Sitas Ari: Scripting Defiance - Four Sociological Vignettes

This is the second volume from the authors (along with several others) of Gauging and Engaging Deviance, which is positioned between the ideas of deviance and defiance and attempts to uncover scripts through which notions of deviance as well as acts of defiance unravel. It argues that instead of the monologue about the binary of European modernity and its traditional backwoods, the contours are to be found in another archive, one that is made up of significant scripts or narratives of defiance that endure through subaltern people's cultural formations despite and in response to dominant ideas and ideologies. Such scripts within this archive will help sociology reconstitute itself away from its original mandate: to be part of the fixers, to help the maintenance of social order, to predict and control aberrant behaviour and to create functional individuals and ensembles. The chapters look at specific figures of discontent: the worker, the woman, the student, the artist, the migrant and refugee, the prisoner, and, as a counter-voice, the movements of reaction to their discontent, the movements of authoritative restoration.