Sociologies in conflict. A reconstruccion of the process and impact of sociology student strike in Buenos Aires, 1963.

DIEGO EZEQUIEL PEREYRA; LAUTARO LAZARTE

Porto Alegre

Congreso; RC 08 Interim Conference,?Mesa 92. Institutions, Organizations and Sociological Thought?, IV ISA Forum of Sociology; 2021

International Sociological Association

By the hand of Gino Germani at the University of Buenos Aires, the creation in 1957 of the first sociology department in sociology in Argentina meant an important step in the institutionalization of the discipline. However, its foundation and development put on the table an epistemological and political debate about the values and meaning of sociology and the role of sociologists in society. In this way, the students' strong support for Germani's leadership from the beginning was quickly leading to a questioning about the origin of the funds, the theoretical and methodological orientation of the discipline and the absence of social commitment. Thus, in 1963, the students declared a strike that lasted for a semester and that acquired mythical edging in the history of the student struggle. Therefore, this paper wants to reconstruct that process seeking a reinterpretation of the reasons for the complaint, the behavior of the actors and the institutional consequences of the conflict. Through an analysis of institutional documents, brochures and notes of students and teachers and interviews, it want to analyze the strike as a repertoire of the student movement that required changes in career orientation, in a context of strong social tensions. Within the framework of a process of political radicalization after the Cuban revolution in 1959, this struggle expressed a clash between a scientific sociology of neo-positivist content and an alternative project that tried to articulate new intellectual demands, from Marxism to Latin American social thought. But at the same time, it marked the first limits of the Argentine democratic project in the 1960s, announcing the nationalist drifts and the armed struggle that would emerge less than a decade later.