Call for Book Chapters: "Qualitative Explorations of Durkheim’s Suicidology: The Ecological Fallacy and Suicide Typologies"
Vernon Press invites book-chapter proposals for a forthcoming interdisciplinary volume on the subject of “Qualitative Explorations of Durkheim’s Suicidology: The Ecological Fallacy and Typologies.”
Émile Durkheim’s Le Suicide (2002/1897) has remained relevant through time to the social study of suicide. Durkheim’s four suicide types- altruistic, anomic, fatalistic, and egoistic- each have their own criticisms, strengths and weaknesses, and are unique concepts that have potential to be explored qualitatively as themes that social actors themselves relate to suicide.
Importantly, Durkheim developed his suicide theory based on pure statistics (suicide rates) without talking to people themselves. Thus, Durkheim speculated on social forces that may lead actors to commit suicide, but did so quantitatively. This book will demonstrate the utility and applicability of Durkheim’s suicide theory when explored qualitatively; that is, when people themselves are asked and interviewed about suicide, what does this tell us about Durkheim’s theory and suicidology? Does it still hold relevance? How is it complicated? What does this tell us about the larger field of the social study of suicide outside of Durkheim? These are questions that this collection of articles will seek to answer.
Moreover, this book will further explore the shortcomings, criticisms, and drawbacks of Durkheim’s suicide-typology. While in one sense the qualitative exploration of Durkheim’s suicidology is a straw-man’s argument-that is, Durkheim did not do a qualitative analysis himself so such an approach does not have the validity to evaluate his- there is something to learn when adding qualitative analysis to Durkheim’s well-established foundational theory. There is potential to take from various contexts around the world to … READ MORE