About

Launched on 15 November 2011, the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective (ISSN 2471-9560) serves two purposes. SERRC is the digital side of the journal Social Epistemology, encouraging dialogue on published articles, reviews and roundtables on new books exploring the social and political dimensions of knowledge from a variety of disciplines and schools of thought. SERRC is also an independent platform for original research, scholarship, commentary, and judgment on issues related to knowledge, culture, and policy. Our digital platform looks well beyond the academic disciplinary boundaries of social epistemology per se, to explore new research and concepts about many aspects of social knowledge production.

Check out the full history of our posts with the Blogroll above. A list of our most recent posts is on the right side of the page. All our different long-running and one-off projects can be found through our other menu options above. You can also find reference information for everything SERRC has ever published on our full Site Bibliography.

We are proudly open-access, and encourage innovation in affordable platforms to spread the latest knowledge and research through the public.

Members and Leaders

At the moment, the SERRC comprises 88 members based in 29 countries. Our disciplinary backgrounds include philosophy, sociology, history, business administration, literature to science and technology studies, biology and psychology. Our diverse outlooks share a common touchpoint in the research program of social epistemology as Steve Fuller described in both his first book Social Epistemology (Indiana University Press, 1988) and in the Taylor & Francis journal of the same name that he founded in 1987.

SERRC’s founding editor is Jim Collier. The online platform is currently maintained and edited by Adam Riggio. Our book review editor is Eric Kerr. SERRC operates in conjunction with the journal Social Epistemology, edited by Georg Theiner with Jim Collier.

Our Aims

SERRC is a platform of intellectual exchange concerning themes that are central to social epistemology as an academic discipline and as a trans-disciplinary inquiry into issues of knowledge, society, politics, economics, ecology, and technology. As a digital, open-access platform, SERRC allows for a response to current issues in disciplinary research and in the wider public square that is both thoughtful and fast enough to keep pace with the contemporary world. SERRC forms a complex, interdependent assemblage with the journal Social Epistemology, developing new formats for academic and intellectual publications that remix and re-imagine the public value, reception, and purpose of scholarship and research. We open to written contributions such as articles, short essays, book reviews, comments, meta-critiques, and aphorisms, and also encourage visual formats such as films, images, and audio.

Reviewing

We either individually or collectively review contemporary books and classics that are of interest to social epistemology. Besides, we aim for high quality work irrespective of the format by reviewing each other’s contributions.

Replying

Our online platform serves as a space of engaging with current events and themes that are relevant to social epistemology. As our online platform allows for faster responses than traditional journals, we are particularly interested in promoting shorter contributions. Moreover, the platform seeks to foster a meta-critical discussion of the journal Social Epistemology with replies to articles, a look at a particular topic addressed in the journal over time, blog postings on subjects and issues, replies from past authors and critical responses, commentaries and syntheses. We would like to encourage dialogues among Social Epistemology’s print and digital authors in the hopes that new approaches to writing, and writing about, academic inquiry might evolve from it. In this sense, the platform can also serve as a space for discussion of upcoming journal ideas or themes.

A Collective Experiment in the Making

Collective work and academic exchange are often presented as ideal scenarios in knowledge work. However, as our own experience has shown us so far, working as a collective is by no means a straightforward and easy process. Being based in different parts of the world—with many of us never having met in person—developing a collective dialogue is an even more challenging endeavour. Besides, the requirements of an academic career geared towards constant publishing and output in an era of quality assurance, seem to leave little space for activities beyond that such as collective work (See Stephen Norrie’s paper Three Social Contracts for an Academic Collective). We would like to revisit our process of developing as a collective in a reflexive mode. Taking our own experience as a point of departure, one idea so far was to pay increased attention to the relationship between conditions of work at universities and knowledge work.

Get Involved!

If you would like to be part of our collective, or if you would like to contribute scholarship, commentary or judgment on issues related to knowledge, culture and policy, please get in touch with Adam Riggio via email, at Facebook, and at @ReplyCollective.