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Researcher - Howard Ramos
Sociology in Existential Times
Increasingly, the world’s most pressing problems are framed as “existential threats.” This includes fears over pandemics, wars, democratic backsliding, declining birth rates, accelerating climate change, and advances in artificial intelligence. Such threats represent turning points that fundamentally reshape how societies function and have significant implications for sociology and the pursuit of justice.
Usage of the term “existential threats” has increased over time in popular media; however, such threats and framing are not being captured in mainstream sociology articles published in top journals.
Sociologists need to take real and perceived existential threats more seriously. Existential threats demand new conceptual tools and reorientations of the discipline’s key assumptions. That is, such threats offer opportunities to reexamine the discipline’s work on social forms, processes, mechanisms, distributions of outcomes, and actors.
The paper concludes that existential threats bring a unique opportunity for reflexive renewal of the discipline to reimagine sociology’s frameworks to help people, policymakers and societies navigate uncertain futures.
Sociology in Existential Times
Researcher
Howard Ramos
Professor, Sociologyhoward.ramos@uwo.ca