A presentation by
Georgia Lagoumitzi, School of Liberal Arts and Sciences

When: Monday, December 3, 15:00–16:00

Where: Center for the Arts Auditorium

Organized by: Faculty Research Seminars 2018-19 Series and Teaching and Learning Center

Lagoumitzi, Georgia: Associate Lecturer II

B.A. The American College of Greece, Highest Distinction,

Ptychion Panteion University, M.Phil. University of Oxford (St. Antony’s College), (Sociology) [email protected]

Office: Main Building 501 | Telephone: 201 600 9800 ext. 1032

Georgia Lagoumitzi joined the Deree Sociology Faculty in 1988. She currently teaches collective behaviour and social movements, the sociology of globalization, social problems, modern Greek society and culture and supervises the senior thesis seminar. She has been advisor to the Sociology Society. She has conducted research on Quality of Life issues in the areas of Piraeus under the aegis of the Prefecture of Piraeus. She has organized various conferences in Sociology and has been a member in the organizing committees of numerous others. She has presented papers in the conference of Global Diasporas in Mansfield College, Oxford. She presented a paper on the Greek Diaspora in the 2011 American Studies Seminar, organized jointly by Deree – The American College of Greece and Panteion University. Her publications include “The Uses of Nostalgia in the ‘Imagination’ of the Diaspora: The Case of the New Pontic Greek Refugees” in Marianne David and Javier Muñoz-Basols (eds.), Defining and Re-defining Diaspora: From Theory to Reality, Max Weber and the iron cage of rationality, Formalism and Economism: Some recent theories of the State (in Greek). She has regularly contributed papers to conferences organized by the Hellenic Sociological Society which appeared in the Conference Proceedings

Abstract

In between the 1950s triumphant proclamation of sociology into ‘the science of the new age’ (Merton, Lazarsfeld, Stouffer, Parsons, Shils) and the 1980s and 1990s warnings of the ‘decentralization’ and even the ‘disintegration’ of sociology (Stephen and Jonathan Turner, Horowitz, S.M. Lipset, James Coleman) surfaced Alvin Gouldner’s ‘critical’, radical sociology which after 2004 was re-defined by Michael Burawoy as public sociology. Using Karl Mannheim’s famous concepts, Burawoy believes that over the last 50 years, sociology has turned from ‘ideology’ (supporting the status quo) to utopia (posing a threat to the status quo while proposing the possibility of another world). What can sociology with a political and normative content (social movements, civil society, human rights, environmental justice, conditions of labor etc.) contribute today, in the so-called ‘post-truth’ era? Reclaiming truth and reality presupposes their recognition as social constructs. Can we use this postulate without dissolving ‘truth’ into a conceptual chaos? Is reclaiming truth primarily a political or epistemological goal and what lessons can we draw from public sociology?

Key words: post-truth, public sociology, global ethnography