The new issue of the InterDisciplines "Done with Eurocentrism? Directions, Diversions, and Debates in History and Sociology" has been published. The guest editors of the journal are an alumna of the BGHS, Mahshid Mayar, and a doctoral researcher of the BGHS, Yaatsil Guevara González. The two were organizers of the 8th Annual Seminar of the BGHS, which took place on the same topic in summer 2016.

A result is this issue with six articles by young researchers from all over Europe, as well as the contribution of the key speaker Shahzad Bashir. One of the contributors is the former participant in the Shortcuts program of the BGHS, Mirjam Hähnle, who is now researcher at the University of Basel and has written an article on knowledge about the Orient.

About the topic

Since the 1960s, academia seems to have actively avoided reaching consensus on all-inclusive grand narratives. Nevertheless, it is evident in the twenty-first century that a great number of these “post-” movements and turns have been transitory moments of resistance to and reactionary gestures against one grand narrative from which we have not fully departed.

Since the Enlightenment, and especially over the past century of scholarship, it appears, Eurocentrism has been considered to have been the source of the vocabulary, imagery, language, legal infrastructure, geopolitical imaginaries, scientific tools, executive leverage, even the geographical orientation by which we routinely make sense of ourselves, our histories, our futures, and our surroundings.

Under the light of this, and yet taking a step out of the lively and essential lines of discussion triggered by our awareness of the historical moment we inhabit, the discussions made in the special issue “Done with Eurocentrism? Directions, Diversions, and Debates in History and Sociology” revolve around the foundational idea that confusions, contradictions, and discontinuities, on the one hand, and fusions, conglomerations, and concurrences, on the other, have created an entangled, eclectic power entity that shapes our everyday lives in the modern world.

As such, the present volume aims at tracing new ways of critically engaging with Eurocentrism as a polarizing, plural entity (1) by appraising where in relation to Eurocentrism(s) we stand at this point in the twenty-first century and (2) by identifying the possible trajectories away from it in our ways of viewing the world at large and as we do research.

About the InterDisciplines

The InterDisciplines, the online journal of the Bielefeld Graduate School in History and Sociology (BGHS), is published twice a year to different, the sociology or history concerning topics. Every issue is managed by different guest editors.

You find the current issue here:
http://www.inter-disciplines.org/index.php/indi/issue/view/23

More information about the Annual Seminar at the BGHS:
http://www.uni-bielefeld.de/bghs/Programm/Ansem/

Interview with Mahshid Mayar in Uni.Aktuell (in German):
Der Blick durch die westliche Brille