The Social Sciences in a Global Age: Decoding Knowledge Politics

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.

Dipankar Sinha is Professor of Political Science and Director, Centre for Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Calcutta, India. He is also Honorary Associate of the Centre for Media History, Macquarie University, Australia and Nominated Member, Association of Global Studies, USA. Sinha has authored, co-authored and co-edited several books. His last book, The Information Game in Democracy, was published by Routledge in 2018.