To celebrate its 30 years, the Centre for Social Studies (CES) of the School of Economics of the University of Coimbra is promoting a wide reflection on the relations, dialogues and tensions which currently stamp the heterogeneous domain of the Social and Human Sciences (SHS) and their diverse contexts of development. Such contexts can be distinct both at geographical level (national, regional and global), and at the level of their social impact (relevance, contribution towards public policies, and relations with the Natural Sciences and the technologies). This reflection and the ensuing debates will be organised around seven major transversal themes. The Social and Human Sciences: A necessary complementarity? Theories and research and intervention methodologies: Studying for transforming? Interculturality and post-colonialisms: Is equality possible within difference? The University of the future: is there a place for the Social and Human Sciences? Social policies and new public risks: Is it possible to combine complexity with equity? Governance and contemporary social dynamics: A world of diversities or of homogeneities? Globalization, peace and democracy: Are there possible alternatives to violence?
The Social and Human Sciences: A necessary complementarity? In the Portuguese scientific landscape, the Centre for Social Studies is one of the few institutions where a strong research agenda within the social sciences has been combined with an equally strong research agenda within the Humanities. This reflexive inter-linkage built over the past thirty years has allowed for the development of innovative approaches in analysing social, political and artistic phenomena. This work has led to several collective publications and has recently made it possible to open up innovative and transdisciplinary doctoral programmes in areas traditionally presented as being more the preserve of the Humanities (interculturalism and post-colonialism), of sociology and economics (democracy for the twenty-first century, governance, knowledge and innovation), or of political science and law (law, justice and citizenship in the twenty-first century). It is now time to take this productive, reflexive meshing onto the next level, that of intra-linkage, i.e., of the construction of new constellations of knowledge where the disciplinary imprint may be deeply transformed, if not altogether abolished. We consider that, in the future, this will be the most productive level for discussing the necessary complementarity between the Social and Human Sciences. This session aims at debating the different processes of fragmentation which we have witnessed over time in the different areas of the SHS and the emerging reconfigurations of knowledge. If, on the one hand, these open up broader frameworks for the analysis and interpretation of reality (setting out from the different areas of knowledge and the different sites of enunciation), on occasion they also give rise to a certain angst of recognition with regard to the canon of the great disciplinary narratives to which institutionalised knowledge has accustomed us. How, in what ways, with what instruments and with what benefits and risks do we proceed from interdisciplinarity to transdisciplinarity or even indisciplinarity?
Theories and research and intervention methodologies: Studying for transforming? The methodologies used by the SHS are very diversified, often providing an insight into internal tensions. Debate in this area has often focused on the dichotomy between quantitative and qualitative methodologies, primacy being granted to a paradigm of technicist rationality which marginalizes considerations as to its own nature and political consequences. Thus it becomes necessary to question the extent to which the methodologies used by the SHS have challenged (and can do so in the future) this paradigm of technicist rationality; how can the questions we pose, the objects we choose, the methods we use and the forms of “devolving” results how can they render our research more emancipatory? To this end, it will be necessary to analyse the new configurations of a paradigm of political rationality (engaged, collaborative, solidaristic, participatory), as well as their boundaries. Such an analysis should also question that which changes in our view of knowledge, if we take into account the critic’s subjectivity, desire and location. On the other hand, SHS methodologies also display strong links to other areas and perspectives, where traditional boundaries have been breached, as is the case of literature and sociology, or theory and politics. The emergence of areas such as cultural studies and media studies are good examples of this cross-fertilization between fields and disciplines. The expansion of the concepts of culture, on the one hand, and of text, on the other, have opened up new theoretical and methodological horizons; besides the visibility accorded to subordinate groups and the recognition of new cultural objects, cultural studies have been able to legitimize the political character of criticism. In turn, within the study of digital cultures, the hypertext has given new encouragement to critical and literary theory, as a laboratory recreating the traditional concepts of epistemology, agency and ethics. Analysing the transformations introduced by virtual means to the economy of writing, reading, research and communication has revealed a broad field of issues. The interaction which characterizes digital practices demands the renewal of our understanding of what is an author, a reader, a text and also what is meaning. Lastly, the exhausting of the national scale of analysis has changed the framework of relations obtaining between knowledge production and social intervention, making us re-think the role of the public intellectual. The multiple dynamics of trans-nationalization, which include the trans-nationalization of the professionals themselves, opens up the possibility for the SHS to sever links with the State and choose other partners for intervention, creating new contexts of political struggle. This possibility is all the more promising at a stage when the University is undergoing thorough transformations which challenge the continuity of its role in affirming public intellectuals and in the social prominence and credibilization of knowledge within the SHS. In fact, we ask ourselves to what extent these changes may enable the renewal of theories and methodologies and lead the SHS to overcome the traditional stalemate between critical analysis and political transformation.
Interculturality and post-colonialisms: Is equality possible within difference? Globalization and liberalization processes and critiques of modernity and the colonial legacy have transformed the SHS, both in the global North and in the global South. This session aims to examine these transformations within different contexts, their impact on North-South relations within the SHS, and the ways in which the SHS themselves have reflexively discussed such transformations. This raises a series of questions of an epistemological, theoretical, political and institutional nature, which can here be centred around two main issues. The first concerns the impact of post-colonial criticism on the production, reception and appropriation of knowledge within the SHS and beyond. This circumstance implies analysing the theoretical options which allow for a decentring of the Western scientific legacy and for integrating cultural differences, all the while maintaining the possibility for dialogue and for political involvement. It further implies a questioning of the ways in which the SHS have succeeded in counteracting the supposedly unquestionable hierarchies and assumptions which turn subjects into objects of knowledge and reduce the diversity of knowledge to the monoculture of scientific knowledge. A key concept in this context is the way the interrelation of the academic and the everyday use of the concepts of culture and interculturality have shaped new epistemological frameworks and different processes of political mobilization. The second issue has to do with the impact of globalization on the SHS in different contexts. A crucial feature of this issue, related to co-development policies, arises with the consequences of the migration, in North-South, South-North and South-South directions, of academics and of the knowledge produced by the SHS. There is a need to analyse critically themes such as the type of research which the North carries out on the South; the frequence and the impact of journeys by SHS research and theories effected in a North-South, South-North and South-South direction; the effects and meaning of “flight” on the part of intellectuals moving from South to North and of the return to the South of those who studied in the North. It is thus essential to reflect on the type of dialogue undertaken in North-South and South-South relations within the SHS and on the international recognition of the knowledge produced by the SHS of the South. Has there been a more pronounced and more egalitarian exchange in North-South and South-South relations on the part of SHS research centres?
The University of the future: is there a place for the Social and Human Sciences? At the present point of paradigmatic transition, the University appears at the centre of a core option between a societal model governed by economicist parameters and logics, subordinate to market imperatives, and a model able to endow with centrality the concepts of citizenship, democracy and culture. The SHS, areas which defy criteria of utility and mercantilization, cannot but be at the heart of this debate. Do recent attempts to render the Social Sciences lucrative present a threat to the freedom of defining research themes, objects and methods, and to the political and economic independence of their results as well? Where the Humanities are concerned, what place will they have in a University and societal model grounded on a concept of knowledge which is materializable and utilitarian? How can the sense of the SHS task be gauged? From a material perspective, quantifiable in marketable results, or exclusively from the immaterial perspective of the construction of citizenship and democracy? In this context, the challenge facing the SHS is fundamental: are we confronted with the need to relegitimize their very reason for being, in the spectrum of the sciences and in the critical review of the concept of “knowledge” itself, vis-à-vis the University and the public and private funding sources; and, lastly, with regard to the society which interpellates them and is the beneficiary of their scientific production and training? What role can be played by the forms of knowledge issuing from the SHS in the conceiving of an alternative model of university organization, in which the most diverse areas of knowledge, potentialities and missions may exist side by side in a fruitful way and develop in the freedom and autonomy which have always been the assumptions underlying the University’s mission?
Social policies and new public risks: Is it possible to combine complexity with equity? The SHS have been confronted with multiple challenges in the area of social policies, on the one hand, and of the new public risks, on the other, both to a very large extent linked to the contradictory processes of neo-liberal globalization. One of the challenges points towards the temporalities and dynamics which social policies have maintained, in view of horizons of equity, redistribution, security and social justice. Bearing in mind the tension between the capitalist logic of accumulation and the need for its legitimization by means of social policies, it is up to the SHS to rethink the effective role of the State and its capacity to create and implement social policies leading to an emancipatory social transformation. Attention must also be paid to the differences between the North and the South, their social policy models and the specificities of the crises which these face in the context of neo-liberal globalization. It therefore becomes necessary to ponder the articulation of the different levels local, national, regional and global and of the he social and political players involved in formulating and implementing social policies. Analysing this articulation gives rise to challenging the meanings of “global social policy” and of the roles played by the hegemonic trans-national agents who develop social policy models. Such an analysis leads, in addition, to the critical study of the emergence and role of players other than the State, such as NGOs and social movements. New public risks have, in turn, grown as a central concern within the different scientific domains, including that of the SHS. The development of these new areas calls for new forms of institutionalization, anchored in the development of new partnerships and in trans-disciplinary work. In several areas, we have seen the emergence of a series of public concerns, which have been supplemented by new and emerging concepts of risk in environment and public health, food safety, medical technologies, information and communication technologies, natural disasters, industrial accidents, public security, as well as in emerging forms of social vulnerability resulting from economic and institutional change. What is regarded as a risk in different societies and in different social and socio-ecological contexts throughout the world, both in the North and in the South, is subject to variation and inseparable from the new configurations of knowledge which mobilize scientific and specialized knowledge, in addition to local forms of knowledge based on experience. The same may be said of the diversity of players involved in the responses to risks in different places and at different levels.
Governance and contemporary social dynamics: A world of diversities or of homogeneities? Contemporary social theory from economics to sociology bears within it important tensions which reflect significantly on how social, economic and political organization is regarded. Paradigms grounded on the primacy of globalization principles which see in mobilities and in the rationality of non-territorialized players the essential power that conducts societies are challenged by other perspectives which underline the variety of configurations shaping the world. It is essentially a matter of debating whether a principle of convergence of social systems will prevail, with regard to which differentiations are marginal, transitory and merely functional in terms of the dominant centres; or whether there is room for a logic of collective structuring and for differentiated modes of governance. In addition to this debate, an assessment is also needed as to whether the players the plurality of relevant players develop intentional strategies seeking to ensure control over the contexts in which they act, or whether such a capacity will be denied them, given that it belongs to a limited and authoritarian core. If the first hypothesis is given primacy, value is given to the consolidation of institutional forms which enshrine difference and variety. If this is not the case, it becomes a matter of relative lack of interest to consider specific phenomena, since they are not sustainable. The way contemporary capitalism is regarded serves as an example of this issue. In some cases, consideration of this historical form of social organization is limited to the facet currently known as neo-liberal. In other cases, it is important to understand non liberal capitalism and that which developed robust coordination mechanisms, outside the market. The notion of governance then emerges - not very worthy according to the former , and the study of institutions becomes central. It is also along these parameters that it is worth debating whether evolution and social dynamics stem from differentiated social solutions, which are the result of hard work, built upon solid ground, from the local to the regional to the national and to processes of integration, or whether, in contradistinction to this, primacy should be given to an alternative on the same transnational scale, based on principles comparable to those of neo-liberal capitalism.
Globalization, peace and democracy: Are there possible alternatives to violence? In the current context of neo-liberal globalization and of invasions championed by the U.S. and its allies in the name of democracy, there is a pressing need for the SHS to problematize the relation between peace and democracy. First of all, the SHS should question the meanings which both these terms take on in the different political discourses and social, economic and cultural contexts. Secondly, there is a need for reflection on the relations between the different levels (local, regional, national and global) and the dimensions (cultural, structural, inter-subjective) of violence occurring throughout the world. What conditions are necessary for the processes of peace and social democracy? Lastly, the need arises to reflect critically on the relation between peace and democracy. Assuming that liberal, representative democracy does not suffice for the recognition of the interests of several social groups and for the peaceful management of their conflicts, other forms of democracy, such as “radical democracy” and “participatory democracy” have for some time been put forward and practised in a number of contexts both in the global North and global South. But it is also necessary to enquire as to how these other forms of democracy relate to violence and to peace. What does participatory democracy contribute to the peaceful negotiation of violent conflicts? To what extent is social peace not also necessary for the processes of participatory democracy?
Outlining the futures of the different spaces in which the SHS stand at this dawn of a new century means not just analysing their different theoretical, methodological, analytical and intervention trajectories, but also rethinking the different forms of institutionalization of the SHS and how these allow for building and conceiving of new futures. To this end, it is important to discuss these issues not simply internally, in the heart of the scientific community, in the research institutions themselves and associated scientific societies, but also to engage in debate with intermediary entities, research funding agencies acting in the field of the SHS. These are not just organizations whose decisions, notably in terms of funding, have vital implications for these processes. They also play a significant role in intermediating researchers, political power and society at large. If, on the one hand, they consult the scientific community in defining the main research agendas and the main theoretical and methodological breakthroughs, as they are in a position to do in this Colloquium, they also put forward to that community objectives to which society wishes to find a response. This session wishes to contribute towards highlighting the above dialogue, creating a space for debate on the future of the SHS (or even on the SHS of the future?), where these different forms of institutionalization may also be debated with representatives of intermediary organizations, in the light of the issues raised by the Colloquium and of strategic options in research policy. It is also hoped that this debate can be conducted not just from the dominant viewpoint of the “European Research Area” but that it should go beyond it and consider different research landscapes and here, too, address North-South issues within the SHS.
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