Studying the new world as the old one is dying: Public sociology in Next System Studies

• In Event: 30259 - Public Sociology and Engaged Scholarship Part I

Abstract

How does one study the next system? Since 2014, when multiple ASA presidents joined in the international launch of the Next System Project (NSP), a growing network of scholars have taken on “the study of the relationships between systemic crises, systemic movements, next system design, and system change” (nextsystem.gmu.edu). Yet much has shifted since 2014. Where NSP co-chair Gar Alperovitz and his colleagues had argued then that we were living amidst a long period of “punctuated stagnation and decline,” allowing for plural experimentation and an eventual scaling up and out of next system alternatives, today the assemblers of Next System Studies (NSS) are faced with a world system that appears to be beginning to cascade into collapse. This paper speaks from my position as director of Next System Studies at George Mason University. Having built a pilot program that centers the knowledge production of those who have been building many kinds of socio-economic, -ecological, -political, -constitutional, and -technological next system alternatives, I and my colleagues are now asking whether our time for prefiguration has run out. In much of the world we are faced with the task of mobilizing academia to aid in the urgent reconstruction of society at the same moment in which academic and other major institutions are under authoritarian attack. Taking our scholarship seriously, how must we rethink the epistemologies of next system design? This paper wrestles with that question, drawing on contemporary and historical cases to argue for a particular role for public sociology in moving academia —and the relationship between academic institutions and communities— into the very center of Next System Studies.

Author

• Ben Manski, George Mason University