230176 SE Enacting the social: How the social sciences participate in "making up" contemporary societies (2011W)

The aim of this seminar is to reflect in an in depth manner how social sciences and contemporary societies are coproduced. In particular we will explore how different models and methods give shape to our understanding of social orders and potential societal developments and thus intervene how we live and make sense of our environment. Simultaneously models and methods are framed by societal expectations towards social science.

We will ask how social sciences - rather marginalized fields by Science and Technology Studies so far - can be observed and analyzed.
We will discuss how "the social" becomes a scientific entity, and how social scientific knowledge "in-the-making" is formed by practices, by "instruments", by locations, and last but not least by the humans who are making use of them, who interact, share some premises on their work, and decide which kinds of research questions are interesting enough to pursue.

In doing so, this seminar offers glances at the plurality of contemporary epistemic cultures and their respective methodological and discursive practices in social sciences. It is planned to focus on fields like economics, sociology, anthropology and psychology.