Hauptinhalt

Counter-Mapping as Method: Locating and Relating the (Semi-) Peripheral Self

Ringvorlesung 2026: Anti/Feminism & Nationalism

Veranstaltungsdaten

Abstract

Drawing on several critical cartographers' approach to counter-mapping as method, I discuss counter-mapping as a means of enhancing sociological reflexivity through a transdisciplinary lens. Such a lens reveals the very constitution of those academic disciplines that deal with the social world as shaped by the colonial and imperial context of their emergence. I argue that counter-mapping can serve as a decolonial strategy to the essentialization of nation-states and world regions in social scientific and political discourse and propose a relational perspective capable of revealing the constitutive entanglements through which a global capitalism grounded in colonial expansion interlinked all areas of the world. The focus lies on the entanglements that counter-mapping as a method uncovers between semiperipheries such as Eastern Europe and Latin America, constructed as fixed and unrelated locations on imperial maps

Bio

Manuela Boatcă is a historical social scientist working at the intersection of the social sciences and cultural and literary studies. Her research focuses on the political economy of global inequalities, gender and citizenship, race and coloniality, unequal Europes, and the Caribbean. Since 2015, she has been Professor of Sociology and Head of School of the Global Studies Programme at the University of Freiburg, Germany. She is the author of From Neoevolutionism to World-Systems Analysis (Leske+Budrich, 2003), Global Inequalities Beyond Occidentalism (Routledge 2016), and of Creolizing the Modern. Transylvania across Empires (Cornell UP 2022, with Anca Parvulescu).