François Dépelteau

I am working on the development of what I call a transactional or a deep relational sociology. The idea is to move sociology beyond social determinism and co-determinism (the study of the interactions between social structures and agency). This work-in-progress is influenced by various sources, such as Blumer's symbolic interactionism, Dewey's pragmatism, Elias' figurational sociology, Emirbayer's relational manifesto and Latour's ANT. This list is not exhaustive. For now, I am trying to show that the object is sociology is the study of interactions between interactants. This conception of the object of sociology is different from the study of society, social structures or social systems seen as substances or forces which partially or fully determine individuals. Interactions between interactants lead to the emergence, the transformation and the end of various social fields we call couples, families, slavery plantations, dachas, nations, empires, wars, genocides, peer groups, etc. Some of the central issues human interactants face in their social life is the assemblage of social fields, their movements from one field to another and the forms taken by the interactions (love, strategic alliances, conflicts, power relations, friendship, hate, agreements, disagreements, misunderstandings, etc.) in various social fields. In this logic, the social is processual, fluid and dynamic rather than being simply solid and structured, and the so-called causal powers of the social context refer in reality to the impacts other human and non-human interactants have on us when we interact with them. There is no social laws (or even social mechanisms) to discover out there, but a lot of very useful knowledge to acquire from past and ongoing human experiences. The main sociological question might be as simple and complex as: How did and do we live together in all these dynamic social fields? If you are interested by this approach or a similar one, please contact me at [email protected].
I am the editor of the bilingual journal of the Canadian Sociological Association, the Canadian Review of Sociology or la Revue Canadienne de Sociologie.
I am also the editor of a new book series on relational sociology called the Palgrave Series of Relational Sociology (Palgrave Macmillan) which will start to publish its first books in 2016 and 2017.
There is also a research cluster you can join on relational sociology (see http://www.csa-scs.ca/files/webapps/csapress/relational/) by contacting me.
On the site of this research cluster, you will find the description and the temporary table of content of the coming Palgrave Handbook of Relational Sociology (forthcoming in 2017), which involved more than 30 qualified collaborators and which will be composed by more or less 50 chapters. I am the editor of this coming handbook.
Address: Sudbury, Ontario, Canada