The Writing of the Social Sciences

Doing sociology, writing sociology, is to somehow engage with the subjects of the discourse, to give voice to these subjects. It perforce means that our writing should be sensitive to these voices. Literature does this admirably well in one way. Social science can still see itself as a science but that does not mean that it can without question make its writing scientific. It does not also not have to make its writing entirely literary. The challenge thus is to find expressions of literary social sciences, where there are some elements of the discourse of the natural sciences as well as some from the literary discourse. This is an introduction to the series of articles by students of a graduate level course taught by the author on ‘The Nature and Practice of Thinking’ at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore. As part of this course, the class studied different writing styles ranging from poetry to critical essays. The series that follows represents one attempt to find a different voice to talk about some important themes in social science.