Concept Formation in Global Studies: Post-Western Approaches to Critical Human Knowledge(Global Epistemics)

The book proposes a new epistemological and methodological approach to concept formation across human and natural sciences, beyond Eurocentrism and specism. It elaborates a method enabling global epistemics to cope with multiplex challenges coming from geohistorical as well as epistemological standpoints whose methodological potential remains unexplored. It assumes monstrosity as the generative grammar of a new holistic approach to human knowledge, and draws from postcolonial, decolonial or post-western perspectives to place new methodological cornerstones, as well as from arts, astrology and magic from the Islamic and European Renaissance, indigenous knowledge, genetics, theoretical physics or Afrofuturism. The book aims at provoking a shift in critical perspectives, which do not acknowledge their own inability to steam an appropriate methodology of terminological and conceptual elaboration for the lexicon of contemporary human knowledge, out of a pressing demand: once agreed upon the world as a single yet multilayered spacetime of analysis, how should research about large-scale/long-term processes of social change advance, in order to cope with the asymmetrical power relations that materialize colonial history through heterarchies of class, gender, race, ethnicity, culture, knowledge, cosmology and ecology? This book struggles against the prejudice that the instances heterogeneous yet non canonical epistemics are in fact exclusively confined to provincial, exotic or solipsistic particularisms; therefore never as universalistic as the dominant ones. To address this problem, the book proposes: a different way to think of the relation between the abstract and the concrete; a new relation between data or histories, and concepts; an alternative pathway to cross-cultural translation in conceptual and terminological analysis; a new posture to inhabit the spacetimes at the border between translation and untranslatability.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: From a Two-Faced Janus to a Many-Headed Hydra Chapter 1: The Racial Foundations of Western Epistemology Chapter 2: Giordano Bruno and the Decolonial Construction of the Renaissance Chapter 3: Teratologic Concept Formation Chapter 4: The Global as The Unit of Analysis Chapter 5: Conceptualization, or, The Operational Language of Theoretical Praxis Conclusion: Limits And Concerns Index About the Author

About the Author :
Gennaro Ascione is associate professor in sociology and epistemology for the human sciences at the University of Naples l’Orientale.

Review :
Critically reflecting on the performative production of concept formation as exercises in ethnocentric power, this important book disputes the violence of objectivity. Drawn into the multiple folds of planetary processes, we are encouraged to undo the established order to better constitute the practices and purposes of today’s social sciences. Moving beyond the critique of Eurocentrism elaborated in the past thirty years, Ascione’s book provides alternative resources and a comprehensive methodology for post-western concept formation. Erudite and captivating, it shows the path towards transforming global studies from a narrowly Eurocentric field to a planetary one worthy of the name.