How would you take your social sciences?

For a few weeks now, we have been reading various commentaries on the future of social sciences in general and political science in Turkey in particular, and expressing our similar or opposing views. 

As an academic who conducts studies at the intersection of social and human sciences, I also wanted to write about this topic on a few points. Because, even before the debate on “how social sciences should be studied,” we need to answer the question of why social sciences exist. 

In recent weeks, we have been caught up in questions such as “should social sciences be studied theoretically or developed based on data,” or “is qualitative more essential or is quantitative better.” Frankly, I think the answer to these questions changes from period to period as an element of popularity. However, beyond the answer to these questions, the question is: What is at the foundation of the Social Sciences?  

The field was institutionalized within the dynamics of modernity in the 19th century, but the questions it asks have been asked since antiquity, albeit on a different plane and scope. In short, these questions are fundamentally trying to understand society and the structures and institutions that develop in connection with it. However, let us not think that this effort to understand consists of a simple desire for identification. For a long time, the identification of questions and problems and the search for solutions to them have gone hand in hand, so to speak. In short, the social science of the modern era is, whether one likes it or not, tightly bound to politics, and the best result in the picture that emerges when you sever that bond is a Q1 publication cited without being read and the metrics it presents. In other words, it does not seem consistent to me to both want a social science that “has no concerns” and “does not rock the boat,” and to criticize an academic structure that is molded according to the norms of a system that the science should be concerned with. Then this issue of not rocking the boat becomes such a major norm that, let alone academic writing, even when an academic says something about the society they live in, everyone suddenly freezes. Why? Because we have long forgotten our intellectual side. Let us allow some people to be public intellectuals without knowing new-generation programming and without analyzing big data. (I am not saying there is no one who does both, let this not be misunderstood either).   

We are part of a global and local academic community: We write articles instead of books so that our performance scores come out well, we want them to be published in places with good indices and to receive many citations. In a structure where thousands of dollars are demanded for open access, we pay money to buy our own production. We do the peer reviews required for the continuation of that structure for free. In a system where funds allocated to social sciences are gradually decreasing, we write projects that all sound the same to be supported by those dwindling funds.  With these articles we write and these projects we carry out, how many of us are really trying to understand a problem, fulfilling the requirements of social science, and not missing the starting point? These questions and all the answers to be given to these questions, whether we like it or not, also require a stance. I suppose I do not really believe in a social science that has no concerns. 

I wish ease to social (and human) scientists who have a concern.