Abstract
Seeing the World offers much food for thought for US social scientists studying specific countries/regions, as well as for non-US social scientists whose research must contend with theories and methods coming from the USA. The book effectively prompts a much-needed conversation on what can be done to promote regionally focused – and more public and cosmopolitan – social science. The USA inevitably looms large in such a conversation because it is arguably the epistemic center of the world, setting global standards and benchmarks of excellence. Laying bare how knowledge production is organized inside top US research universities, the book invites both US and non-US researchers to critically examine how the existing configuration of the social sciences and area studies can, and should, be transformed in today’s globalizing world.
Specifically, the book examines rich interview data on how relevant administrators in top US research universities – directors and associate directors of area studies centers, chairs of economics, political science, and sociology departments, and deans or vice provosts of international/global affairs – manage intersections between the social sciences and area studies. Perhaps the most significant pattern that emerged from the data is the organizational dominance of disciplinary departments over area studies centers vis-a-vis the epistemic dominance of abstract theory and method over concrete knowledge. Such dominance of the social sciences over area studies is also coterminous with the organizational focus on the reproduction of departmental prestige against a backdrop of intense status competition in US higher education. Social science departments thus encourage US-national or country/region-neutral research, the safest way to pursue theoretical and methodological contributions as the measures of disciplinary excellence, while eschewing country/region-specific research that produces highly contextualized knowledge.
Although Seeing the World offers a penetrating analysis, I would like to suggest two lines of inquiry that the book could have pursued to strengthen its analysis as well as its recommendations for promoting regionally focused social science. Simply put, I suggest that it is crucial to critically reflect on the relationship between the organization and the content of regionally focused social science, on the one hand, and the transnational circuits of knowledge production involving both US and non-US social scientists, on the other hand. These lines of inquiry may well fall outside the scope of the book, but they are nonetheless worth exploring because they have the potential to help sharpen the book’s overall argument and further enrich the insights it has to offer to those who seek a more productive relationship between the social sciences and area studies – a new and different way of seeing the world – on a global scale.
To begin with, while the book focuses on the organization of social science departments and area studies centers, it does not pay sufficient attention to the content of resultant research output: the book is primarily concerned about how top US research universities make knowledge rather than what kind of knowledge they make, as indicated by its subtitle. This analytical blind spot somewhat obscures the book’s overall aim, to promote regionally focused social science capable of contributing to critical discussions in the public sphere as well as in the larger ecology of knowledge production, now increasingly dominated by non-academic actors like media pundits and think tanks. As the book forcefully points out, in today’s ‘post-truth’ world, it has become more urgent than ever for university-based social scientists to participate in public discussions of international/global affairs filled with deliberate spins, omissions, and distortions. But here, clarifying what kind of regionally focused social science can make public contributions is a prerequisite for exploring how to organizationally reconfigure the social sciences and area studies to that end.
Take, for example, regionally focused social science that comparatively examines democracies, citizenship practices, and developmental trajectories in Asia. If this kind of regionally focused social science is done in the typical fashion of comparative politics or comparative-historical sociology, it is most likely to speak only to university-based social scientists who want to advance theories of democratization, state–society relations, and developmental regimes, glossing over important empirical details and hence adding very little to country/region-specific knowledge. Such regionally focused social science is also likely to produce books and articles about Asian countries that cite very few works by ‘native’ researchers and, at most, simply use them as empirical evidence as if they had nothing important to offer theoretically or methodologically. I doubt that Seeing the World advocates this kind of regionally focused social science – neither public nor cosmopolitan – that seems unable to participate meaningfully in public discussions of international/global affairs whose scope and scale now extend beyond the USA.
Importantly, this undesirable kind of regionally focused social science can spread to the rest of the world because of the structural position of top US research universities in the global field of knowledge production. This is where the second line of inquiry intersects with the first, helping to extend the scope of the book’s organizational analysis beyond US higher education. For example, top social sciences programs in the USA attract graduate students from various regions in the world, many of whom return to their home countries after having internalized the US disciplinary worldviews. Given the growing institutionalization of world university rankings, these US-trained researchers then try to publish their research findings in the US-based disciplinary journals. In so doing, they continue to be disciplined to prioritize contributions to theory and method over country/region-specific knowledge while simultaneously legitimating and reinforcing the transnational circuits of the US epistemic hegemony. Thus, the organizational infrastructures of regionally focused social science at US universities are distributed across national borders.
Moreover, the disciplinary effects of these organizational infrastructures, combined with world university rankings and other mechanisms of institutional isomorphism, are potentially detrimental to the publicness of the social sciences in the rest of the world. Because more and more non-US social scientists have to use the English and disciplinary languages to publish their research findings, they end up spending less time talking and writing about urgent public issues concerning their home countries/regions in their native languages, depriving themselves of opportunities to engage with their publics.
So, what kind of regionally focused social science is necessary for seeing the world newly and differently, and how should the social sciences and area studies be organizationally reconfigured to that end? For the first question, I agree with the answer implicit in Seeing the World – we need regionally focused social science that is both public and cosmopolitan. As the book emphasizes, the publicness of such social science is vital because the world will be better off if people in the USA are better informed about the rest of the world, given how much the US economy and government influence the lives of people in other countries. Because the arts-and-sciences core at US universities offers courses that are required for graduation, social science departments will do well by reappraising the importance of teaching country/region-specific knowledge that can effectively inform undergraduate students – their most immediate public. This public kind of regionally focused social science is also necessarily cosmopolitan, for the production of country/region-specific knowledge forces social scientists to take seriously foreign societies on their own terms apart from the US disciplinary debates. Indeed, such a cosmopolitan orientation on the part of professors can best inspire students at US universities to become more open and respectful toward different peoples in the world.
For the second question, I only have a hunch – and a hope – that international associations like the International Sociological Association (ISA) can offer requisite platforms. This is because the ISA, founded under UNESCO, has the potential to facilitate the cosmopolitan kind of regionally focused social science, wherein US-based researchers studying particular countries/regions can collaborate with non-US researchers from those countries/regions on equal terms. As a UNESCO-associated organization, the ISA embraces the principle of equal national representation and, in this regard, it is quite unique, compared with the US-based associations in the social sciences, such as the International Studies Association and the Association for Asian Studies, which recently began to organize regional conferences outside the USA. If US and non-US researchers collaborate on equal and cosmopolitan terms through the ISA and other international platforms, they may be able to produce country/region-specific knowledge that is less constrained by the US disciplinary debates and hence more capable of addressing the urgent concerns of their publics.
Ultimately, answers for these two questions are open-ended because they fundamentally depend on how US and non-US social scientists, as well as other stakeholders of higher education around the world, will collectively respond to the questions. In this regard, Seeing the World makes an invaluable contribution, alerting our attention to the difficult but important challenges and calling for global efforts to realize a new and different way of seeing the world.