The Global Chicago School: Cases and Currents

The Chicago School of sociology is often described as narrowly focused on casework, departmental life, and the city of Chicago. These internalist accounts obscure the Chicago School’s exchanges with places like Kansas, Ohio, Mexico, Canada, the Philippines, and Poland. They also overlook the ways Chicago School research has been appropriated and extended by sociologists working in countries from China to France. Rather than dismiss these international ties as outliers, this special issue conceptualizes them as currents flowing around a coherent whole, demonstrating the value of examining the Chicago School as a case of global sociology. This paper thematizes the currents identified in this special issue’s works in a four-fold relation flowing into, out from, through, and against their case — the Chicago School. Interpreting global scholarship in this way suggests that externalist accounts of intellectual life can be thought of in terms of the relations between cases and currents. It also shows that the global Chicago School has been there all along.