Road Works – Highway-Building

Ananta Kumar Giri from the Madras Institute of Development Studies in India offered me sometime ago an exciting opportunity, inviting me to contribute to the book he is editing:

Pathways of Creative Research: Towards a Festival of Dialogues.

Taking this invitation as opportunity to think about where we – as researchers – want and have to go encouraged me to go beyond usual modesty of usual subordination under the rules of the game, looking for the small paths and alleyways with the thorny shrubs we automatically path while we try to durchwinden

My point in the contribution, titled

Research as Searching for Nescience

We have to look for the underlying soci(et)al developments and structures: socio-political control, political practice and (social) science apparently lost their sound reference to the actuality of the  social. And this means as well, that they lost any foundation on which creativity can be based. This means that control emerges as more or less oppressive power, political practice moves towards short-term oriented executism and science develops as utilitarian instrumentalism. Thus the search for pathways towards creative research has to concern itself with looking for wide roads rather than just pathways, if it is right to understand the latter as narrow openings. Nevertheless, these wide roads, possible new highways will have to be pathways as we are not seeking to simply replace the existing approaches. Instead the aim has to be to weave a new network of access routes that can serve as facilitator of new research and cognisance.

I look forward to the finished product – and further engagement with the other contributors from all over the globe.