Critical Sociology of Knowledge

This article curates scholarship around those understandings identified to be “knowledges.” It investigates their production, legitimating institutions, and their experiences and embodiments. It emphasizes those conceptualizations excluded from canonizations of knowledge. This knowledge cultural sociology (KCS) recognizes the importance of the Mannheimian tradition, and its extensions, that explain how social relations shape the articulations and validations of knowledge. However, KCS also situates knowledge within systems beyond those who produce and consume it. KCS views knowledge as itself necessarily contested, as struggles over its qualities reflect social locations and articulate social practices. In making knowledge over the subject of inquiry, KCS works to understand how knowledges’ symbols, schemas, institutions, and networks shape the terms of social reproduction and transformations. As such, KCS demands consideration of different kinds of knowledge cultural products and modes of communication. KCS is thus necessarily grounded in the question of what constitutes knowledge, and for whom and with what interests and expectations. This KCS intervention focuses on 21st-century work. This decision aims to engage scholarship that extends and challenges a 20th-century canon; including works from the 20th century signals scholarship yearning for expansion. The article is not comprehensive, but marks how knowledge is valued and ignored. To focus on this century and move beyond sociology allows engagement with ways of knowing and being that sociology has historically minoritized, moving consideration to structures and processes validating some kinds of knowledge over others. KCS is not canonization, but works toward liberation, a knowledge activism mobilizing knowledge in consequential public ways alongside more familiar scholarly ambitions. KCS moves scholarship beyond familiar networks and self-reproducing knowledge hierarchies grounded in race, gender, sexuality, religion, and world region. It seeks to move dialogue beyond knowledge silos and to identify new and ignored ideas, meanings, references, and authorities for constituting knowledges of consequence, reframing contests along the way. For example, instead of asking how excellence and diversity can be combined in knowledge production, KCS asks what anti-racist knowledge excellence can be. Accounts of epistemology ought to foreground the contexts and power relations in which those knowledge sensibilities are formed and communicated; thus, the references in this article move generally from concept to context. Likewise, sections moving toward global, post-socialist, and postcolonial discussions inform ontologies and epistemologies organizing scholarly work and public consequence. But this begins with what might be identified, in this entry at least, as the greatest hits of KCS.