What is academic is political. Intergeratinal reflections based on the work of Elizabeth Jelin

Abstract

Elizabeth Jelin has been and still is a core figure of Latin-American social science, with a legacy that includes conceptual innovations in many fields (social movements, family and gender, social memories, inequalities, to mention a few), the leading participation in the creation and management of institutions, and the fabric of international nets that enabled many key research projects in the region. In this paper we propose to think about Jelin´s ways of understanding social science, through an intergenerational dialogue between the authors and her work. It is a partial and personal lecture of her work in which we take some of those ways and topics (the ones that we use in our own research). The paper is divided in three parts: in the first, as a way of introduction, we briefly describe Jelin´s academic biography; in the second, we analyze the role of researchers in social research, in relation with styles and ethical issues; in the third, we consider some issues related to the investigation about rights.