【週一演講】回顧我的社會運動與公民社會研究之旅-中研院民族所

I began my personal attention to and involvement in exploring and studying Taiwan’s social movements issues in the early 1980s. I returned to Taiwan to work in Academia Sinica and National Taiwan University from the US right after having completed my Ph.D. degree in Sociology in 1979. Soon, with direct or indirect participant observation in various emerging social movements and protests, I began to engage in the theoretical debates on the concept of civil society when it was first introduced to Taiwan’s intellectual circle in the late 1980s. It has been a long time since I started my sociological journey exploring social movements and civil society in the 1980s. However, my long-term interest and involvement in this topic did not emerge out of my doctoral research back in State University of New York at Buffalo. Over the past nearly four decades, my research works and theoretical thinking have also gone through the following twists and turns.

The first turn is from a citizen-intellectual’s concern and advocacy to a professional sociologist’s serious observation and reporting (1980s);

The second shift is from preoccupation with empirical research to the intention to generate plausible theoretical propositions (1990s);

The third shift is from the specific social movements and study of civil society to establish the theoretical connection between social movements and civil society dynamics on the one hand with middle class and democracy on the other (since the 2000s).

In this revisited essay, I will concentrate first on the first two interesting turns in my research on social movement dynamics and civil society organizations, and then direct my reflection on how the two changes have impinged on the third shift to develop the tripartite links of middle class, civil society and democratization in the context of Taiwan’s and even Asian experiences.

本場演講毋須報名，歡迎踴躍參與。

聯絡人

陶曉萱，02-2652-3324