The episteme upside down: subaltern knowledge´s and the new perspectives of social sciences

Abstract

Our work seeks to demonstrate the difficulties and resistances faced by subaltern studies – feminist studies, queer studies and postcolonial studies – to break with the hegemonic epistemologies of the social sciences, especially the Eurocentric sociology. We will point out firstly the basic rules that have validated and have referred sociology as an area of knowing truly unique and outstanding within the universities, since the nineteenth century, as well as the theoretical assumptions linked to its legitimation. Secondly, we will analyze the context for the emergence and development of epistemological ruptures follow-on the appearance of subaltern knowledge’s that are directly linked to the challenge of modernity as a life project and what subaltern studies have to tell us about the new configurations of contemporary social reality. We are based on a methodology that points the set of epistemological generalizations made by sociology, especially the positive and related schools, and the epistemic ruptures resulting of the subaltern studies.