1. What is Knowledge Today? E. Doyle McCarthy mccarthy@fordham.edu
PowerPoint Presentation by Michelle Rufrano

2. The Sociology of Knowledge & Culture
Everything that you and I know comes to us from society, however differently we think about society and ourselves.
This means that peoples of the world have many different ideas and concepts and worldviews because we have grown up in different social worlds.

3. There is always a social foundation to thinking
There is always a social foundation to thinking. Ideas about religion or salvation, concepts of dirty and clean whether religious of health-related, and vast belief systems (religious or scientific) about the natural universe and its origins, all of these share an intrinsic sociality explained by the social and political and religious contexts in which they emerge.

4. Particular social groups can also be important too, as to what we think and what we know, like economic elites or religious authorities or secular-thinking medical doctors.

5. Many of these assertions about the social foundations of thought and knowledge developed in the 1920s in Germany in the field called the sociology of knowledge or, in German, Wissenssoziologie. Its framers thought they could resolve the many battles surrounding conflicting political ideas in Weimar, Germany after WWI. They tried to settle these battles by looking at the social roots of ideas and seeking for the truth-content contained in these ideologies.

6. These ideas—the social roots of knowledge—have come back to us with force in 21st Century societies, as their citizens’ ideas from all over the world are shaped by the knowledges that come to us from global digital networks of media and technology

7. The Social Roots of Knowledge
In today’s world, more and more of us are aware of how much our ideas are “out there” and how they are disseminated to us by academics, journalists, photo journalists, politicians, media consultants, and many more groups of people who are in the business of disseminating and shaping ideas and images.

8. Today’s social knowledges that come to us via digital media and technologies are not only informational or idea-based, they also communicate to us deeply personal meanings about life and existence that are also emotional and about “who we are or want to be,” our identities.

9. Unlike a century ago, knowledges are not easily located in specific economic classes, social organizations or institutions, at least not institutions housed in brick and mortar. Instead, many social scientists today look to studies of media technologies, to studies of the differences between print (book) culture and digital culture, and to the fields of rhetoric and semiotics for an understanding of the ways in which a society’s multifarious meanings are communicated and reproduced, how specific kinds of social organizations order knowledges

10. Reactionary Politics
One of our most urgent issues today is that of the new politics of reaction (or, political reactionary social movements) whether among Eastern European peoples (nation-based or not), some groups of Middle Easterners or of residents of sections of the Midwest or South in the U.S. I am referring to new movements of the political right that appear to many to assume the form of counter-revolutionary or reactionary politics.

11. The Sociology of Knowledge
It is a perspective that moves easily between:
the subjective perspectives of people with common sociocultural backgrounds (age, race, citizenry, education, religion, etc.)
the ideologies and principal ideas they use to provide the social meanings of their lives.

12. The Goal of the Sociology of Knowledge, a perspective
Its goal is to understand from within a people’s own particular group perspectives, including the important emotional features of their politics and identities, their feelings, for example, of ressentiment, pride, righteous anger, economic despair, or the intense solitude of the marginalized citizen blamed for her own illiteracy and ignorance.

13. The sociology of knowledge provides today’s social scientists with conceptual frameworks and tools for uncovering new and better explanations for how and why social actors embrace certain ideas and ideologies over others, how collective actions and ideas and ideologies, like political “reaction” or revolution, and their emotional substrates, emerge out of and are shaped by the multiple social contexts and positions of their proponents and opponents.

14. Sociologists of knowledge can provide empirical-causal accounts that provide incisive explanations about the social sources of the concepts of social life that each of us carry with us, conceptions that bear the weight of their consequences in the worlds that we share with others. This may be a much-needed approach for today’s highly contentious cultural and ideological climate.

15. REFERENCES
Arlie Russell Hochschild Strangers in Their Own Land. New York: The New Press. Mark Lilla The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction. New York: New York Review Books. McCarthy, E. Doyle Knowledge as Culture: The New Sociology of Knowledge. NY and London: Routledge. __________ Emotional Lives: Dramas of Identity in an Age of Mass Media. London: Cambridge University Press. Isaac Reed Interpretation and Social Knowledge: On the Use of Theory in the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.