Social Scientist in South Asia: Personal Narratives, Social Forces and Negotiations

Description

This book is a collection of autobiographical narratives by leading social scientists working across South Asia. It explores the linkages between their personal experiences and academic pursuits and analyzes how personal, political, and professional choices shape knowledge production and affect social transformation. The narratives revisit long-standing debates on objectivity, subjectivity, self, and other and attempt to collapse the binaries that have informed the social sciences until now. Highlighting the state of research and pedagogy in the social sciences in the region, the book questions the conventional understanding of the task of the social scientist and, in doing so, blurs the distinction between theory, research, pedagogy, and activism. A unique and compelling contribution, this volume will be indispensable to students and researchers of sociology, anthropology, history, creative writing, education, politics, biography studies, and South Asian studies. It will also be of interest to general readers. Cover Half Title Title Copyright Contents List of contributors Preface Acknowledgements 1 Introduction Part I Engagement with disciplinary prisms: expanding horizons 2 Meandering through the art of medicine and the science of society 3 A ‘self’ embedded in ‘social’ 4 Forging a practice through autobiographical questioning 5 Contours of a discipline: perseverance, social sciences, and the word 6 Whither svaraj? 7 Self, society, and social science knowledge 8 The fusing of research and teaching: groovy economics, groovy science 9 Travels through changing times: my search for social relevance 10 Embodied memories: a journey with Ambedkar 11 Self in the making of partition literature Part II Reflections on disciplinary practices: pedagogy and research 12 Social and institutional engagements in a periphery: reflections on a personal journey 13 Of tactic and tenacity: tale of a teacher 14 The (auto)biographical and anthropological: interplay for teaching and research 15 My Journey: unfinished, unending 16 Biography and social forces 17 Inside/outside/in-between: on the discomfort of shifting locations as a border-crossing academic 18 Journeys in history, personal and professional 19 On teaching sociological theory Index