1 A Politics of Style

The art of writing social sciences has many embodiments depending on the disciplines’ trajectories, the national traditions of philosophy, rhetoric, and literary expressions. ¹ This diversity is the proof that no language or style can pretend to be the best rationale and the voice of logic. Nevertheless, main journals and even some research agencies have disciplined the art of writing by enacting specific rules that impose a certain politics of style. This contribution will discuss some of the taken-for-granted rules of writing a scientific article as a particular textual genre, such as the necessity to have one main argument, to have single-authored pieces, to write 8 to 10,000 words, to present the research in a particular outline, as a demonstration of the theoretical approach via case studies, to repeat findings in the conclusion, and so forth. These “rules” have come to structure the imposition of a legitimate mode of doing and writing social sciences (problématique légitime). We will establish our critique of these stylistic rules by showing their inner politics, thereby challenging the seemingly innocuous nature of stylistic guidelines that journals recommend and some writers give in to. Additionally, we will address forms of discrimination produced by and through journal rejections, which are not exclusively representative of the quality of an article, or merit based, but also of a specific game played by reviewers. It is thereby through this inquiry into the rules about the “art of writing” and a reflexive stance towards our role as editors confronted with articles evaluated through a process of peer review that we are accentuating the urgent need to politicize styles of writing and producing academic knowledge. Thus, our strategy for taking issue with the politics of style now dominant in the (written) world of the social sciences is to reveal forms of arbitrariness at the heart of everyday decisions to publish or not to publish.

Our choice to open the first issue of pariss with a conversation about the politics of style comes from collective discussions ² and a reflexive attitude towards the implications of publication decisions emanating from editors’ and publishers’ guidelines as well as rules for readers and reviewers. In extending a conversation initiated by others and positioned as the starting point of pariss , we aim to facilitate transdisciplinary ways of writing. We envision pluralization as key to contesting the symbolic violence of prescriptive rules of style currently so prevalent in the dominant so-called “global” social sciences system. ³ But before even being able to think seriously about alternative ways of writing or, more generally, communicating ‘like a social scientist,’ an epistemological break must first interrogate the standards of evaluation, valuation, and judgement that have become so important to the academic field. To illuminate the logics and forces underpinning contemporary measures of ‘good scholarship,’ we propose a return to and an extension of the strides made most fervently by historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science in their multiple quests to ‘exoticize the domestic’ ⁴ and seize the uneven effects of domination produced by the formation of disciplines ⁵ and the internationalization of the social sciences. ⁶ More precisely, we endeavor to think reflexively and collectively about academic writing and, more specifically, the journal article as a particular communicative form. Our technique is thus to pay heed to the politics of style defining what it means to be and write like ‘a (social) scientist’ so as to render visible dominant modes of evaluating scientific production and the effects they generate. This disruptive exercise might appear masochist to some, particularly those who might be at a loss in daring to no longer be complicit in defending the universality, neutrality, and objectivity of the presently dominant measures of ‘scientific quality.’ Our diagnostic, however, is of a more optimistic leaning, that in offering a space (not a directive) for scholars to challenge convention and exercise creativity, the ‘art’ of scholarly production may be reinvented. Without the pretension of fully dismantling the current order of things, pariss nonetheless aspires to foster the blossoming of a more pluriversal and heterogeneous social science.

2 The Triumph of Social Sciences as Specialized Journalism in the Need to Make Profit

From all sides, the idea that social scientists were first and foremost artists of creating new ideas with new words, and that their role was almost entirely in this performance, was defeated. Social scientists had to speak and write to convince large audiences, not a small group of peers. They had to rely on their capacities to make money on a larger publishing market, not as university professors paid by the state. It seems that it is still the case with the ‘publish or perish logic’, the multiplication of self-plagiarism to add the numbers of papers produced in order to please different audiences, and often the adjustment of the text to the idiosyncratic preferred journal’s authors. The number of words for an article, beyond the hysteresis of attitude coming from a pre-digital era implying economic choices, is often based on estimates of the capacity of the supposed audience to read carefully and not on the degree of precision of the meaning and its goldsmith quality. This relation to an audience, perceived as poorly specialized, is crucial in understanding the current rules of writing with one simple argument which is operating as a justification to continue the practices of the past and its dominant legacy. Digitization has also reinforced partly this idea to write in clear and simple terms for different audiences, and by multiplying “blogs” and even tweets. The idea to influence opinion by way of writing social sciences was not at all a linear destiny connected with the progress of technologies of communication. It has been a certain turn that social scientists have developed in relation to their enrolment into propaganda, very quickly renamed for some public relations and, nowadays, strategic communication. The turn of the Second World War was significant, and it continued after wards with the Cold War. Psychology and journalism studies reinforced the trend towards simplification of thoughts and words. Continental philosophers, structuralist sociologists and anthropologists were obliged to struggle and to adapt to the trend if they still wanted to publish and not to be considered as “obscure”.

One key moment of the success of the politics of an essay with one straightforward argument that can be easily read came when the disciplines of social sciences were confronted with the development of humanities and their challenge concerning forms of knowledge. The 1970s have been the golden age of this “art” of writing where the US social sciences imposed their hegemony on style at the very same moment that they won the war on dictionaries and imposed by default their spelling, before opening up again to a multiplicity of other English languages, including the English one as a variable. The success will nevertheless be short. This sense to have a linear demonstration where every step is precisely described, which was at the foundations of the argument of a social science essay was put in question at the moment of its climax by the evolution of both the hard sciences, the cybernetic and the “nouveau roman” all together.

The so-called French theory, post structuralist, nouveau roman, constructionist approaches of language attacked these ideas of linearity and simplicity, the idea of reason as universal and insisted on situated forms of knowledge having no access to an “aleph”, a local point giving access to the universal to paraphrase Borges. ²⁰ They refused, for some of them, the character of science to social scientists and destabilized their claim to authoritative knowledge based on fact.

Be they Nietzschean or Libertarian, they proposed to disrupt the pretence of science, in interpreting social activities. They rejected the ideas of inference, generalisation, explanation, and especially the idea to do that through quantitative methods and behavioural techniques constructing statistical generalization leading to prediction. They considered that the practice of imposing a scientific style based on the belief to be an explanation, with inferences toward the abstract generalisation and ultimately the universal, was a form of academic hubris coming from dominant white male positions inside the university and reproducing a certain type of presentation of research design via the triptych: theory, methods and cases studies, which had to be taken for what it was: a hegemony by an elite (Ivy league in the US, Russel Group in the UK) in danger to lose their dogmatic positions of authority and reacting by a war on scientific publications imposing a unique path to knowledge.

The controversy of quantitative versus qualitative methods which was so important in the late seventies and eighties, was therefore settled momentarily to save social sciences from this “invasion of barbarians” and social scientists, historians, political theorists coming from the European continent. A wall was erected between disciplines and in many campuses, social sciences left humanities departments to escape the contamination, joining new branches of “sciences”: media studies and informatics. The French and continental theories of social sciences were confined easily to the German and French language departments of US and UK universities. It was the same for the critiques coming from Latin America which were examined in the Spanish department as “novels”.

A key book, organizing this “division of labor” and methods between social sciences and the French theories colonizing language department but also their neighbours, history, philosophy is Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in qualitative research written by Gary King, Robert O. Keohane and Sidney Verba. ²¹ The book organized the reconciliation between different tendencies of research design and the tension between the quantitative turn of departments of politics, IR, general sociology versus anthropologists and historians often fighting for a more qualitative, interpretive approach, based on nuances, the absence of over-generalization, even if famous “traitors” existed in both camps. Still considered today as an absolute requirement, at least in political sciences and IR, the core terminology chosen to create a boundary between social science and other narratives was “inference”.

Social sciences are straightforward and reason in a quasi-mathematical way by advancing an argument step by step in a clear way, and by proposing a reproducible model where what they say on a case can be repeated in other places by other social scientists. For them comparison is reason through abstraction and de-personalisation of the researcher whose ethos and emotions as well as political values could not be taken into considerations. Theory is conceived, not as the result of the research of specific human practices, but as the opposite of the “empirical”, and its goal is access to a pure knowledge, in the most abstract way, almost a mathematics of forms (based on an aesthetical geometry of symmetries, balancing dual poles) detached from any content and therefore reproducible anywhere. The frequent result of the essay-article is therefore to tend to confuse abstraction, concept and theory. It embodied into the style an ontology distinguishing theory, methods and case studies as three categories allowing to purify from the empirical as matter, the abstract as the essence of knowledge, its spirit. Quantitative and qualitative methods may be used but only if they are based on inference as the intellectual mechanism linking simplicity of style with step by step argumentation in favour of a demonstration in the conclusion. The triumph of the essay as the way to write a social science article was preserved by the consensus on the necessary “design” to be labelled “social science”.

Like wrecking balls threatening the structural integrity of a building with each moving swing, streams of critical theory and postmodernist thought have assailed the assertive position of a positivist epistemology within the social sciences. This offensive has undoubtedly had varied results across time and space, across disciplines and institutions, producing a complex intellectual terrain whose topography is the product of ongoing shifts. Nonetheless, from a bird’s-eye view, it would seem that ‘anti-positivist’ approaches, if lumped together, have victoriously carved a space for themselves within the humanities and social sciences with the late nineties and the American touch reinventing beyond recognition French theorists and postcolonial writers radicalizing the critiques. The specializations of faculty now found in institutions of higher education, the pluralism of teaching curricula, and the existence of academic journals open to or even dedicated exclusively to critical theory all speak to ruptures that have been made with traditional conceptions of science, reason, and method. Have we therefore a reversal of positions in social sciences? Are styles now a question of choice? Is it not a Pyrrhic victory?

3 Objectivizing the Current Rules of Writing Social Sciences for Homo Academicus: A Sticky Practice of Style Despite Challenges

If we analyse today adequation between the style of social sciences journals and what they say of their ontologies and epistemologies or methods, it seems that the “critical” journals are less critical than they think. The style of the one argument fits certainly with a Newtonian world of calculus and almost certainty but is much more problematic to express constructionist approaches and post-structural forms of reflexivity insisting on the work done by the use of style itself. So, how can we embark towards a different art of writing? How can we disrupt the logic of one argument and propose a new ethos for writing social sciences? Do we have to reinvent everything or could we base our judgement on other traditions, for example the “Latin” ones concerning dissertation structures as the best way to write articles in social sciences?

4 The Art of Writing Social Sciences Reflexively: Alternatives to Apply for pariss

If we consider the current customs and practices of producing scientific knowledge, what can we do in a new journal? What are the conventions we will use to define how we present our arguments and express ourselves, which ultimately play a forcefully decisive role in distinguishing the ‘publishable’ from the ‘unpublishable’? Could they be challenging the reproduction of a certain style? It is uncertain whether critical approaches, may they be post-structural, post-colonial or feminist approaches or other anti-positivist traditions, have unsettled the scholarly practice and enabled a break with a positivist rationale of explaining and writing. Many experiments exist, but they are still at the margins. Could we coalesce these margins together and reverse the trend?

This collective article can be read in some ways as an anti-manual with a developed guideline for our future writers, reviewers and readers, inversing many principles taken for granted. Thus, we, purposely, privilege some features which have been rejected by many other journals.

We will keep for example as much as possible an economy of style, which is the one of the mother tongues of the writer, even at the risk (here an opportunity) of creolising a bit the English style. The reason for our opposition to the essay style is therefore not a question of good or bad English as such, but a judgement on what the English language can do with its flexibility and its full dictionary for the social sciences.

We are not saying that a paper does not need to have an argument, but we are aware that to present the argument is not necessarily to project it in the front page. In order to properly justify the originality of the claim, the history of the debate from which the argument has emerged, its complexity, its politics is necessary. Against the false pretense to invent a radically new position or debate, we prefer authors who can trace where they come from. This is of course from an intellectual debate, but also a situated context linked with the social properties of a specific time and milieu.

As Bob Cox said profoundly before it became a mantra without proper analysis, writing to develop a theory is always for someone and for some purpose. ²⁶ Graham Allison and Murray Edelman insisted also that where you stand depends upon where you sit. We prefer a clear positioning to a pretense of universal claim to an abstract theory detached from the place it comes from. We prefer humble beginners who try to be creative than apprentice philosophers who want to speak in the name of the universal, their nation or their village without having asked anyone what they think. Here is our engagement for what we call an anthropological approach for politics and the international. If explaining this position is lengthy, we will not edit it out, as long as it is helpful in understanding the emergence of the thought. This cannot be relegated into a footnote. The conditions of possibility of an argument are often more important than the position itself to understand the validity of the debate and its novelty.

We will also accept long sentences when they are meaningful and nuances and/or control to a certain degree the connotations implied by the denotation of the words. We will recognise this effort to speak a global English, which entails its vernacular role and its pre-eminence, but we do not want to end up with an arbitrary privilege, or, at least, an excessive advantage for those who have English as a mother tongue.

If the article is, for good reasons, more than 12 000 interesting words, we will certainly not cut it. But we will resist papers where it is obvious that self-indulgence takes privilege over reasoning.

Against this neo liberal tendency of inflation of the self and its own idea of excellence and competition against others, we will encourage even longer articles around 25 to 30 000 words written by a proper collective voice as we will explain below.

A publishable article for pariss will be illustrative of a situation that can be analysed by the description of an analysis of the practical logics at work, implying a reasoning by the author which is not detached from bodies and emotions, and which is not individual but constructed by a set of relations between objective positions in society in which the writer is embedded. The use of metaphors and analogies, using imagination within the reasoning while respecting the validity of truth claims, is often one of the first tools to bring to life and to stimulate a conversation regarding the justifications of forms of power and their (lack of) arbitrariness (or not). So, instead of ending up with a kind of dualist argument between two extremes in order to find the right balance, which is so often the result of the logic of an essay, the article which pariss will value is open to connections with the humanities, history and anthropology, rather than fascinated with mathematics and physics. Complexity is valuable. Complexity is not a series of complicated facts that can be reduced to simple ones by a step by step reasoning along a main argument, it is a mode of existence in the world, that can be translated only through complex arguments, which may impose a more holistic way of writing, implying dialectical moves with also a strong reflexivity about who is writing, and from what position, in terms of gender, coloniality, class, and ideology, the author is speaking.

Here the great intuitions and propositions of Edgar Morin in his series of books about the contemporary form of knowledge as a method for complex systems, have asked specifically for a style of writing implying a specific typography indicating the (retroactive) feedback loop in a sentence to avoid the linearity of the step by step reasoning. ²⁷ For him, this was the best way to break with the confusion between complicated things which can be broken into simple elements and complex emergences and things which cannot be reduced to elementary “bricks” assembled by one hegemonic logic. He has proposed, with Henri Laborit, that complexity has to be drawn inside the text for generating a reasoning based on a transdisciplinary approach and understood through these symbols of “dialogic loops” destabilizing the “primacy” of a Newtonian physics reasoning. These dialogic loops are the way to building intercommunication between science and philosophy, in which complexity is ce qui est tissé ensemble ²⁸ (com), dans un enchevêtrement d’entrelacements ²⁹ (plexus). The writing style in its materiality is therefore an art and a science as such. The style defines the episteme at work and reciprocally. Many people and especially artists have taken this refusal of a causality via our way of reading and have produced collages challenging the idea of a beginning and an end. Morin later tempered his radicality, mainly because of the resistances of the readers and publishers, but he has maintained its exigence on a style which is not linear. We will do the same. Nevertheless, we consider that rupturing the linearity of a style to give its role to diversity, heterogeneities is now a central way of writing and thinking social sciences.

We are keen to have submissions in their original languages and will facilitate the review process in this language, in the same way that the journal International Political Sociology has done in the field of International Relations, paving the way for submissions in Arabic, Portuguese, Farsi and Spanish, among others and facilitating reviews in these languages. Furthermore, translations of these papers into English will take care not to destroy a style specific to different traditions of writing the social sciences but allow instead for more vernacular forms of English. In this vein, the goal of pariss is to reflect the diversity of styles of writing taking place in order to reinvent academic English in a world of many worlds. We privilege what Blommaert, Jacqumet and Rampton therefore call the “mixedness, creolization, crossover phenomena and heterogeneity” present in a world constituted by transversal lines and hybridities. ³⁰ In this vein, even the reference style that pariss prefers is chosen to honor this line of thought; full footnotes, written in the Chicago 17th style are required instead of the usual Harvard style, where disparate authors are often lumped together within the text so as not to take up too much space.

Of course, we do not consider our journal the first to travel in these directions we set out, and owe a debt to some of the wonderful work which has been undertaken to pluralize the art of writing in global politics, albeit working from the margins. Much of this transdisciplinary dialogue has taken place with the re-emergence of sociological and anthropological interventions into studying ‘the international’, but this is by no means exhaustive. Jenny Edkins famously called for ‘novel writing’ within the field of International Relations, ³¹ drawing on Elizabeth Dauphinee’s pioneering work, The Politics of Exile. ³² The Journal of Narrative Politics, for example, has emerged from these junctures between narrative, aesthetics, theory and politics, foregrounding autoethnography and storytelling as an art of writing; one way of many through which to navigate the theory-practice relation.

Finally, among the major corrections that we want to introduce, we will verify that it would not be possible for reviewers who disagree with a text to incriminate the style of the author, instead of daring to discuss the content of the contested ideas. Reviewers will be questioned on their own assumptions.

Needless to say that, in that case, the preference or habit for a certain choice of words in the name of purity of the English or about the style of writing encompass a politics, which creates power struggles, dominant positions and symbolic violence which are not recognized as such by the victims of it. Locutors of different languages that use untranslatable terminologies in English or do not privilege the same ‘essay style’ art of writing, are often disadvantaged if the reviewer interprets their use of particular terminology narrowly, associating it with its specific connotations in English, when the term may in fact have slightly different overtones in other languages. Likewise, if an invention of a specialized terminology which does not emerge from English common sense, is refused on the same bases of “preserving” English from contamination. ³³ The attention also to gendered forms of writing and grammar of language which does not have “neutral” will also be taken into consideration. We will put all our attention to correct these biases, sometimes unconscious, sometimes strategized by a reviewer seeing their role as the one of a gate-keeper. This leads us to a discussion about the reasons we will do the peer-review system differently.

5 Submission Process: Reasons for a Different Peer-review System

The domination of a certain politics of style and a way of writing would be almost impossible to enforce only by recommendations concerning the guidelines of the journal. So, many social sciences journals are insisting about the role of reviewers who have to discuss the content, but also to police the style. This has certainly a good reason if texts arrive and are not comprehensible, generating nonsense, ³⁴ but more than often, it gives an exorbitant power to the reviewers who disagree with the content, but dare not to say so in their reviews, and then critique the forms (structure, style, so called clarity of the argument) as a way of dismissing challenging ideas. The review ends up not by describing logical problems and value of the argumentation but turns to “aesthetic” judgements dismissing the constative efforts of “neutrality” to the benefit of their own performatives. Very easily, the process ends via the exclusion of original formulations and ideas, as soon as they do not follow the rules of the essay style. Paradoxically, this is reinforced (and not suppressed) by the fact that the two or three reviewers are fully anonymous, since the anonymity creates an easy way to be dismissive about other ways of presenting argument by just referring to the normal (doxa) as an evidence of the personal judgement.

What is often left unsaid in debates about reviewing is therefore the criteria of anonymity as a condition for fair judgement. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. Anonymity in the form of a double-blind process can certainly be convincing if it is a review process between pairs, and if it effectively delivers fair treatment, instead of just reinforcing the current doxa against innovative ideas and practices. If the proposition of anonymity as a strategy in the hinderance of obsequious clientelism is also important, the need to change the so-called double-bind process is nevertheless urgent for several reasons. First, the pretence that the act of reviewing, as it is today, remains anonymous throughout the entire process is not credible, especially within the digital age. For the reviewer, a quick check about references provided in footnotes correlated with internet searches indicate often if not the name of the person, at least the language s/he knows and the university or country she belongs to. Second, among the bad practices of some reviewers, lay the assumptions that someone who is located outside of the zone of English as a mother tongue is making mistakes and “needs” to be corrected by a “purest” form of writing and that the reviewer is entitled to ask for refusal or major corrections on this basis. This is sometimes awkward for the editor if the reviewer does not realize that the person in question is an anglophone living in a far-away country like Japan, or Netherlands and France, a recurrent point of complaint by editors during discussions. But, this discrimination regarding the style of English has to be taken seriously. It is one of the most effective ways of controlling a journal and framing the boundaries of the authorship by confusing the best ideas and the logic of arguments with a certain style of writing. This implicit colonial take, which is hidden in this move of rejection-discrimination by the style, has to be combatted as well as other forms of discrimination concerning gender, class, nationalities, but is by far less discussed in editorial boards who desire a more equal distribution of articles. A decolonial project, if it goes beyond the most visible reasons, has to address this form of symbolic domination which explains, more than other criteria, the low rate of papers coming from the non-anglophone Global South in top journals of social sciences.

It is also interesting to see the modalities of resistance and strategies of distinction used by some of these anglophones abroad. To be sure to be recognized as “proper” native English locutor, they often quote the most “idiomatic” items (relics, even totems) of an English culture in order to avoid being discriminated on their “level” of English. As we are well aware “ce que parler veut dire” (translated as “In Other Words”) cannot be summed up by a perfect grammar and style, providing equality of chances, the use of language and style is a permanent struggle for distinction and signs of age, class or gender recognitions (cf the so-called Queen’s English). ³⁵

It is difficult, even when being aware of these forms of symbolic violence to eliminate them. We suggest nevertheless to alleviate them, at least a bit, by modifying the role of the traditional anonymous peer review system. Concerning this aspect of the form and style of the submission, one of the reviewers will always be chosen from our large scientific committee, and in addition we will ask one (or two) external reviewers to act as experts on the topic. The internal reviewer will be in charge of entering into a productive dialogue with the author in terms of helping them to express their own style and argumentation, whilst keeping a coherent meaning and logical argumentation for the English audience. This internal reviewer will also summarize the views of external reviewers, allowing for a collective discussion with the editors. This means abandoning anonymity during the process if necessary. Some editors and publishers may react negatively, but we contend that this needs to be done. This is a way of altering the author’s chances of being published and therefore to enhance the diversity of the authorship.

In a similar vein, we also welcome submissions in original mother tongues different from English, and the review process will be carried out in these languages; the list of languages will depend on the capacities and willingness of a large group of academics to enrol into the scientific committee. The final document, once accepted, will have to be translated by the author, and we cannot, before obtaining specific grants, cover the cost of translation, but we consider it our duty, even if it certainly takes time to make constructive suggestions, to help improve a text which has been conceived in a different language and framed in a different style.

6 Collective Articles: A Necessity for a Different Art of Writing Social Sciences

A way of breaking down the individualist aesthetics valorizing too much to “attract” the audience via catch phrases and tones of declaring “wars” on their colleagues, by claiming an absolute originality and frontier ideas (that competition for grants recommends) is to privilege on the contrary, effective co-writing and collective articles. This is why pariss will strongly encourage collective writings. We consider that social sciences authors need, against the permanent illusio of the individual little genius, to work collaboratively and to show it in their publications.

When the group of authors has not just collated short individual pieces together with only a common introduction (like many forums), but has worked together to elaborate the structure, the order of the arguments and the narratives strategies, it changes the nature of the art of writing. So, we claim. Negotiation about wordings have taken place. Reflections about the agreement on the place of disagreements between authors have already obliged clarifying the boundaries of the question and the problematization at work. The process of writing has been by far more discussed than in individual pieces. They are more on the side of “slow food” production than “fast food” blogs and tweets, or individual sensational pieces. But their mode of production in terms of writing may help to have fewer, but better articles. If the topic is not the self-promotion of a “party” line, this art of writing collectively often tames the inflammatory rhetoric of the self, claiming to be the “unique supreme”, and gives more ground to a common reflection, based on different formulations of the core ideas. ³⁶ This often gives a more accurate perspective insisting on the different facets to express each idea, and it provides to different readership and specialist of only one discipline, a way to better understand what is at stake. This may look sometimes repetitive and “too long”, with circumvolutions, but it is a way of describing and analysing which has its own qualities and is metaphorically the equivalent of a 3D video in comparison with a 2D image.

Some may prefer the old individual style and if they have great ideas, they will be always welcome in terms of submission, but we want to definitively give a place in the pariss journal to strong collective articles which exist sometimes by the sole logic of international grants, but cannot find important places in other journals. We consider this task to publish collective articles as one of the most important goal of pariss project.

These kinds of articles are central for reframing the boundaries of the types of knowledge that can be called social sciences. In the next issues, we will develop these intimate relations between the art of writing and the knowledge connections which define a fluid space, but having nevertheless boundaries between social sciences, humanities and work of fiction on one side, and on the other side with contemporary hard sciences, both of which have developed more of these collective practices, letting social sciences to be the central place of experiment for those who want to convert universities into a place for profit deriving from individual competitions around diplomas, jobs and grants.

The making of “social science laboratories” to use the formula of Bruno Latour, or the one of “collective intellectuals” to use the one of Pierre Bourdieu is not just a nice add-on. It is absolutely central to produce collective articles as an antidote against the hyper individualization, privatization, commercialization which is at stake in current higher education of the Global North. They can structure stronger solidarities, develop better reflexivity, encourage and become embryonic social movements among their own fields and their capacity to speak to an audience, ready itself to take time for serious analysis, and not quick slogans whose quality is more about sense of humour than veracity.

Collective articles, especially when they come from more than one discipline and try to find transversal, transnational, translinguistic lines will be welcome and we will give them all the necessary place they need to express strong ideas with nuances.

By that, we mean to give a chance for collaborative writing where the singular of the self disappears, and where the collective is not an accumulation of different self(ves) but a work in common with an emerging position. The ownership of the full text under a collective label would be preferable to the so-called collective created by the addition of individual contributions along a traditional division of labour and responsibility.

The collective attribution limits the obvious distinctions of the order by which the presentation organizes age, gender, professional status, or alphabetic order. We will discuss with the group proposing the paper their choice of ordering all the names, and in addition of overcoming some asymetries in power relations, we may propose, if necessary, to have only one nickname for the collective and to have a footnote of the people who have participated in it and are ready to claim it publicly immediately, while others may decide to reclaim their participation later and use a nom de plume inside the collective. ³⁷ Against the politics of publishing only individual essays with light and brilliant thoughts, we consider that journals of social sciences like pariss if they want to deconstruct disciplinary boundaries seriously, have to promote this collectivisation as a form of knowledge and an art of writing. The journal will try for each issue to have at least one of these collective articles in addition to the four or five individual articles.

These collective articles are also a way to be reflective of a certain moment of research, before presenting the so-called findings and to propose an ongoing conversation beyond disciplinary boundaries when epistemological and methodological conundrums push to write about the level of agreement on the disagreements which is (un)acceptable.

The more we have an institutionalisation of collaboration between « country » teams, the more we need this reflexivity about methods, but also about he the art of writing which is not dispossessing the non-anglophone of their core reasonings and ways to present them.

By signaling this necessity to change the art of writing social sciences, we want even to go further and break with the reproduction of forms of symbolic violence and linguistic colonialism at work. This will imply being consistent with the current decolonial move affecting the different ways of writing social sciences in English, by accepting and encouraging narratives and forms of thought that both refuse to mimic demonstration, propose creative writings and plural styles and keep a non-fiction way of argumentation.

We want also to clarifiy that a call for connections with humanities, anthropology, history is not a call for a fusion and a claim that regimes of truth are unimportant. We follow on that Paul Veyne for whom writing history is not to describe facts but to write a novel, taking nevertheless into consideration that this narrative needs to be definitely a novel based on truth of the archives. ³⁸ In social sciences we are also in the same position. We are not publishing novels for entertainment, but we can use a style open to complexity like in some fictions if it is the best way to encompass the human experiences and to express them better than an arid reasoning.

Nevertheless, why would we reject a certain style if the understanding provided is higher than the linear flow of argument and if it may push to change practices of certain actors? If the effective short style is efficient regarding its purpose, we will certainly not reject it, by a reverse discrimination, but for us social science styles exist only through their diversity, through the transversal lines they can open, through the fragments which are non-compatibles with a dominant model, but express a specific universe, or more exactly a pluriverse.