What kind of normativity does sociology need? Rethinking values, knowledge and critique

At the roundtable discussion of our departmental conference “Sociological Routes: Past, Present and Future”, held on 15 November 2024, we posed a provocative question: Should sociology remain descriptive, or is engaging with normative questions essential to understand social life? As one might expect, the goal was not to settle the issue definitively, but to spark a conversation that would invite our participants to a shared reflection on one of sociology’s most enduring and urgent debates. This question aimed to explicitly interrogate the boundary between description and evaluation, a boundary that recent theoretical developments have framed as the “normative turn” in sociological theory.