World SSH Net Mission

World Social Sciences and Humanities Network (World SSH Net)


Mission

International scientific collaborations in the era of globalization face the paradox of a growing need for globally shared knowledge and at the same time of exclusive knowledge concepts and discourse structures that make many forms of conceptualization and theorizing as well as social knowledge practices invisible.

• The era of globalization has not only increased the demand for shared and inclusive knowledge, but it has also led to a commercialization and privatization of knowledge.
• Globalization necessitates internationalized knowledge; nevertheless, this knowledge is created through ethnocentric analytical frameworks within nationally confined societies.
• Globalizing societies necessitate the understanding of the peculiar social and cultural prerequisites of social thought in all societies allowing for a diversity of interpretations of the global; nevertheless, globalized social science presupposes that social thought is unaffected by social, political and cultural contexts.
• Global phenomena necessitate the reflexive complementation of multiple interpretations of the social while they have been historically constituted on the reflexive hegemony of Western world views.
• Reflections about the globalizing social require a global dialogue among all social scientists from which, however, the majority is rendered invisible.

The “World Social Sciences and Humanities Network” aims at scientific thinking beyond the theoretical frameworks of confined societies and at networking scholars beyond their disciplinary boundaries for bottom up constructed international discourses about the challenges of world social sciences and humanities and therefore promotes:

• Nonethnocentric research and publications about the epistemological, cultural, organizational, institutional, and educational challenges of a multipolar research world;
• Nonhegemonic international discourses inviting academics from all global regions to hold dialogues that may promote a true debate among multiple concepts and cultures of social thought and academic work;
• The education of young academics preparing for international collaboration with multiple concepts of science and a diversity of academic cultures.