beyond borders, between thoughts

tramod

I was a Post-Doc researcher for the Trajectories of Modernity project, funded by the European
Research Council (ERC). The project was led by Professor Peter Wagner, and I worked directly
with him in defining the directions for analysing the Latin American trajectory of modernity.

The project aimed to advance the analysis of the contemporary plurality of social self-understandings and related institutional structures of political bodies in the current global context. The analysis of multiple forms of modernity is the main challenge for current social and political theory, as well as for political and comparative sociology. Scholars tend to underestimate variation and succumb to ideas of global neo-modernization trends or overestimate historical continuities, providing some culturalist explanation for civilizational differences. In this sense, the project’s objectives were:

  • Complement the prevailing institutional analysis of modernity with an interpretative approach focusing on social self-understandings and developing an understanding of how such innovative interpretations emerge and contribute to reshaping institutions;
  • Unravel the excessively complex concept of modernity into components that are empirically analysable in terms of both shared similarities among all modern societies and differences due to the variety of possible interpretations of modernity;
  • Analyse two selected non-European societies, South Africa and Brazil, in terms of their specific articulations of these components of modernity and their historical transformations;

Confront previous analyses of European modernity with new analyses of non-European modernities with the aim of establishing empirically rich foundations for a global sociology that recognizes the specificity of the European trajectory of modernity but does not confuse it with a model or a singular interpretation.

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