Fernanda Beigel

During 2020 and 2021, I had the honor to serve as chair of the UNESCO Advisory Committee that prepared the Recommendation on Open Science draft project, approved at the 41st UNESCO Conference in November 2021. The discussions with the 30 experts who were part of the committee, representing different regions of the world, soon showed us the complexity of the idea of openness in the context of...

In 1996, former ISA president Immanuel Wallerstein called on the international community to restructure the social sciences in the well-known Gulbenkian Commission Report. The report questioned the development of these disciplines in the nineteenth century, when they accompanied the development of European colonial states, turning their particular experiences and observations into a supposedly universal theoretical construction. The consolidation and institutionalisation...

Over the past 40 years, the geography of science has been re-mapped, through a publication system which progressively established a “universal” language and writing style, and through a mainstream circuit which built prestige for a handful of centers of excellence and certain disciplines, relegating to the periphery entire scientific communities whose work did not appear in journals linked to the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI, now...

In his attempt to reduce the sociology of sociology to an ideological exercise, Piotr Sztompka builds a cocktail of academic dependency, intellectual imperialism, and colonialism within sociology, which are lumped together, uncritically naturalized and peremptorily discarded by reducing them to ‘a reflection of those more fundamental external divisions in our globalized society’ (2011: 389). Leaving aside Sztompka’s disrespectful language...