Production Of Knowledge In Social Sciences Research Articles

Evaluación científica en Ciencias Sociales: explorando horizontes desde la tecnociencia como fenómeno social

The science evaluation has generated debates and tensions in the scientific and academic community, especially in the Social Sciences field. This study aims to reflect on the topic from the perspective of technoscience as a social phenomenon and the alternative model of technoscience proposed by Latour, based on a critical review of the science evaluation in Latin America. A systematic review of the literature was carried out, with a qualitative approach to analyze criticisms and alternative proposals in scientific evaluation practices, with special emphasis on Social Sciences. The analysis identified criticisms and limitations in the evaluation processes. The proposal is based on techno-scientific changes that allow an effective integration between the knowledge production in Social Sciences and society, promoting quality, relevance, epistemological diversity and active participation of the academic and social community in scientific research.

Interactive experiences in social science research in Mexico: networking and knowledge mobilization

ABSTRACT In the social sciences, a direct relationship with societal actors is an extended practice of conducting research, particularly in fields entailing in-depth empirical fieldwork. This paper analyzes the interactive processes observed in knowledge production in social sciences. The aim is to understand how these relationships are constructed between academic and non-academic actors, which is the goal of researchers in approaching social actors in this way, and the scope of these relationships for generating knowledge and addressing societal problems. Given the modalities of social science research, two frameworks are essential to analyzing these processes. On the one hand, there is the notion of knowledge networks. On the other, knowledge mobilization concerns understanding these processes and their linearity or non-linearity. In this paper, integrating both frameworks helps explain interactive social research. Based on recent empirical information about social sciences research in Mexico, this paper analyzes the dimensions of the interactive character of knowledge generation in these disciplines. The purpose of the paper is to document how the interactions between academic and non-academic actors are built during research; the characteristics of such collaborations; how the mobilization of knowledge occurs emphasizing learning processes and trust generation.

Militant Design Research: A Proposal to Politicize Design Knowledge-making

This work reflects on how design can engage in emancipatory processes of knowledge-making through Militant Design Research. The argument draws on the work of scholars who are engaged in counter-hegemonic design research and practice, and questions the knowledge production structures within academia. ‘Militant research’ is presented as a Latin American theoretical-political approach to knowledge production in social sciences, engaging processes of research, educational, and political actions, and uniting organic intellectuals, researchers, and social movements. Inspired by this perspective, principles for Militant Design Research are outlined to stimulate alliances between designers and social movements for the collective production of knowledge, to overcome situations of oppression in and out of academia.

6 - The History of Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR) and her Place in the Study of the Social Sciences in Africa

Following the research steps of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute which started in 1937, three new research institutes were formed in the British Empire viz. The East African Institute of Social Research (later re-named Makerere Institute of Social Research [MISR]); The West African Institute of Social Research (WAISER) and the West Indies Institute of Social Research (WIISR). This expansion in knowledge production had its own logic and history as well as links to the deepening studies in social sciences, especially anthropology. Over the years, the Institute at Makerere has continued with a fledgling relationship with Makerere University with which it shares a history since 1948. We attempt to place the institute within a history; a history of social science knowledge production; a history of an endogenous institute attempting to attain indigeneity and space.

Localization of social science research in selected academic disciplines in South Korea

Social science contributes to social development when theory and research topic are linked to its social context. However, in practice most social scientists in South Korea tend to explain their social issues and problems through mainstream theoretical perspectives that were primarily developed in the West. This study investigates how much social science research is localized in four selected social science disciplines (sociology, political science, public administration, and education) in South Korea. The study analyzes articles published in one representative domestic journal in each discipline to assess the localization of knowledge production during the last three decades (1988–2017). It was found that the local knowledge-base of Korean social science research is relatively weak though it has been continuously increasing during the last three decades. It was also found that knowledge production in social sciences is reliant on Western theory even though the research topics are locally embedded. In addition, the findings revealed that there are noticeable differences between the applied fields (public administration and education) and the pure fields (sociology and political science). Applied fields of public administration and education are more locally embedded than pure fields of sociology and political science. This study proposes that social science research in South Korea should draw more on indigenous knowledge and be less reliant on Western theory in the future.

DEVELOPMENT DISCOURSE AND SOCIAL SCIENCE KNOWLEDGE IN MALAYSIA

This article aims to explore the impact of development discourse on the production of social science knowledge in Malaysia since the adoption of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1971. It analyses the nexus between development discourse and the growth of social science themes in Malaysia. This nexus was methodologically tracked using a thematic content study. The paper surveys the articles published by the Akadamika Journal of social science and humanities from 1972-2010 with a special focus on the themes of development discourse in Malaysia. The paper interrogates how the development discourse in Malaysia influences the thematic debates in social science? The findings of the paper revealed four major themes that underpinned the production of social science knowledge in Malaysia. The themes include; (a) Gender and economic development, (b) Climate change and development, (c) State, capital and labour (d) Peasant transformation. The implication of the findings suggests that the Malaysian state’s industrial development significantly influences the formation of debates or construction of social science knowledge by Malaysian scholars. The paper’s findings further showed the potential of social science knowledge in contributing to the development aspirations of the state through a policy coherence between development and values system of the society. The findings also revealed the relevance of social science knowledge in achieving the sustainable development goals on gender equality, economic growth and promotion of sustainable communities in Malaysia.
 Keywords: Development, thematic analysis, knowledge production, Malaysian development, social science

Social Science and the Problem of Interpretation: A Pragmatic Dual(ist) Approach

ABSTRACT In Power Without Knowledge, Jeffrey Friedman contends that ideational complexity can stymie social-scientific understanding and prevent the reliable predictive knowledge required of a well-functioning technocracy. However, even this somewhat pessimistic outlook may understate the problem. Ideational complexity has both cognitive and phenomenal dimensions, each of which poses unique dilemmas. Further, due to its methodological individualism, Friedman’s vision may neglect emergent layers of knowledge produced through social interaction, creating yet another source of unknowns. Given these two factors, social science should embrace a pluralism regarding levels of analysis. This would recognize the multifaceted limitations on social-science knowledge production, furthering epistemic humility about the potential role of social science in technocratic policymaking.

Interpreting family struggles in West Africa across Majority-Minority world boundaries: tensions and possibilities

The 'family' is associated with powerful, often emotive discourses in both the Majority and Minority worlds. However, family geographies to date have been largely focused on research with children and families in the Minority world, reflecting the wider dominance of geographical knowledge and social science theories developed in affluent, Anglophone contexts. In this intervention, I reflect on the tensions in attempting to theorise family meanings, practices and struggles in West Africa without imposing Minority world framings and perspectives. In my research in urban Senegal, the team's approach of 'uncomfortable reflexivity' enabled us to have frank conversations about our own experiences of 'family' and the death of a significant person, about our differing emotional responses to participants' experiences and about the nuances of the language used. My collaborative research with Ghanaian academics highlights the importance of time and space to develop shared qualitative understandings of everyday family struggles for publication in international journals. Given global inequalities in social science knowledge production, an ethic of care is needed that seeks to collaborate reflexively with others across disciplinary, linguistic and Majority-Minority world boundaries. This endeavour will hopefully generate more nuanced insights into the plurality and diversity of everyday family lives globally, while recognising the commonalities we share, situating knowledge in place and approaching the 'global' from the Majority world.

American Normal: Situated Theory and American Anthropological Knowledge Production

AbstractKey social scientific concepts are based in local theories particular to the North Atlantic, and the United States especially, and have been exported by anthropologists to analyze diverse ethnographic contexts despite the lack of interrogation of their status as local, American theories. In this article, I address this situation by focusing on the elaboration of American normalcy in its present moment, dependent upon a lay reconfiguration of “ideology,” “hegemony,” and “history.” In advancing this analysis, I focus on popular media journalism and its analysis of the Trump presidency. My approach is bifocal, at once focusing on the history of these Marxian concepts while attending to their permutations in the present. Focusing on these concepts and their relation to ideas of the individual and institutions opens up possibilities for the symmetrical analysis of knowledge production practices and everyday actions of popular and expert communities, and lays the foundation for the cultural anthropology of the U.S. to critique contemporary U.S. politics as well as social science knowledge production and its circulation.

Critical Disability Studies at the Edge of Global Development: Why Do We Need to Engage with Southern Theory?

This paper examines critical disability studies through the lens of Southern theory–a theoretical perspective on the process of knowledge production in social sciences which embodies intellectual projects from the global South (Connell, 2007). Building on Helen Meekosha’s question on decolonizing disability (2011), I critique the domination of Northern disability studies by proposing an engagement with Southern theory. My argument is three-fold: First, the use of Southern theory enables us to interrogate the domination of Northern epistemologies in Southern contexts; second, this theory unveils how colonialism has continued to manifest itself through the knowledge practices which have made the experiences of disabled people in the global South invisible; and finally, situated within the context of global development, this theory enables critical disability studies to act as a project of decolonization that engages with Indigenous ways of knowing about disability experiences.

Institutionalizing Transparency

Concerns about the credibility of social science have increased calls for more transparency, but many academic incentives undermine individual efforts. Institutional changes are needed to substantially transform conventional practices. The authors present a series of specific actions that can be taken by different actors in social science knowledge production: journals, reviewers, professional organizations, teachers, universities and departments, funding sources, and data providers.

Knowledge circulation in urban geography/urban studies, 1990–2010: Testing the discourse of Anglo-American hegemony through publication and citation patterns

This article approaches the question of Anglo-American hegemony in urban studies by examining publication and citation patterns. The past one or two decades have witnessed critical arguments about how knowledge production in social sciences is characterised by centre–periphery relations, and risks universalising US–American and European knowledge and epistemology. While not much systematic analysis has been done to address the extent to which urban knowledge has been shaped by Anglo-American centrism, it is not difficult to tell that the field is dominated by the Anglophone world in terms of authorship, institutional affiliation, the cities under scrutiny, and the urban theories arising. This article undertakes systematic analysis by collecting papers published between 1990 and 2010, in journals indexed by the categories ‘Geography’ and ‘Urban Studies’ in the ISI Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) database. We develop a series of analyses by examining the sites of knowledge production, contributors, key research interests, and the circulation/impact of works. We also single out research on urban China to explore questions such as the place of research on non-Anglo-American contexts in international forums. In all, this article argues that the dominant position of the Anglophone world in the production and circulation of urban knowledge is clearly discernible. But the Anglophone dominance does not necessarily mean that other research interests and orientations have not found a footing. Instead, we suggest that the growing but still small niche of urban China research presents tremendous opportunities for generating cross-context dialogues. The potential has not been fully delivered, as yet.

Before the Body Count: Homicide Statistics and Everyday Security in Latin America

AbstractHomicide statistics are a widely accepted metric of security and democracy. This article argues for a focus on how bodies come or do not come to be counted – of what happens before states enumerate. The experience of São Paulo relates that how many people die and how many do not is connected to the governance of an organised crime group known as the PCC. The punishment practices of the PCC and groups like it throughout Latin America reshape the lived paradigm of governance over life and death, albeit in concealed ways. Statistics are produced by and are productive of a de jure state, different from the state de facto. The acceptance of state-made homicide figures, whether for analysis, visualisation or political claims, is consequential for the future of lived security and social science knowledge production.

The Discovery of Hispanic Child Labor in Agriculture in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, Texas: A Life Geography Approach

A life geography approach is used to analyze the production of social science knowledge regarding Mexican-origin child agricultural workers in south Texas during the early 1940s. The protagonist in this article, Amber Arthun Warburton, worked for the U.S. Children's Bureau during the early 1940s and authored one of many reports analyzing conditions of children in U.S. agriculture. She was the first social scientist to report on labor relations in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas, with particular attention to working and educational conditions of Mexican-origin children. Two aspects of Warburton's unpublished work—her analysis of child labor in terms of Marx's reserve army of labor and her description of living conditions through fieldwork—are examined here. The experience of Amber Warburton suggests how educated women, facing discrimination in academia, navigated personal and bureaucratic challenges while generating social knowledge, offering comparison to experiences of female geographers working outside academia.

Rethinking Knowledge Production and Circulation in Comparative and International Education: Southern Theory, Postcolonial Perspectives, and Alternative Epistemologies

Rethinking Knowledge Production and Circulation in Comparative and International Education: Southern Theory, Postcolonial Perspectives, and Alternative Epistemologies

Producing Knowledge in the Global South: The Political Economy of Social Science in Argentina, Colombia, and Peru

How do international inequalities in funding, institutional support and research capacity affect the production of social science knowledge? New data on the political economy of research in Latin America shows that funding for social science is organized in sharply contrasting ways across countries, with three types of capital -- foreign, domestic public, and domestic private -- playing distinct roles. This cross-national variation in the role played by each type of capital, in turn, has contrasting consequences for (1) who produces knowledge, that is, for the professional credentials and networks needed to gain access to funding for research; and (2) for the kind of knowledge produced, especially for the comparative scope and policy relevance of research. A focus on cross-national variation in how social science is funded provides a stronger understanding of knowledge production in the Global South.

Narrating the Non-Nation: Literary Journalism and "Illegal" Border Crossings

Narrating the Non-Nation:Literary Journalism and "Illegal" Border Crossings Marta Caminero-Santangelo (bio) The twenty-first century has been hailed as ushering in a new era of globalization and "post-nationalism," in which the nation-state is becoming an increasingly "obsolete" category (Appadurai 169). Such grand claims are belied, however, by the strong wave of resurgent nativism in the U.S. that has accompanied immigration reform debates of the last decade—most recently manifested in Arizona's notorious SB 1070 and similar legislative efforts in other states1—as well as by the accompanying escalation in "boundary enforcement" at the U.S.-Mexican border (Nevins 158-59). As immigration spiked to ever higher numbers in the 1990s and early 2000s in the wake of NAFTA, policy enforcement "crack-downs" suggested a new level of border policing. Operation Hold-the-Line in 1993 and Operation Gatekeeper in 1994 implemented more rigorous enforcement at highly populated points such as San Diego and El Paso, driving border crossers through less populous areas and harsh desert conditions (Eschbach 4, 9). These developments resulted in large numbers of immigrant deaths due to dehydration, suffocation, hypothermia, and hyperthermia. The United States Government Accountability Office reports that border crossing deaths as a whole more than doubled between 1995 and 2005, although this increase was not accompanied by a corresponding rise in illegal entries. In response, the last decade has seen a flurry of books on the subject of undocumented immigrant crossings and deaths including: Dead in their Tracks: Crossing America's Desert Borderlands (1999) by John [End Page 157] Annerino; Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail (2001) by Rubén Martínez; The Devil's Highway (2004) by Luis Alberto Urrea; Dying to Cross: The Worst Immigrant Tragedy in American History (2005) by Jorge Ramos; Enrique's Journey: The Story of a Boy's Dangerous Odyssey to Reunite With His Mother (2006) by Sonia Nazario; and The Death of Josseline: Immigration Stories from the Arizona Borderlands (2010) by Margaret Regan. These texts reframe the immigration debate through graphic narrative accounts of the human costs of our border policy, and they emphasize the pressing urgency of this crisis through the haunting leitmotif of border deaths. The title of this essay clearly takes its cue from Homi Bhabha's postulation that "nation" (understood as a sense of collective peoplehood that is geographically bounded and claims the right to sovereignty) is brought into being largely by stories, including shared histories and myths as well as "literature." Because stories of nation generally strive for a sense of homogeneity, they inevitably obscure or leave out elements that do not easily fit into the "imagined community" (Benedict Anderson's famous coinage) of the nation. The now standard labeling of undocumented immigrants as "illegals" in mainstream media suggests the degree to which this population has been narratively constructed as not fitting into the boundaries of the American "nation"—indeed, as fundamentally threatening that nation. Perceptions of Latinos as a national threat, Leo R. Chavez argues, have been shaped by "a history of ideas, laws, narratives, myths, and knowledge production in social sciences, sciences, the media, and the arts" that constitute a powerful set of "discursive formations" (22; Hall 6, qtd. in Chavez). In the wake of 9/11, titles linking immigration to threats to America's national security and even survival have proliferated.2 The authors of the border-crossing texts that I examine here clearly seek to intervene in this strident narrative of immigration as a threat to the existence of the nation by offering alternative narratives in which undocumented people are not imagined, first and foremost, as "aliens." These texts offer counter-discourses, reframing the story of immigration in terms that tend to shift the focus from the borders of "our" imagined community, to construct alternative notions of ethical communities. As works of literary journalism, these accounts capitalize on a culture in which "life narratives" have become not only instrumental in discourses on human rights, but also eminently marketable (Schaffer and Smith 7, 25, 27). [End Page 158] The current popularity of life writing suggests the degree to which these books might be instrumental in advocacy by reaching...

The Production of Social Science Knowledge beyond Occidentalism: the quest for a post-exotic anthropology

This article makes the case for a post-exotic anthropology as an alternative disciplinary practice adapted to the emerging historical conjuncture that is reconfiguring the political and epistemic relations between different parts of the world. This is raising anew a legitimation challenge to mainstream social sciences but especially academic anthropology, as its a practice is still characterised by a chronic exoticist inflection thanks to its allegiance to the epistemology of Occidentalism. The article calls for a revision of anthropology's geo-theoretical premises in light of an emergent post-exotic historical conjuncture, which entails the abandonment of the duopoly exercised by the epistemic regimes of postmodernism and postcolonialism, in favour of a post-exotic standpoint. It suggests the adoption of mesography as the optimum means of operationalising a post-exotic anthropology as well as an alternative mode of social science knowledge production. Finally, it proposes an ethic of reciprocity to rectify the extractive fieldwork practices that sustain the illiberal politics of interpretation of academic anthropology.

Mode-2 social science knowledge production?<BR> The case of Danish sociology between institutional crisis and new welfare stabilizations

The notion of mode-2 knowledge production points to far-reaching transformations in science-society relations, but few attempts have been made to investigate what growing economic and political demands on research may entail for the social sciences. This case study of new patterns of social science knowledge production outlines some major institutional and cognitive changes in Danish academic sociology during ‘mode-2’ times, from the 1980s onwards. Empirically, we rely on documentary sources and qualitative interviews with Danish sociologists, aiming to reconstruct institutional trajectories expressive of wider changes in the field. The analysis shows this has been a period of exceptional volatility in Danish sociology, from institutional crisis in the 1980s to a gradual re-expansion since the 1990s. Drawing on a four-fold typology of professional, critical, public, and policy sociologies, we show how a particular cognitive modality of sociology — ‘welfare reflexivity’ — has become a dominant form of Danish sociological knowledge production. Welfare reflexivity has proven a viable response to volatile mode-2 policy conditions. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

Knowledge and Empire: The Social Sciences and United States Imperial Expansion

This paper focuses on the relationship between the social sciences in the U.S. and the formation of empire. I argue that the peculiar way the U.S. has established a global presence during the 20th century—by establishing a commercial empire rather than territorially-based colonies—has generated on the part of state and corporation an unusual interest in the knowledge produced by social scientists. It has also generated an unusual willingness on their part to subsidize the production of that knowledge. Not only have government and corporation considered the social sciences essential to the project of managing empire. At each major stage in the reorganization of that empire state and capital have underwritten a massive reorganization in the production of social science knowledge.