Introduction

Chapter 1, the introductory chapter ‘Critical Times Now’, situates the main theme of the book: the challenge faced by social sciences in finding and sustaining its credibility amidst crisis and vulnerability in the new millennium. In an intensely introspective mode, infused with a self-critical look at social scientists themselves, the chapter makes a broad survey of literature on the theme, moving back and forth in time but having a temporal anchor in contemporary times. In the process, it explores the prevailing discourses on social sciences and identifies their major strands keeping the issue of its (ir)relevance at the forefront. The chapter analyses why and how time, a major axis of the neoliberal globalisation project, unleashes and strategises acceleration, which in turn considerably shrinks the scope and space for the ‘slow-paced’ nature of social science explorations, deliberations and outcomes. In the background of the political economic act of ‘marketing the state’ it explicates the twin processes of ‘depoliticisation’ and ‘repoliticisation’, which constitute the arrowhead of the book. The chapter explains how in the global age social sciences are subject to the process of depoliticisation of perceptions, disciplines and methodologies and why social scientists need to explore the ways and means of repoliticisation. Also, with a focus on social science pedagogy, the chapter puts forth the argument that even while being much constrained by the broader political economy of the global age, social sciences for their own survival have to move ahead with humanistic impulse and motive.