2011 Theme

S3F 2011 Theme: Are the Social Sciences Good for Anything? The Little we Know and the Lot we do not

The worst economic recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s hit the world economy about three years ago and most members of the economic profession were not only shocked by its arrival, they also had no idea how to act to reduce its damages. Almost four years later the OECD economies are still struggling with the aftermath of the crisis while there is no consensus among academic economists about what should be done to bring about high and stable economic growth.

Half a year ago a sequence of popular revolts started to shake the oppressive political regimes that had been ruling various Islamic countries for decades, bringing them down one after the other; they continue to these days. These massive uprisings caught the Western diplomatic and military experts completely by surprise. Political scientists, sociologists and international relation experts around the world are scrambling to understand a political phenomenon of epochal relevance while it happens because they had not been able to see it coming and do not really know what is driving it.

Social relations networks such as Facebook and Twitter end up attracting hundreds of millions of users worldwide, establishing new social norms and patterns of interactions in a number of months, or a few years at most, while most psychologists, anthropologists and other social scientists are essentially unable to explain and model, let alone predict, which among them will be successful – and how and why - and which will founder and be forgotten in a matter of weeks.

Are the social sciences good for anything?

Well, they are and, matter of fact, they do understand economic and political crisis, as well as social trends or manias, a lot more clearly and precisely than the popular media report and our earlier provocative statements acknowledge. Social phenomena, though, are much more complex than natural ones and a lot less controllable and manageable by coordinated human action, hence the often heard requests of “solving” such crises, or even “preventing” them, are misplaced.

Understanding complex social phenomena is a challenging interdisciplinary process. Still, it can be intellectually fascinating, collectively useful and personally entertaining, even amusing, as well as understandable to the non-specialists. This is what the Salamanca Social Sciences Festival (S3F) aims at doing: bringing together some of the most brilliant social science researchers worldwide to expose, illustrate, debate and even criticize their own findings in front of, and together with, the intellectually curious Spanish and European citizenry.

Beginning this year, every year in early October, we will be bringing to Salamanca about fifty top social scientists and practitioners, from different disciplines, ways of life, intellectual approaches, countries and what not. For three days we will ask them to focus their intellectual powers on a variety of topics - ranging from the role of diamonds in facilitating sexual intercourse to that of central bankers in alleviating financial crisis – and to debate such topics with the students of the universities of Salamanca, of Spain and, hopefully, of Europe, as well as with other academic colleagues, professionals or just intellectually curious citizens.

What’s the goal for which we are doing all this? Simple: showing in corpore vili that, after all, the social sciences are good for something.