Erasing Slavery: Origins of a 'Black Hole' in the Rise of American Sociology

Aaron Yates, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Recent scholarship in science studies draws attention to certain persistent absences in both the scientific community and the conceptual content of the field (Mascarenhas 2018). In the case of US sociology, others have identified the dearth of research that includes substantive analysis of the legacies of the transatlantic slave trade, US chattel slavery, and colonialism in shaping the current structure of opportunities for participation in the generation of sociological knowledge as well as the conceptual and theoretical content of the discipline (Magubane 2016). This paper begins to address this absence by examining the historical roots of these exclusions in the emergence of the institution of US sociology at the turn of the 20th century. From the moment of the establishment of the first professional journal of sociology in the US in 1895 (the American Journal of Sociology) to the end of World War II in 1945, I consider the relationship between the structure of opportunities for participation in formal sociological discourse, and the presence (or absence) of certain kinds of people as contributors and ideas as content in the development of that discourse. Using longitudinal bibliometric data, this study maps the hidden network of people and ideas that were excluded in the early institutionalization of US sociology.

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 Presented in Session 63. Social Science History and Science & Technology Studies: A Theoretical Exchange