Face to Face with Modern World

Face to Face with Modern World


Andreyev A.L.

Dr. Sci. (Philos.), Chief Researcher, Institute of Sociology of the Federal Center of Theoretical and Applied Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia sympathy_06@mail.ru

ID of the Article:


For citation:

Andreyev A.L. Face to Face with Modern World . Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya [Sociological Studies]. 2019. No 2. P. 3-8




Abstract

The article gives a brief overview of the work of the XIX World Sociological Congress, held in July 2018 in Toronto, Canada. Its representative character (more than 5,000 participants) and an extremely large thematic variety of its scientific sessions, as well as reports included in the program, are noted. Within the framework of the Congress, more than 1200 sessions of various formats were held, which dealt with an extremely wide range of issues, from quite traditional ones developed by the founding fathers of sociological science to those that appeared only recently in connection with the latest trends in social and historical development, such as global migrations, international terrorism, formation of the digital economy and the emergence of so-called technological sciences. Considerable attention is paid to the contribution of Russian scientists to the work of the Congress, which seems to be quite noticeable, although value of the Russian sociological science, according to the author of this article, deserves wider coverage. Sharing his impressions of the Congress as a whole, the author points to some innovative ideas and approaches and shows that the world sociological science reacts very vividly to many phenomena and challenges of the present, making considerable efforts to understand them. Nevertheless, attention is drawn to the fact that the main global generalizations that constitute the sociological “filling” of the term “modernity” refer to the last decades of the twentieth century and describe the realities of that time. And the analysis of the themes of both the scientific sessions and of the separate reports submitted to the sociological congress in Toronto shows that in the understanding of the prospects for the further development of humanity that are outlined literally before our very eyes, sociological science is getting late. In particular, it lags behind the rapid pace of changes determined by the development of new principles for the interaction of anthropic and technological components of civilization on the basis of such scientific and technological breakthroughs, as the development of nanotechnologies and biomedicine, the introduction of intelligent robots and the creation of cyberphysical systems.


Keywords
sociology; sociological research; sociological community; social problems; modernity; theories of modernity

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Content No 2, 2019