Our history

The group’s trajectory is marked first by exploring issues related to the rural universe, the State and collective action in Latin America and Africa. Places and social situations that traditionally evoke descriptions guided by sociological narratives of lack, absence or deviation from patterns of political organization, economic development or even morality.

We are a group of researchers who for a long time were defined by our peers as peripheral in relation to the fundamental themes and processes of the disciplines. Our research stance is to break with this kind of sociological explanation precisely because it is guided by an exemplary narrative of sociology — one that can only read social processes by comparing them with what would have happened in Europe or North America.

The sociology we call exemplary converted the processes analyzed in those countries into centers or, in our words, theoretical and analytical thermometers to analyze social life wherever it develops. Facing this picture, the challenge is to build a sociological narrative through theoretical forms that are not expressed by social markers guided by positive and negative poles, nor central and peripheral ones.

This theoretical challenge aims, above all, to push current theoretical forms to incorporate social situations that are quantitatively and qualitatively significant in the contemporary world, even when they are not in the classic bins we have built. The central issue of the Non Exemplary Sociology Lab is to build its own, innovative and unstable narrative forms through objects that provide clear alternatives to concepts such as periphery, backwardness, development, clientelism, populism, social movements, rural, urban and culture, among others.