Epistemicide and epistemological disobedience: lessons from a critical synergy

ABSTRACT

This article contributes to the ERS symposium on Ali Meghji's 2023 book, A Critical Synergy: Race, Decoloniality, and World Crises (Temple University Press). While offering a selective review of the book's contents, author Vilna Bashi focuses on the promise that synergy might contribute to new insights in sociological theory. Here, she agrees with Meghi, that sociologists approach theory in our work by tending toward synthesis, where synergy will do. Bashi further suggests that critical theoretical synergy could be used to revitalize the sociology of immigration in the United States should theoretical approaches beyond assimilation theory be critically applied. Bashi also explains how critical synergy illuminated insights in her own work in the sociology of international migration, critical race theory, and global inequality.

KEYWORDS:

• Coloniality
• decoloniality
• critical race theory
• epistemology
• critical theory
• sociology of immigration

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).