Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Startseite

Whether in France, Germany or the United Kingdom, social sciences research and knowledge production activities have recently been reinscribed within institutionalised agonistic political confrontations (Mouffe 1994), which take academic neutrality, freedom, engagement, responsibility, or impact as divisive policy issues. The multiplication of formulas and buzzwords by political actors testifies to this polarisation of exchanges, especially in the so-called representative bodies of society. Parliamentary debates on that subject may be sometimes controversial, sometimes polemical, but their evolution has both policy and polity implications. In this context, to what extent do parliamentary debates, which are supposed to be the democratic debates par excellence, still play their role, namely deliberate, when it comes to social sciences?
This presentation aims to outline some thoughts on the evolution of parliamentary discussions on social sciences in the period 2012-2022. For three case studies (Assemblée Nationale and Sénat for France, Bundestag and Bundesrat for Germany, House of Commons and House of Lords for the UK), a rhetorical analysis of the debate transcripts (Wiesner, Palonen and Haapala 2017) will be carried out to see what MPs say about social sciences - and how they even do it. Testing such a methodology may thus contribute to the understanding of which social roles and functions are assigned to this disciplinary group, as it can help to identify what argumentative strategies are mobilised and what associations of ideas run through them.