ALI GUNES

  Ibn Haldun University: Reclaiming the Epistemic Commons  for  Social  Science and  Human Flourishing Prof. Dr. Ali Gunes Ibn Haldun University Department of Comparative Literature Email:  ali.gunes@ihu.edu.tr   Something has quietly gone wrong at universities around the world. Governments, funding agencies, and corporate partners have spent decades pushing institutions towards Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines and applied professional programmes, treating them as the surest route to economic productivity. The social sciences, meanwhile, have been pushed to the margins, stripped of prestige and resources. This is not merely a quarrel over departmental budgets. The capacity of contemporary societies to make sense of their most pressing problems -- whether climate change, structural unemployment, mass migration, or political polarisation -- depends on the analytical traditions cultivated by sociology, anthropology, his...

  Rooted in tradition, reaching for the world:   How Ibn Haldun University is rethinking what a social sciences education can be. Prof. Dr. Ali Gunes İbn Haldun University  Department of Comparative Literature. Email :  ali.gunes@ihu.edu.tr     Establishing a university named after Ibn Khaldun requires strong courage and vision. Ibn Khaldun, a 14th-century scholar from Tunisia, is widely regarded as one of the earliest true social scientists in human history, someone who discussed the rise and fall of civilisations centuries before sociology, economics, and political science had names. His well-known book is the  Muqaddimah  (completed in 1377), or  Prolegomena  (Introduction), which has inspired and influenced scholars, philosophers, sociologists, and historians worldwide. For example, 17th- and 19 th -century Ottoman historians such as Katip Celebi, Mustafa Naima, and Ahmet Cevdet Pasha employed Ibn Khaldun’s theory to examine the rise...