CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF SOCIAL SYSTEMS
SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES
JAWAHARLAL NEHRU UNIVERSITY
cordially invites you to the
THURSDAY COLLOQUIUM
on
21th September 2023 at SSS II,
Room No. 013, 3:00pm - 5:00pm
What does social reality look like?
A beginner’s introduction to Roy Bhaskar’s critical realism
Abstract: The social sciences today, especially sociology, has to compete with social discourses, images and arguments put forth in the public domain by various interest groups. Furthermore, there is a theoretical lull caused by the many schools of thought in the social sciences where each of them defined social reality as exclusively subjective, objective or situational, without a metatheory to draw them together. The confusion has also led to the postmodern denial of any such thing as reality. Constructionist thinking explains scientific facts as socially manufactured. Can we even talk about social reality in this context? Yes, says, Roy Bhaskar, the English philosopher of Indian origin, who argues that there is a concept-independent social reality. What are the grounds for his assertion and what does he mean by social reality? Roy Bhaskar suggests that social reality is not what you immediately experience through your senses. Society/social reality is unmanifest and not visible because it consists of generative mechanisms and their relations which can be discerned only in terms of their effects. Marx did not understand the mechanism of capitalism by observing a factory. How then do we go about studying society? This talk aims to provide an introduction to critical realism, and an exposition of its significance for both the scientific and social scientific understanding of reality. The implications of critical realism for social research and analysis as well as its limitations will be discussed.
V.Sujatha is professor of sociology at the Centre for the Study of Social Systems, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her fields of interest are sociology of knowledge, sociology of health and medicine. Her publications include the books: ‘Health by the people’ (2003), ‘Medical pluralism in contemporary India’ (Co-editor Leena Abraham; 2012), ‘Sociology of health and medicine. New Perspectives’ (2014) and ‘Global capital and social difference’ (ed. 2020), apart from research articles in refereed international journals and writings in Tamil. She received the UGC-DAAD fellowship for fieldwork in Germany, the ICSSR-NIHSS fellowship for research at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Her reports on ICSSR projects on neoliberalism and nutritional status in South Africa and India (2018) and on social inequality and access to medicine in rural Madhya Pradesh (2021) sought to link conceptual studies in health with policy initiatives. Her ongoing work examines the relation between experience, knowledge and expertise in medicine with specific reference to clinical practice.
