Title：Peripheralizing Social Science Academia: A Relational Landscape of the Global and Local Social Sciences
Speaker：Lanu Kim（Assistant professor. School of Digital Humanities and Computational Social Sciences, KAIST.）
Host：Meng-Jung Lin（Assistant Professor. Department of Sociology, NTU）
Time：2024/5/16（Thur.） 12:30-14:00
Venue：Department of Sociology and Social Work R319
About the Lecture:
Although researchers have studied the global assembly of knowledge in the fields of natural science and engineering, we do not know how social-scientific knowledge is constructed by knowledge producers clustered at various places in the world. The present study shows that the global social-science field and the local Korean social-science field are focusing on different topics and concepts at glance, while the global is one-sidedly impacting the local in setting temporal academic trends. We claim this phenomenon is a peripheralization of local social science. Utilizing large-size computational analyses of the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) and the Korean Citation Index (KCI), we discover topical differences, semantic heterogeneity, and different chains of academic trends that reveal a temporal and spatial structure of social science knowledge formation. To explain these patterns, we identify academic brokers who contribute to both the SSCI and the KCI, and track their asymmetric publishing and citation behaviors. Because theoretical and empirical articulations from non-English speaking social-scientific research are dismissed, there exists an institutional and structural assembly of undone social science. This result sheds new light on the hidden structure of the global social-science knowledge economy and calls for reflexivity among social scientists around the world.
About the Speaker:
I am an assistant professor in the school of humanities and social sciences and a joint professor in the school of computing and the graduate school of data science, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). After finishing my sociology PhD at the University of Washington, I was a postdoctoral fellow and data science scholar at Stanford University. My research broadly contributes to the theoretical understanding of academic knowledge creation by mainly examining the impact of academic search engines, gender inequality in higher education, and the social structure of knowledge construction. To investigate, I utilize new big data sources, innovative analytical strategies, natural language processing, and advanced statistical methods and work with interdisciplinary research teams. I am always open to new collaboration opportunities. Please contact me via email if you are interested.
