Social storytellers, or why the social sciences need to return to storytelling

Abstract

After a decade at the head, and many times at the tail, of the journal Cuadernos de Teoría Social, we hand over the baton to a new generation to continue giving life to this intellectual space. We retired with fragmentary ideas and stories, like a collective memory scattered in vignettes. After this long period of administrative-editorial work and intellectual craftsmanship with our own and other people's concepts, we observe that we live in an era that still craves epics, but no longer believes in the meta-story. Fueled by the energy of that intuition, we have sought to make Cuadernos a space to try out new ways of telling social stories. Issue after issue, we became convinced that the meta-story does not hide like a ghost behind the meta-theoretical abstraction -which many fear and others venerate-, but is built, rearticulated and materialized in the daily exercise of working with (and through) concepts, weaving the multiple plots that give a sense of continuity to the social.