Our school held the academic lecture entitled “Knowledge Production and Action Research” on Nov. 26 at 3:00 pm in Guanyun Building 703. The lecture was delivered by associate professor Jiao Ruoshui from the School of History and Culture. About 60 postgraduate students majoring sociology and social work of grade 2017 and 2018 and other specialties attended this lecture.

Assoc. Prof. Jiao’s lecture was composed of three subjects: “why knowledge production is important”, “devoted to theories and action research”, “locality and globality of social research”. Taking the current research status as an example, Assoc. Prof. Jiao pointed out that at present researchers had not acquired a sufficient cognition of social problems in China; besides, research should not depend on western theories, it should be related to the current situation of China and required self-examination. He said, to comprehend a discipline, what is to observe is primarily what is being done by practioners of this discipline, instead of theories or discoveries of this discipline. He told the students that academic research could be conducted in untouched fields to which we were acquainted. The development of sociology and social work in China should step out the “apprentice” stage, in which western theories were introduced. This development should be based on exploration into cultural genes and codes in the history of Chinese social service, so as to reform native wisdom into systematic theories.

Assoc. Prof. Jiao’s academic ideas were applauded. Begining with the relation between knowledge production and action research, he instructed the students to think how to conduct real academic research. He encouraged the students to take their research along the historic event series, in order to discover the historical roots of social problems in China.