Creative Social Research: Rethinking Theories and Methods and the Calling of an Ontological Epistemology of Participation

Modern social research, as we know it now, emerged as a part of rise of modern social sciences in the context of transition to modernity. As an enterprise of modernity social research reflected some of the foundational assumptions of modernity. For example, the project of sociology was closely tied to the project of nation-state, embodying in its epistemology methodological nationalism. Social research also proceeded within the bounded logic of disciplines. But all these assumptions of modernity as well as their social manifestations have been subjected to fundamental criticisms and interrogations in the last decades. Both anti-systematic socio-cultural movements and critical discursive movements and new movements of ideas have challenged the modernist paradigms of pathology and normality as well as distinction between ontology and epistemology. In the background of critiques of modernity, social movements and processes of transformations the present essay submits some proposals for a creative and critical social research. It explores ways of moving beyond mere denunciations and critiques and embodying transformational theories and methods which would facilitate creative and critical research. The essay also calls for a new vocation of social research by pleading for a simultaneous engagement in activism and creative understanding, fieldwork and philosophical reflections, ontological self-cultivation and epistemic labour of learning. Ananta Kumar Giri originally from Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai, India is currently a Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at Institute of Sociology, Albert Ludwig Univesitat, Freiburg, Germany. The present essay builds upon author’s introduction to his recently edited volume, Creative Social Research: Rethinking Theories and Methods (Lanham, MD, USA: Lexington Books, 2004 & New Delhi. Sage, 2004. This has benefited from presentations in many different places, most recently at the Ernest Gellenr seminar series in Prague and Institute of Sociology, Freiburg, and my grateful to thanks are due to participants in all these places of dialogues, particularly to Professors Chitta Ranjan Das , Peter Skalnik and Hermann Shwengel.