The Social Sciences in a Global Age: Decoding Knowledge Politics

Description

The book focuses on the status and role of the social sciences in the current millennium. Drawing inspiration from a range of theorists, it critically examines the key debates on the social science stream and focuses on its ir/relevance in our times in the background of changing state-market dialectics. It specifically scrutinises knowledge politics of the global times to reveal how the neoliberal project aligns and fuses steep economic ‘conditionalities’ with professional cultural parameters of higher academia to constrain autonomy and weaken radical expressions in social science pedagogy and research. Asserting that the humanistic core of social sciences has the potential to resist acts of reducing knowledge to a monochromatic form, the book argues that the social science stream can challenge and resist such hegemonic ambitions. It also identifies and analyses the contradictions, dilemmas, predicaments and false steps of social scientists, and avoids a reductive approach based on the ‘west versus non-west’ binary. The volume will be of interest to scholars and researchers of the social sciences in general, and of sociology/politics of knowledge, political theory, political sociology and education in particular. Cover Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Page Contents Preface Acknowledgements List of abbreviations 1 Introduction: critical times now 2 Packaging knowledge: the neoliberal tapestry 3 On the track of the dominant western template 4 The elusive case of template ‘beyond the west’ 5 Sampling India: close-up Conclusion: on pressing the criticality button Bibliography Index