Creative social research : rethinking theories and methods / edited by Ananta Kumar Giri.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Machine derived contents note: Contents -- Foreword: Some Observations on New Directions in Creative Social Research 00 -- S. N. Eisenstadt -- Introduction: The Calling of Creative Social Research: -- Rethinking Theories and Methods 00 -- Ananta Kumar Giri -- Part One: Rethinking Theories -- 1. Articulating the World: Social Movements, the Self-Transcendence of Society -- and the Question of Culture 00 -- Martin Fuchs -- 2. Towards Liberative Social Sciences: A Dialogue with Liberation Theology 00 -- Felix Wilfred -- 3. Caring for Economics 00 -- Irene van Staveren -- 4. Rethinking Modernist Historiography 00 -- Ananta Kumar Giri -- 5. Rethinking Comparative Politics: Towards a Critique of -- NeoStatism in Third World Studies 00 -- Supriya RoyChowdhury -- 6. Reconceptualizing Rural Development and Peasantry 00 -- John Harriss -- Part Two: Rethinking Methods -- 7. The Irrelevance of Methodology and the Art of the Possible: -- Reading Sen and Hirschman 00 -- Achin Chakraborty -- 8. Gandhian Economic Method and the Challenge of Expediency 00 -- Narendar Pani -- 9. Experiments in Creative Research: -- Efforts to combine Participatory with conventional methodology 00 -- Walter Fernandes -- 10. Studying Up: Some Thoughts on Method 00 -- Gideon M. Kressel -- 11. Moral Premises and Theoretical Musings: -- The Ontology of a Journey 00 -- Chitra Sivakumar -- Part Three: New Formulations -- 12. Humanities and Social Sciences in the New Millennium: -- Theorization in/for Society as Play 00 -- Binod Kumar Agarwala -- 13. Creative Reconstructions of Methods of Social Research: -- Insights from the Philosophical Traditions of Buddhism and Vedanta 00 -- Godavarish Mishra -- 14. Second-Order Creativity in Research: -- Exploring an Action-Oriented Perspective 00 -- D. P. Dash -- 15. Building Bridges: Nurturing a Complex Ecology of Ideas 00 -- Des Gasper -- 16. The Calling of a Creative Transdisciplinarity 00 -- Ananta Kumar Giri -- Index 00 -- About the Contributors 00.

"Creative Social Research calls for a fundamental reconceptualization and transformation of contemporary research methods in the social sciences. Leading scholars from a variety of disciplines and geographies establish the ways in which the traditions of non-Western societies and contemporary global developments can be incorporated into current social science discourse, greatly enriching it beyond most of the existing paradigms and approaches. Creative Social Research sheds new light on social theory and calls for a new articulation of the practice and ideal of understanding at the levels of self, culture, and society."--BOOK JACKET.