The Redefinition of Social Scientists Identities from Latin America: Towards a New Intellectual Colonialism?

Abstract

The cognitive practices and the publications that derive from them express central aspects of intellectual identity, empirically speaking. In this paper, we study the identities of social scientists in Latin America. In a first section, we describe disciplinary practices from the point of view of the variation of the frequencies and types of publication carried out by social scientists in their production of knowledge. In a second section, we built a description of the semantics involved in such publications. Both sections refer to the accounting of three disciplines: sociology, economics and political science. Data coverage is from five countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Mexico. Finally, the discussion attempts to draw some lessons about academic capitalism in Latin America.