The ‘Relevance’ Question

The relevance of social sciences in the wider world of action, one bey­ond the academy and its sphere of knowledge production, has been the subject of long-standing debates among social scientists. Dipankar Sinha’s new book revisits these extensive debates that have taken place in the last few decades, and does so with the purpose of locating social sciences within the context of neo-liberalism and its configuration of academia, knowledge production and expression. In addition, the book seeks to delineate some of the lineages of the global North’s hegemony in knowledge production in institutional academic settings in the non-West as well as the “elusive” search for alternate “templates” in these parts.

The book’s foremost contribution is in bringing together a wide range of writing and thinking about the development and career of social sciences in institutional academia and the field’s relationship to the wider world. In fact, the bibliography gathered together here can ­offer an excellent starting point for those interested in thinking and reading critical literature on social sciences as a field.