Dialogues in Sociology

The primary aim of Dialogues in Sociology is to cultivate and encourage new, exciting, stimulating, and often unusual and unprecedented debates across the discipline of sociology, and across all the many parts of the world where sociology is practised.

The journal aims to be a central node for debate-creation and knowledge-formation. It seeks to both reflect and cover current debates in and across the field, while also provoking new ones too. It allows groups of authors to thematize debates that are emerging or have as yet only been carried out implicitly. It aims to create a mixture of collegial discussion and healthy provocation. It is be centred around evaluating established ways of thinking and doing in sociology, as well as upending them and seeking to go beyond them. It subjects to critique forms of sociology of all sorts, including critical sociologies, probing their strengths, weaknesses, and lacunae, opening up new conceptual vistas for exploration.

The journal promotes the view that sociology is a concept-led and concept-creating discipline, and it aims to be at the very forefront of new concept creation in the field, as well as offering novel methodological spinoffs from these conceptual innovations.

It deploys an open peer commentary format. It publishes articles, with responses, which are agenda-setting for future theory and research in sociology. It particularly encourages articles that take unexpected angles, which seek to think outside of established parameters, which are full of surprises, and which try to create genuinely fresh sorts of investigation, conceptualisation, and methodological design. It also seeks to open-up subject matters that sociology has not yet touched upon, through allowing for some more free-form and speculative reflections than might normally be the case.

The journal does not shy away from controversies, and in some ways tackles them head-on, but it asks participants to deal with them in respectful, considered, and inclusive manners.

It solicits papers which express the voices of both the emergent and the established, the avant-garde and the more traditional, the more orthodox and the more heterodox, the more well known and the less familiar, the Global South and the Global North, and sociologists – and cognate others – of every type and of every social characteristic, from whatever sub-field and from whatever part of the world they may be from.

Topical coverage ranges across sociology in general, and major sub-disciplinary formations. The journal also seeks to reflect, and encourage reflection upon, the fact that the boundaries of sociology, both with other disciplines, and with many different inter- and trans-disciplinary knowledge formations, are porous, open to revision and contestation, and constantly mutating.

At root, the journal aims to be one of, if not the, most exciting and dynamic locations for sociological debate in the world. It aims to publish must-read articles that no-one would want to miss. Such articles are provocative in the best sense of the word, calling forth a wide range of responses, generating ideas that need to be heard, and cultivating dialogues that otherwise might not have happened.