Gennaro Ascione

Gennaro Ascione is Associate Professor in Sociology (SPS/07) at the Department of Human and Social Sciences of the University of Naples L'Orientale where he teaches Sociology, and Cultural and Postcolonial Studies of the Mediterranean. He is a research Fellow at the Center for Global Studies of the University of Cambridge and of the Italian Institute for Philosophical Studies. He worked on social movements in the Global South and, later, on indigenous knowledge, and non-western epistemologies. He is interested in Eastern philosophies, in particular non-dualistic ontologies, and investigates the epistemological heritage that non-Western and non-hegemonic knowledge offers to contemporary critical reflection. He studies the circulation of knowledge in the pre-modern Mediterranean and the relationship between heresy, magic and modern science, within the horizon of the Italian Renaissance. He is passionate about the life and thought of Giordano Bruno. Member of the European International Studies Association, worming on Globalizing International relations. Member of the directive committee of the Interuniversity Research Center on Transnational Technocultures (CRITT). Co-founder of the international research group Non-Hegemonic World-Sociology, sponsored by the United Nations. Gennaro Ascione is part of international research networks: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group, Global Social Theory, Conceptual and Termnilogical Analysis is Social Sciences. He was a visiting research associate at Delhi University from 2015 to 2017. In 2017, as an Early career scholar of the World International Studies Committee, he was awarded by the Frontier Research program, on the topic of Post-Western International theory. He writes novels and is a columnist for Corriere del Mezzogiorno.

The project

Title: WEB - Wallerstein Encounters Braudel. Explorations in epistemology at the borders of space and time

This transdisciplinary project investigates the intellectual encounter between Immanuel Wallerstein and Fernand Braudel. It focuses on the theoretical outcome of this encounter in the field of concept-formation, with a specific focus on the categories of space and time. This was an epiphanic encounter took place, and the discussion over the methodology of World-Systems Analysis developed along new lines of inquiry that paved the way for a variety of fields in critical global studies. From world history, to global international theory, to international political economy, to political ecology. This project intends to reconstruct the intellectual path that led Wallerstein to encounter Braudel and reflect upon the exchange between these two major scholarly figures, to explore the web of ideas and scholars that promoted the transformation of the categories of space and time in historical social sciences. This inquiry will be conducted through archival research, reconstruction of seminars and conferences proceeding, thematic exploration, theoretical interpretation, and in-depth interviews to scholars witnessing that moment of unique epistemological effervescence and theoretical engagement. The questions that animated the encounter between Wallerstein and Braudel are crucial in the current moment of transition in the structures of knowledge production. They form an unprecedented resource toward the elaboration of new ways to configure the basic categories of space and time in historical-social analysis, for a novel theoretical framework more adequate to understanding the present and future of world capitalism, able to dialogue with a variety of non-western epistemologies, from the Afrocentric notion of Ubuntu to Aymara epistemics.

Host institution : IMAF - Institut des Mondes Africains, Campus Condorcet, Aubervilliers

Selective Bibliography

Articles, chapters and contributions to collective volumes (selection)

• Ascione, G: (2022) The Shifting Epistemological Horizon of the Pandemic. In Science, Technology and Society, 8(1): 50-57.
• Ascione, G. (2021) Knowledge in an age of transition. Wallerstein and the future. Socio, n.15: 105-125.
• Ascione, G. (2020) Heretic-Erotic Alliances on Decoloniality. Softpower, 7(14): 295-303.

Monographs

• Ascione, G. (in preparation) Unthinking Capital. New epistemological Foundations of the Critique to Political Economy. Leiden and Berlin: Brill-De Gruyter
• Ascione, G. (2024) Concept Formation in Global Studies. Post-Western Approaches to Critical Human Knowledge. London and New York: Rowman and Littlefield.