In addition to setbacks in the reorganization of interactions and priceless losses of lives, Covid-19 has brought a particular setback to the interior of academic communities: the increase in inequalities.
Changes in workplaces, impediments to movement, cancellation of scientific events and postponement of competitions and research notices are some of the factors that can be highlighted in the global situation.
Associated with this, in countries such as Brazil, a science, technology and innovation policy based on underfunding, institutional harassment and the delegitimation of scientific knowledge deepened previously existing disparities and made future professionals from generations who had recently graduated from higher education more uncertain. . We address here damages that can harm intellectual production in the social sciences.
Research areas
Although most scientists declare that they have felt the negative impacts of the pandemic on research routines, there are discrepancies according to various social characteristics.
The first to be highlighted concerns the discipline of action. If we take the social sciences as a parameter, articles indicate that anthropologists perceived more losses in conducting investigations than sociologists and political scientists, something that is also evident in data on productivity.
The biggest drawbacks to anthropology are related to the research methods prevalent in the area, which have been severely hampered by quarantine measures, such as field surveys, ethnographies, and participant observations.
This does not mean that political scientists and sociologists have not experienced difficulties, but rather that they have obtained different intensities and attributes that need to be known in depth so that we can think of collective solutions sensitive to specificities.
The fact that anthropologists report more obstacles in the recent period does not only bring a problem of distinction internal to the social sciences. It also indicates a consequence that is especially bad for women. In relation to the trio of political science, sociology and anthropology, the latter concentrates the highest proportion of females in teaching and research positions, as statistics relating to Brazilian universities demonstrate.
The women
If the more traditional research methodologies in each field of knowledge induced greater or lesser penalties to work routines during the pandemic, this is not the only determining item in the asymmetries that have been asserted in recent years.
Women make up one of the social groups that, regardless of the discipline of concentration, suffered from the immense changes in the conditions for exercising the profession of researcher (a).
The transfer from the face-to-face regime to remote work caused women greater exhaustion and difficulty in maintaining productivity in the face of overload with domestic and care activities.
The time division disparity between the genders is a long-standing phenomenon known to inequality researchers. With the Covid-19 crisis, in turn, the repercussion of such asymmetric dynamics caused more obstructions to the construction of equality in scientific production.
In the social sciences, it is possible to point out that women were doubly punished in anthropology, either because they are the majority in the area and have had to face more obstacles in carrying out their research methods, or because they are overwhelmed by care work. This will imply a return to the condition of greater equality that the discipline supported.
In sociology, it is possible to conjecture about the loss of a certain balance that existed between men and women. And, finally, in political science, which already had a majority of the male gender, it is possible that we face even more inequalities.
the black population
The work area and gender of its researchers reveal specific adversities. The same occurs with the variable “race”. In several parts of the world, white people are the ones who lead research and occupy institutional positions of power, assuming prevalence in the various scientific fields. Blacks, on the other hand, tend to be a minority in the production of knowledge and have unique obstacles to entering the career of a scientist.
It is worth noting that “race” is a dimension as relevant as “gender” for estimating inequalities. But the complications to deal with this sphere of asymmetries of social life are many. There are consistent differences in how to measure this variable in different locations around the globe.
And, often, there is also the very disregard of its importance. In Brazil, for example, the attempt to raise the discussion of racial inequalities among social scientists comes up against the lack of mandatory collection of information on self-declaration in research evaluation systems, as well as the lack of transparency of public bodies.
In the context of a pandemic, disadvantaged minorities have been accumulating more misfortunes and limitations to persist in the consolidation of trajectories in the academy. This scope of work requires long-term dedication and is therefore more difficult for those who do not come from affluent or symbolically privileged social classes in society.
the generations
Scientific communities are multigenerational and learning among researchers at different stages of their careers is a fundamental hallmark of the production and advancement of specialized knowledge.
While gender and racial inequalities were already known in academic circles, the generations in training or with degrees in close periods or in the midst of the pandemic were faced with hitherto unimaginable aspects, such as the lack of face-to-face coexistence in classes and events, which facilitated the networking, or the loss of usual spaces for study and professional development.
The effects of the pandemic associated with a science, technology and innovation policy that induce inequalities open up a difficult horizon for generational groups especially affected by cuts in research funding and the precarious insertion in professional activities, whether linked to a scientific career or not.
The social sciences and the importance of diversity
Equality in science remains a distant normative ideal, but it was from this point on that discussions that were unlikely to start taking over public spaces.
It was the arrival of women that brought feminism and gender analysis to academia. It was the presence of more blacks in the universities that intended the primacy of whiteness as the only example of intellectuality in the humanities.
And it was always from youth that the “new” was able to emerge and give continuity to the traditions transformed. The social sciences need diversity to contribute to people with all their potential.
Research area, gender, race and generation are social markers that guide generalizable challenges to scientific production, particularly visible and enhanced during the pandemic. In each of these modes of distinction in society, there are varying impacts, with some groups being more affected than others.
In a scenario of deepening inequalities and the consequent limitation of diversity, it is up to social scientists to ponder the tortuous future paths that are in sight for the community if the plurality of its actors comes to regress.
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