Transnational sociology and concepts of social expertise in Eastern Europe, 1970s-2000s

Within a broader vision of technocratic socialism in Eastern Europe, expert-led socialist modernization turned to social issues beginning in the 1960s. Existing scholarship on the development of sociology in different national contexts in the region shows that the discipline was accommodated as a technical, but not critical source of social expertise both before and after 1989. Going beyond this well-researched national level, the project “Transnational sociology and concepts of social expertise in Eastern Europe, 1970s-2000s” (TransSocio) asks how socialist sociologists were embedded in transnational epistemic networks regionally, transregionally, and internationally beginning in the 1970s, and what their contribution was at the articulation of the main social issues of their time. TransSocio is an interdisciplinary intellectual history and digital humanities project, which will produce a database of sociologists involved in collaborative research beyond their national context, a corpus of machine-readable publications stemming from such involvement, and a collection of twenty oral history interviews with sociologists from throughout the region who contributed to transnational social expertise. On this basis and by combining DH methods (social network and text analysis) and intellectual history methods (contextual analysis of concepts), TransSocio will map the transnational epistemic networks and the concepts of social expertise to which Eastern European sociologists contributed, and will explore their uses up to the early 2000s. This is a history worth recovering as a counterpart to the current crisis of expertise in Eastern Europe; as a genealogy of epistemic inequalities engendered by professional and conceptual integration in Europe beyond the national level; and as a resource for strengthening social expertise, the public trust in science, and visions of transnational social solidarity at a moment of renewed crisis due to pandemic, war, and economic austerity.