SOC 335: Nowheres: Introduction

Purpose of this guide:

This guide is designed as a companion to the course Sociology 335 - Nowheres.  It includes: 

• search strategies to find research materials about countries/nation-states
• information about the historical, political, cultural landscape that influences the organization of libraries and how scholarship created and disseminated 

Conceptual framework of this guide and the related instruction sessions:

• Invisible Countries by Joshua Keating
• Methodological nationalism and beyond: nation-state building, migration and the social sciences, by Andreas Wimmer and Nina Glick Schille
• Methodological nationalism and the politics of history-writing: how imaginary scholarship perpetuate the nation by George Vasile
• The power to name: representations in library catalogs by Hope A. Olso

"[...] language plants ideas about things, and the use of ethno-nationally loaded terminology - compact and workable as it may be - unjustifiably casts populations as certain types of actors"  George Vasilev.  Methodological nationalism and the politics of history-writing: how imaginary scholarship perpetuate the nation [p.518] 

"[..] categories are choices between different kinds and degrees of simplication, choices, moreover, one is forced to make in order to begin thinking and speaking about the social world." George Vasilev. Methodological nationalism and the politics of history-writing: how imaginary scholarship perpetuate the nation [p.519]