Provincializing the Social Sciences

International Workshop June 4-6, 2015, at Freie Universität. The three-day workshop departs from the insight that the much lamented "crisis" of area studies has to be understood and coupled with as a larger "crisis" of the social sciences. Postcolonial critique has shown that the social sciences, in spite of having claims to universality, are based on the experiences of European modernity. "The conference will take up this criticism and go a step further," said Schirin Amir-Moazami, a professor at the Institute of Islamic Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. Following Chakrabarty's call to "provincialize Europe," the conference organizers deploy the notion of "provincializing the social sciences" as a point of departure for fostering a critical conversation on the interface of area studies and social sciences. The workshop thereby aims not only to foster reflection about false claims to universality and tendencies to marginalize "other" knowledges in the social sciences, but also to work toward a more political and theoretically reflective formulation of area studies. The workshop participants will discuss three main topics:.