Why social sciences?

My task is to place opening words in this space, which aim to introduce the lines of research, knowledge production and thinking developed at the Center for Advanced Studies (CEA) of the Faculty of Social Sciences of the National University of Cordoba.

Those of us who constitute this community believe that the historical moment, the economic, political and social situation, makes it particularly necessary that there be some form of dialogue between the academy and the citizens to whom this community itself owes.

In short, it is a proposal to communicate science to the public.

Our commitment is to preserve the public university, which is the only guarantee of comprehensive training that will keep us on the path of upward social mobility, and will also support a system that guarantees scientific sovereignty.

The Center for Advanced Study is an institution dedicated to postgraduate research and teaching, with an interdisciplinary portfolio in the social sciences and humanities. It was created during the administration of the University Rector, Francisco Delic, in 1990, as a division of the University Directorate.

In 2015, he was part of the founding group of the College of Social Sciences, of which he has been a member since that moment. CEA currently has 17 postgraduate courses (PhDs, Masters degrees and specialisations); Postdoctoral. And 24 research programs. It also has its own publishing house: Edicea, and four scientific journals.

The main question that arises in these times is: Why social sciences?

The question can be answered from several points of view.

First, what is the benefit of this disciplinary field; Else, it can lead us to the relationship between investment and profitability. The answers can also be different: on the one hand, there is no doubt about the contributions of the disciplines they constitute to the knowledge, work, and needs of our societies and, to a large extent, to the solutions of problems. What plagues them: poverty, hunger, housing, infrastructure, communications, public health, political construction and citizenship, international relations, education, environmental stewardship and ecology, are all issues to which the social sciences contribute. And search for possible answers.

In this sense, even from an economic standpoint, the value and importance of investment in the social sciences can be preserved. Although for the rest, it is clear that this should not be measured by economic standards.

But there is an important segment that the social sciences deal with and whose profitability is more widespread: namely, contributions to general knowledge, such as cultures, memories, gender studies, and the arts, for example, which allow us to learn about ourselves as subjects and as communities in a particular historical, political, and social context.

We open this space in which we hope that the reading public in Cordoba will find many questions and some answers on the topics they reveal to us. Those who can provide a description of what is produced within CEA's research programs will write here: researchers, teachers, non-teachers and students at our institution. Then we will read each other periodically in this column.