The Adventure of Relevance

At a time where the relevance of the social sciences is under threat, this innovative book offers a speculative experimentation on the philosophy and methodology of the social sciences to rethink what 'relevance' is, and to cultivate a new ethos of knowledge-making for an eventful world. Engaging a diverse a range of thinkers including Alfred North Whitehead, Gilles Deleuze and Isabelle Stengers, as well as the American pragmatists John Dewey and William James, Martin Savransky challenges longstanding assumptions in the social sciences and argues that relevance is an event that is part and parcel of the immanent and situated processes by which things come to matter. He develops new conceptual tools for cultivating an empiricist ethos of inquiry that is attuned to the question of how things come to matter an ethics that turns social inquiry into a veritable adventure. The result is an original and rigorous book that infuses knowledge-practices in the social sciences with new sensibilities, creative possibilities, and novel habits of thinking, knowing, and feeling.

Engages critically and creatively with contemporary theories and debates in philosophy, social theory and the social sciences more bradly. Draws on the tradition of process philosophy and speculative empiricism. Develops a new concept of 'relevance' that renders it not the product of a subjective act of interpretation, but an event that is part and parcel of the immanent, multiple and heterogeneous processes by which the facts that compose situations come to matter.

Autorentext
Martin Savransky is a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK, where he teaches philosophy, social theory, and methodology. He works at the intersection of process philosophy, the philosophy and methodology of the social sciences, and the ethics and politics of knowledge.

Inhalt

Foreword; Isabelle Stengers

Introduction. The Care of Knowledge

1. The Question of Relevance

2. The Risks of Invention

3. Thinking with Encounters

   4. Modes of Connection

4. An Ethics of Adventure

5. For Speculative Experimentation Afterword: Becoming an Apprentice