as the paradoxical relationship between the emancipatory energies of modernity and its colonial impulse to subjugation and exploitation. Radical Relational Individuality is aware of its relationships with other persons and with its natural environment and I discuss why these are two necessary milieus to make sense of a broader perspective on the non-anthropocentric ethical standing for decolonial lessons on globalization, knowledge production and shared humanity. This perspective ultimately opens up to an ethical commitment to humility in knowledge production and discovery and rejects universalistic approaches to knowledge as colonial. Because of this, it can be seen as congenial with the vast plurality of ways of knowing in the world today and can effectively embrace anti-oppression and a more genuine relational type of freedom.