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Contemporary Sociological Analyses and Horizons
Seminar: The Sociology of Nature/Culture
Choose one A topic and one B topic to discuss and present in groups. In addition, each of you
must choose one A topic and one B topic and submit a written discussion of both (2 pages per
topic) in connection with the seminar.
1A. In the face of ecological crisis Latour believes that sociology must redefine itself as a
‘science of the social’. No longer should ‘the social’ be understood as referring to a separate
autonomous domain of investigation, but rather to the very many different types of
connections and attachments that sustain or threaten our collective life on earth. What new
kinds of environmental sociology does this imply?
2A. Why has modern sociology tended to neglect environmental issues? What new skills and
competences have sociologists been asked to develop in order to become environmental
sociologists?
3A. Compare the revised realist perspective on environmental issues that Lidskog and/or
Woodgate/Redclift advance with the more thoroughgoing constructivist approach developed
by MacNaghten and Urry.
4A. Latour sees ecological crisis as calling for the formation of new political institutions, socalled ‘parliaments of things’. Discuss how such parliaments would transform relations
between science and politics and change the way in which environmental matters are
governed.
5A. A concern with environmental sociology appears to imply closer cooperation between
social scientists and natural scientists. At the same time social scientists appear to be drawn
into making the knowledge claims made by different natural scientific experts regarding the
environment into crucial objects of social scientific investigation. Discuss some examples of
this and the type conflicts which can arise out of such situations.
______
1B. Sociologists have long been interested in studying processes of ‘medicalization’.
However, ‘biomedicalization’ appears to imply something on a larger-scale. Describe and
discuss the larger import and meaning of processes of biomedicalization.
2B. Biopolitics today coincides with the rise of new biological identities and the creation of
new ‘biosocial groups’. Describe this process and the types of identities and groups we find
emerging today. How do these social identities and groups differ from those sociologists have
traditionally studied?
3B. What is ‘biovalue’? Discuss the type of global bioeconomy we see emerging today?
4B. According to Rheinberger, molecular biology has shifted from an interest in
understanding life to a concern with rewriting life. What does this shift imply for the future of
medical sociology and its relationship to biomedicine?
5B. Rose claims that biology today is operating in ’a flattened field of open circuits’ (2007:
7). What does he mean by this and why should sociologists care?