Social science research in India, or at least much of it, has been characterized by a banal reiteration of an already produced reiteration. This lack of criticality stems from an academic space that privileges the extant dominant ideas that suit the visions of a dominant ruling class. The dullness and incoherence of academic spaces in the country are a result of the banality of curricular knowledge. For curriculum is in many ways carceral. In other words, it hinders one’s ability to develop one’s critical perception, restricts one’s thought process into a curricular dogma, restricts one from going beyond the curricular, and hence, keeps one engaged within the confinement of the curricular prison. The very notion of docility is inculcated into the minds of the students by the syllabi that they must follow. Research in the social sciences genuflects on the establishment’s non-critical approach, essential for the production and perpetuation of the dominant class ideology and interest to maintain its hegemony. This carcerality leads to the passivity of researchers who are only recipients of hegemonic knowledge.

The researcher is not trained or rather is not intended to be trained, in thinking beyond given formats.  The space to develop an imagination transcending the limits of set parameters does not exist. By subscribing to the curricular knowledge, the researcher is only trained to repeat, thus ensuring the perpetuation of rote knowledge.  One’s research is thus confined to a set practice in steps such as in the dominant practice of sociology- research question, sample size, findings – with no engagement with questions of sociology of knowledge or philosophy of methods, or even a serious engagement with existing scholarship.  Such research thus remains an uncritical and unoriginal piece, vacuous for the most part. Such research morphs into an ideal instrument for the dominant class to perpetuate their hegemonic control. In other words, the research itself becomes, as Louis Althusser will go on to argue, an ideological apparatus of the state (Althusser 1970).

The quest for producing original research of quality among researchers has been further diminished by a barbaric and mandatory requirement of publishing research papers to get a r teaching job in colleges or universities across the country. It is not necessary here to explain that the plight of unemployment in the country has created a dire situation, particularly for young researchers. The pressure to publish or perish is real (Patgiri 2022).

The quantification of research excellence, where excellence is measured by the number of research papers one has published rather than the quality, has camouflaged the hyper-production of substandard, or even unoriginal, academic research practices. The research scenario, especially among the young academicians, and more precisely the doctoral scholars, has led to an assignment of uniform numerical values against each publication, regardless of whatever its academic value might be. This in turn has resulted in the booming of many dubious and cloned journals that take a publication fee for a quick publication of the papers, that too, without any peer-reviewing process. Thus, the quantification of research excellence has, firstly, created a sense of unhealthy competition among peers, and secondly, nourished a conducive atmosphere for uncritical and un-original research environments to proliferate. This proliferation is in turn fueled by the strict adherence of researchers to a curricular dogma, as mentioned earlier.

The necessity of serious criticality in doing academic research cannot be emphasised enough in the current context. A blind analysis of information is not sufficient to produce knowledge. Our empirical knowledge about the surroundings or what in sociology is called common sense knowledge (Chaudhuri and Thakur 2018) is derived from our own sensory experiences – how we perceive the world around us, how we see, hear, smell and taste things. Our ontological understanding of the episteme creates perception. This perception varies from person to person according to one’s social location and training. Without perception undergoing scrutiny, critical academic research cannot come to the forefront, and without criticality, research in social sciences is nothing but a tool for the hegemonic practice of the dominant class ideology.

References:

Althusser, Louis. 1970. Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.(Notes towards an Investigation). La Pensee.

Chaudhuri, Maitrayee and Manish Thakur. (eds.). 2018. Doing Theory: Locations, Hierarchies and Disjunctions. Hyderbad: Orient Blackswan.

Patgiri, Rituparna. 2022. The Pressure to Publish in Social Sciences in India: Issues of Access and Information. Doing Sociology. https://doingsociology.org/2022/07/19/the-pressure-to-publish-in-social-sciences-in-india-issues-of-access-and-information-rituparna-patgiri/

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Niloy Pratim Kashyap is a research scholar in the Department of Sociology at Tezpur University. He can be reached at prniloy63@gmail.com.