In a new article published with the recently founded journal Political Anthropological Research on International Social Sciences (PARISS), Monique Beerli and her co-authors analyze what it means to write like a social scientist in the 21st century. Raising important questions about current academic practices, their origins, and their inner politics, “The Art of Writing Social Sciences. Disrupting the Current Politics of Style” is an invitation to do and write science differently.
Placing the substantive and stylistic guidelines of dominant journals in the social sciences at the core of their critique, Beerli et al. examine forms of power imbued in the naturalization of standards on how to write a scientific article. Though seemingly innocuous and banal, the authors argue that stylistic guidelines, from word limits to the “one argument” rule, act as forms of symbolic violence that structure the scientific field.
Although the “globalization” of the social sciences might have led to the transnational circulation of national disciplinary traditions and a pluralization of academic styles, it has instead resulted in the imposition of a strangely singular and harmonized mode of doing the social sciences.
The denaturalization of the taken-for-granted rules structuring how academics write, how they judge the value of their peers’ work, and ultimately what is validated as “science” then brings Beerli et al. to imagine what an alternative art of writing social sciences might look like.
Framing the article as an “anti-manual” guiding the type of academic style and content PARISS wishes to cultivate parallel to a number of running themes, the authors-editors commit to disrupting the current politics of style in the name of a more pluriversal social science.
PARISS Collective. “The Art of Writing Social Sciences: Disrupting the Current Politics of Style.” P.A.R.I.S.S. 1, no. 1 (2020): 9-38.
Monique Beerli is presently a Swiss National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow and a Research Associate at the Global Governance Centre.