Network U: Postcolonialism and Legacies of Empire
This network is devoted to engaging the connections between imperialism, colonialism, racism, slavery, and capitalist expansion and global socio-economic development. While critical theories of development have existed for decades, from anti-colonial political economy and dependency/world-systems traditions, and continuing through the “post development” approaches manifested in the work of Escobar (1984) and Ferguson (1990) among others, newer “decolonial”, “postcolonial” and “Southern” approaches have emerged in their wake. These paradigms have surfaced in a variety of fields, including political economy of development, comparative-historical sociology, social theory, political theory, anthropology and comparative politics. Together they make explicit the Eurocentric, imperial/colonial and often racialized bases of Northern social science and seek critical alternatives, either by reconstructing historical narratives as “entangled” and “connected” or by critically deploying the knowledge, concepts and theories of postcolonial/Southern thinkers and social movements. This network brings together scholars from a range of disciplines to take stock of these recent critical turns and their implications for the study of development. The network welcomes theoretical, programmatic, or empirical papers that engages such questions as racial capitalism, postcolonial theories, imperialism, colonialism, racialization and racism, subaltern resistance, imperial epistemes and epistemic inequalities, and decolonial knowledges, practices, and methods of research.
Network U Organizers
Zophia Edwards
Julian Go
Jason Jackson
Alexandre White
Johns Hopkins University
Zophia Edwards
Zophia Edwards is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Director of Black Studies at Providence College, RI, USA. Her research examines the impacts of colonialism and multiracial labor movements on state formation, state institutions, and long-term development in resource-rich countries in the Global South, with a particular focus on Trinidad and Tobago. Her work has been published in Sociological Quarterly, Studies in Comparative International Development, International Journal of Comparative Sociology, Political Power and Social Theory, among others.
Julian Go
Julian Go‘s research explores the social logics, forms and impact of empires and colonialism; postcolonial/decolonial thought and related questions of social theory, epistemology, and knowledge; and global historical sociology. Much of Go’s work has focused on the US empire, resulting in articles and books such as The American Colonial State in the Philippines: Global Perspectives (co-edited with Anne Foster, Duke University Press, 2003), American Empire and the Politics of Meaning (Duke University Press, 2008) and Patterns of Empire: the British and American Empires, 1688 to Present (Cambridge University Press, 2011). His other work is on postcolonial thought and social theory, culminating in his book Postcolonial Thought and Social Theory, Oxford, 2016; and global historical sociology and transnational field theory: Fielding Transnationalism (co-edited
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Jason Jackson
Jason Jackson is Assistant Professor of Political Economy in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Jason’s research is broadly concerned with the relationship between states and markets in processes of social transformation. It assesses the implications of political struggles between business, government and societal actors over the structure of market institutions and resulting competitive and distributional outcomes. Jason is currently writing in three main areas: (1) the role of anti-colonial economic nationalism in development; (2) the rise of the digital platform economy and the future of work; and (3) the role of law in the governance of public health and the COVID-19 response.
Johns Hopkins University
Alexandre White
Alexandre White joined the Johns Hopkins Faculty in 2019 after completing a Provost’s Post-Doctoral Fellowship here. He earned his B.A. in Black Studies from Amherst College, his MSc. in Sociology from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and his PhD in Sociology from Boston University. He is also jointly affiliated with the Department of the History of Medicine as an Assistant Professor in the School of Medicine and is an Associate Director for the Center For Medical Humanities and Social Medicine.
His work examines the social effects of infectious epidemic outbreaks in both historical and contemporary settings as well as the global mechanisms that produce responses to outbreak. His book project, Epidemic Colonialism: A Social History of International Disease Response, explores the historical roots of international responses to epidemic threats. This book will examine how certain epidemic outbreaks become “global threats”, that is, diseases that become the focus of international regulations and organized responses while others do not. To answer this question, this work draws upon archival data collected at the World Health Organization (WHO) archives in Geneva, the Western Cape Archives in Cape Town, the British Library, British National Archives, the Wellcome Library Archives in London, and twelve qualitative interviews with senior global health actors in order to analyze five cases when disease threats were prioritized internationally as well as how these constructions patterned responses to outbreaks. White begins by exploring the formation of the first international disease controls in the 19th century, the International Sanitary Conventions, created to prevent the spread of three diseases- plague, cholera and yellow fever. He probes how these earliest conventions patterned responses to diseases covered under them and limited responses to those beyond their scope. Examining how these conventions transformed, he explores why the same disease priorities were maintained by the WHO in their International Sanitary Regulations of the 1950’s. Finally, he analyzes the transformation of the International Health Regulations in 2005 and its effects on the assessment of disease threat.
His published work in the field has demonstrated how differences in the perceived threat of deadly diseases have provoked anomalous responses to outbreaks. Global Risks, Divergent Pandemics: Contrasting Responses To Bubonic Plague And Smallpox In 1901 Cape Town, in Social Science History explores two simultaneous epidemics that, despite similar pathologies, prompted significantly varying responses from public health actors in 1901 Cape Town: the bubonic plague and smallpox. His work in fields beyond medical sociology has primarily explored questions of racial subjectivities, anti-colonial revolution and uprising and structures of colonial domination and resistance.
SASE Networks
A: Community, Democracy, and Organizations
This network focuses on the moral or values-based underpinnings of human thought, practices, and institutions that comprise civil societies, particularly as they relate to the participatory, collectivist, and democratic aspirations of organizations, markets, and other spaces of collaboration and contestation.
B: Globalization and Socio-Economic Development
This network considers how, at a time of a polycrisis, domestic, transnational, and international institutions and markets influence the contours of developmental opportunities in the global economy and beyond.
C: Gender, Work & Family
This network focuses on exploring the current state, and the changes in institutions concerned with gender and family roles and workplace organization.
D: Professions and Expertise
Through the Professions and expertise network we seek to develop critical analysis of the dynamics of professions and expertise.
E: Comparative Capitalisms
The aim of this network is to advance research on changing labor markets, industrial relations, and systems of social protection within the study of contemporary capitalisms.
F: KITE: Knowledge, Innovation, Technology and Entrepreneurship
This network focuses on innovation and entrepreneurship as well as its underlying technologies and knowledge sources. On these topics, we particularly welcome, but do not require an institutional perspective.
G: Labor Markets, Education, and Human Resources
The network welcomes contributions on the general issues of labor market segmentation, unemployment, and the link between training, skills and jobs.
H: Markets, Firms and Institutions
This network focuses on the interrelationships between markets, firms, and institutions.
I: Alternatives to Capitalism
The broad aim of this research network is to advance the international, comparative and interdisciplinary study of alternatives to capitalism.
J: Digital Economy
Digital technologies are contributing to radical, growing and unpredictable transformations of economic life, raising a broad range of new issues for scholars of the economy. This research network is dedicated to the study of these issues.
K: Institutional Experimentation in the Regulation of Work and Employment
This network focuses on making work better through actor experimentation with institutions to regulate work.
L: Regulation and Governance
This network promotes the interdisciplinary study of regulation and governance at national and global levels.
M: Spanish Language
A lively Spanish-speaking section that was established in 2011.
N: Finance and Society
The goal of this network is to promote cross-disciplinary dialogue on the study of finance and include perspectives from social sciences outside of economics.
O: Global Value Chains
This network aims to bring together social scientists interested in analyzing the causes and consequences of this offshoring-outsourcing phenomenon.
P: Accounting, Economics, and Law
This network focuses on the intersection of accounting, economics and law. Institutional design, rules and social norms are critical to the working of organizations in economy and society.
Q: Asian Capitalisms
The basic idea of this first area network within SASE is to make Asia a central field of investigation for theories of institutional change and diversity of capitalism.
R: Islamic Moral Economy and Finance
This network aims at bringing scholars and practitioners together to consider and discuss the role of Islamic moral economy and Islamic finance in achieving its stated ideals by highlighting the tension areas as well as the dynamism observed in the practice of Islamic finance.
S: Environment and Climate Change
This Network aspires to advance a broad, interdisciplinary, and critical dialogue on the interactions between the economy, society, and the environment.
T: Health
This network focuses on the social scientific study of health, broadly defined. It explores four key areas: the embeddedness of health within broader economic, political, and social structures and systems, health equality and equity, organizing and the organization of health, and pricing and valuation of health. The network aims to foster an interdisciplinary community and promote cross-national comparisons in global health, including but not limited to studies about drugs, medicines, healthcare, community and public health, and health policy.
U: Postcolonialism and Legacies of Empire
This network is devoted to engaging the connections between imperialism, colonialism, racism, slavery, and capitalist expansion and global socio-economic development.
V: Geoeconomics
This network explores empirical and theoretical puzzles at the intersection of geopolitics, international political economy, and national capitalist systems in an era of ongoing global transformation. It brings together scholars studying how intensifying rivalries, shifting power relations, and geoeconomic competition reshape state strategies, growth models, welfare regimes, and global production networks (and vice versa).
W: Elites and Power Structures
This network examines how economic, political, and cultural elites shape contemporary socio-economic systems. It brings together scholars exploring elite formation, power, and networks, and their influence on inequality, institutions, markets, and social change through comparative and interdisciplinary research.