Thanks for sharing with us your experiences and understanding of the
situation in the former Yugloslavia...
> The problems there (in the former Yu) and all around the world indicate
> today that social science and social scientists mostly don't have real
> political power to change clearly destructive circumstances, not even when
> they are still manageable and controlable. Why would anyone, on the basis of
> what is known in social science, today, vote for cuts for education and
> social programs and more money for police and jails, is beyond me - yet it
> is happening today in the USA. I see scary parallels between the present
> social situation in the USA and the situation in Yugoslavia several (maybe 8
> - 10) years before it was consumed by the war.
>
> The question which I have is: is there any connection between the political
> position of social sciences, i.e. their ability to make a difference
> (hopefully for the better) in the real world, and the state of the art of
> the theory, methodology, practice, and in general the body of knowledge
> about society and individuals we assume we have?
To be honest...
I'm rather pessimistic as I fear that academics and intellectuals have
more often than not been integrated into the mainstream economic system...
what constrains us (like it or not) is often the pressure of getting a
tenure-track job, of keeping it if you 've got one, of publishing in the
legitimate journals, of writing on topics that would have an (academic)
audience, of ... I'm not sure ... as I'm still at the periphery of such
a community of (academic) practice... I'm being socialized into it right
now... and I'm struggling to maintain some degree of autonomy, exploring
some arenas of freedom of eccentric practices (e.g., publishing
in an academically unprestigious journal but one that's easily available
to the local teachers or people about whom you're writing)...
The theories of academics are often used by whoever or whatever party
who's in power to justify or to add on a scientific appearance whatever
policies they've already decided on (shaped and motivated by interests
that are often irrelevant to the scientific work of academics). This is
certainly a pessimistic view which I hope is not true most of the time.
On the other hand, I feel that perhaps we need to break the line
between "theoretical" and "practical" work or research... Even the most
theoretical work has very very practical consequences, affects the lives
of people... etc.; as all our research work, theoretical in name or
not, is always pratically situated in our historical, social, cultural and
political contexts... there's no way to escape it: what we do is bound to
have some kind of consequences on others (for better or worse..., like it
or not).
I don't know what's the role of the researcher or academics in a world of
increasing (to our dismay, not decreasing) social injustice... We've
been both forced and seduced not to think about these tricky areas, but
to do research and to publish (hopefully not rublish) a lot... e.g., in
the academic administrative and funding system in Hong Kong, a department
in a university gets more funding from the government when its faculty
has more publications in certain kinds of journals... and they have
devised elaborate math formulas for calculating these things!
Technology and science have freed men and women (in some areas of the
world only, though) from the daily need to search for food and shelter
in an uncontrollable nature... but it has not freed us (academics) from the
necessity of job/tenure/publication pressures, has it? :-{
Angel