A field of European social science? The relations between European social sciences and European integration

• In Event: 1541 - Race, Colonialism and Fields in Comparative Historical Sociology

Abstract

This article empirically argues that during the last app 30 years the relations between EUs political intuitions and the social sciences have been reconfigured through a twofold process. One the one hand, despite recent setbacks, EU has expanded its research policies to also include the social sciences. On the other a European field of social sciences is slowly build up both in form of institution and practices. Hence, the empirical analysis shed light on a central theoretical question for political sociological analysis of European integration process and serves as an practical example of a political sociological analysis of what Georgakakis and Weisbein termed ‘analysis form above and from below’ by applying Bourdieu’s concept of homological structures to understand how relations between European political fields and emerging European social fields are built through actions of specific agents. (Georgakakis and Weisbein 2010). What I propose here is that the last roughly 30 years has witnessed a emergence of a European field of social science and that this emergence is closely related to processes of EU research policies and the various ways social scientists has entangled with it in their pursued of build European wide social sciences institutions and knowledge. The article thus further our understanding of how changes in funding institutions and policies entangles with and has been shaped by and has shaped European social scientists striving to produce social sciences knowledge, and eventually led to the constitutions of what can be understood as a relatively autonomous European field of social science.

Author

• Kristoffer Kropp, Roskilde University