Making Society, Knowing Society
June 3-4, 2005 University of California, San Diego

Conference Description

The Science Studies Program at the University of California, San Diego is organizing a workshop on the social sciences as sciences, as histories, and as politics. The social sciences have not been sufficiently analyzed from a Science Studies perspective, although they are increasingly becoming a central site for investigation among our colleagues and students.

Focusing on the themes of proof and persuasion in the social sciences, this workshop will provide a forum for discussion of the following questions:

• what is the nature of evidence in the social sciences? How are facts created, stabilized, and destablized?
• how are causal claims made, and what makes these arguments effective?
• how do we understand the historicity and cultural specificities/contingencies of the social sciences?
• recognizing the broad diversity of methodological and theoretical approaches (i.e. epistemic cultures) in the social sciences, can we identify specific features that bind them together (e.g. Ian Hacking's notion of historical ontology)?
• who produces social science knowledge and how are boundaries between expertise and lay knowledge created and sustained? How does this boundary work elide the central role non-experts play in creating and transforming social science theories and putting them into practice?

To narrow our discussion, we would like to focus our attention on two major issues: 1) the character of scientific arguments in the social sciences, and 2) social hierarchies of knowledge production and policy implementation. With regard to the first issue, we wish to consider how particular ideas and specific practices in the social sciences make their way into policy and into public consciousness. How are plausible claims made convincing politically? While scholars of science studies have learned a great deal from approaches focusing on networks, enrollment, and translation (Michel Callon, Bruno Latour, John Law), we have spent less time examining the relationship between the character of argumentation, forms of evidence, and the rhetorical or strategic projects of making theories into political tools.

The second issue concerns the question of who makes social science. We believe that we need to think more provocatively about the role of social movements, political activists and state agents in framing social science questions, exposing ethical quandaries, and demanding participation in their own "subject formation." For years scholars in science studies have debated human versus nonhuman agency. We wish to ask different questions. Whose knowledge and whose labor counts in making social science and social policy? Do only elites make science and create policy? Or, do the contributions of subaltern actors also command our attention?

The format of the workshop will promote discussion and dialogue among participants. Papers will be pre-circulated, and panelists will be limited to brief introductory remarks in order to allow time for sustained debates around common issues, questions, and themes. This workshop is the first in a series of conferences sponsored by an NSF Research and Training Grant awarded to the Science Studies Program (sciencestudies.ucsd.edu/news.html).