Emancipatory Social Science Today. Presentazione

In a historical phase marked by a growing crisis in the social sciences’ ability to position themselves in a meaningful relationship with the worlds, issues and contexts of which society is composed, and by a tendency to depoliticise critical knowledge – often caged inside mechanisms intended to favour public marketability more than actual usefulness or incisiveness – social research today is increasingly faced by the challenge of concretely influencing social processes. This is the case, it must be said, within a scenario witnessing a more or less sharp decline in public universities and a more visibly precarious condition of the social researcher. A gradual weakening has occurred in the ability to establish forms of communication, exchange and, in some cases, true alliances and social actions with the agents and worlds that should be the preferential subjects with whom to create a dialogue while working towards a critical theory of society. This is not to say that consistent traces have not appeared, in many countries, of critical social research approaches that seem to newly aspire to a leading role. In the United States, E. O. Wright has proposed an “emancipatory” social science expressly intended to legitimise a critique of neoliberal capitalism and to generate academic knowledge capable of opposing new and emerging forms of exploitation. In Latin America, increasing space is given in universities to the “ecologies” that define fields of knowledge, with radically multidisciplinary educational and research projects tied to issues raised by citizens, following practices of interaction not unlike the idea of “social democratic research” advanced in Mumbai by A. Appadurai. In Europe as well, B. do Sousa Santos, L. Boltanski and many others are attempting to give a future outlook to the forms of critical sociology developed in the mid-20th century. This article introduces the contents of the Special Issue and provides inputs for future research in the field.