The Elgar Dialogues Series
Invitation to submit a book proposal for a ‘Dialogue’ in social sciences, humanities, with an interdisciplinary perspective.
Series Editor: Frank Moulaert, frank.moulaert@kuleuven.be, Juan-Luis Klein klein.juan-luis@uqam.ca, Marisol Garcia Cabeza marisolgarcia@ub.edu, Chiara Tornaghi ac0952@coventry.ac.uk and Marcella Aruda marcellasmparruda@gmail.com
This new Edward Elgar series encourages scientific debate in a dialogical way.
It invites scientists, especially social and political scientists, researchers and activists working in related disciplines, to enter into dialogue with each other on current societal imaginaries and challenges. This can be done both within each scientist’s discipline or in an interdisciplinary way. The dialogue should bring to the fore complementary, divergent, or opposing scientific visions and arrive at relative consensus or epistemologically supported dissent or complementarity.
The series seeks to promote dialogical scientific debate leading to shared analytical conclusions and recommendations for public action and policy. Too often, scientific exchanges are limited to a comparison of approaches or slight adaptations of an author’s or a scientific community’s ‘own approach’ to critical remarks. Different factors explain such timid interactions.
First off, clashes between social scientists on different ways of looking at the world, assumptions about what the world is, and how we can understand and know about it – in other words, wars on paradigms – are not held in open and accessible fields of debate; on the contrary, they are mostly led in courteous, albeit occasionally poisonous, arenas that often shy away from pin-pointing the exact source of conflict or even conceal dissenting voices.
Another factor is that ‘knowledge’ produced by elite universities and established private or public research institutes and networks (often supported by corporate capital as part of their CSR strategy) is too easily understood by large parts of public opinion and policy makers as ‘absolute verity’. For who would doubt the conclusions coming from prominent research centres? Yet there is increasing evidence of path dependency within the social sciences, whereby assumptions that have drowned out opposing voices are set in stone and left unquestioned.
At the same time, ‘offshore science’ often presents solid alternative views on societal challenges, their engines, and ways forward. Such contributions are seldom taken seriously; at best, they are considered as correctives to dominant scientific discourse. This dubious treatment of ‘correctives’ is often the consequence of power games played by self-protective paradigmatic communities rather than the result of solid scientific evaluation.
Moreover, not only is the war of paradigms or scientific exchanges structured and ‘verified’ by power relations. Too often, scientific exchanges between ‘honest equals’ lack a proper dialogical structure, failing to build common ground for a clear explanation and comparison of epistemological stances, theoretical perspectives, and research as well action methodology.
To break through this lack of scientific dialogue is to move towards dialogical epistemologies, to bring different approaches (theories, methodologies, thematic priorities) into dialogue with each other. This series seeks to contribute to such a dialogue.
The first book in this series, Social Innovation and Socio-political Transformation in Dialogue, deals with the fragile bridge between social innovation and community development on the one hand and socio-political transformation on the other. In particular, it addresses the bridges and discrepancies between social and political change movements. Three authors working in different subfields of social science and humanities explain their viewpoint, enter into live dialogue and, with the help of challenging voices, manage to produce a synthesis of the analytical insights and public action proposals to make the bridge between social innovation and socio-political transformation.
Themes for dialogical debates are numerous and could include: the struggle of social scientists to come to a real ‘socialisation’ of socio-ecological systems; the meaning of the social in socio-technical systems; the frustration of political scientists towards public management theories overruling theories of the political, political struggle, and transformation; the positionings for and against Action Research (AR), with hard scientists voicing their suspicions and critiques of AR being subjective and denying ‘hard results’ and AR researchers arguing the contrary; the role of informal agency and institutions in economy and society; adaptive governance versus deep democracy; the growing scientific and educational gap between SSH and STEM and the fragile relationships between social innovation and socio-political transformation; different approaches to solving the food crisis; the role of agriculture in political ecology; different views on small scale agriculture and gardening; the place of the social in political ecology; and so on, ….
If you share this concern and desire real and interdisciplinary debate in social science – not simply listening to other opinions and politely persisting on the ‘one and only track’ – please email the series editors, explaining your interest in preparing a manuscript for a book in the Elgar Dialogues series.
A typical book structure would logically be as follows:
Chapter 1. Introduction: the topic of the dialogue. Example: The Social in Socio-Technical systems (STS). Short explanation of different views on the place of ‘the social’ in socio-technical systems. For example, instrumental social behaviour vs. multi-rational and diverse human behaviour within complex social relations. Short explanation of the different epistemological stances and underlying ontology. Introduction to the debate.
Chapters 2, 3, 4: Different stances
Examples:
Chapter 2. The genesis of STS from an innovation systems perspective
Chapter 3. Instrumental policy making and adaptive governance: which view of collective agency?
Chapter 4. Institutional dynamics within STS: the role of cultural diversity and power relations
Chapter 5 could be a focused debate on diverse ontologies of STS, role of institutions, etc.
Chapter 6 Conclusions: convergences and divergences – Lessons for collective action and public policy.
Ideally the book should be based on a live confrontation at a seminar between the authors following a similar logic to the book structure: problem statement by a moderator or editor; ‘paper’ presentation of the different perspectives; live debate on key issues; working towards a synthesis.
Each book of this series will have a distinct feel and style, according to the type of dialogue and debate upon which it is based. However, tying these dialogues together in this series is a bold and clear scientific exchange that cuts to the heart of today’s scientific, social, economic, and political challenges and discusses concrete possibilities for addressing these.
Authors interested in submitting a proposal for the series are invited to contact the series editors: Frank Moulaert, frank.moulaert@kuleuven.be, Juan-Luis Klein klein.juan-luis@uqam.ca, Marisol Garcia Cabeza marisolgarcia@ub.edu, Chiara Tornaghi ac0952@coventry.ac.uk and Marcella Aruda marcellasmparruda@gmail.com