The study of the nature and roles of intellectuals has been a decades-long concern of many scholars in sociology and other disciplines that goes back to the period immediately following the Second World War. Later on, there emerged discussions on the related idea of public sociology, suggesting also the various ways in which sociology and other social sciences play a role in shaping public opinion and contributing to policy interventions. These concerns have much relevance to research on and in Asian societies. In addition to questions raised in the West regarding the types and roles of intellectuals, scholars in Asia also engaged in the critique of Orientalist and Eurocentric knowledge and saw themselves as playing a role in non-Eurocentric, postcolonial and decolonial knowledge creation. In this sense, public social science, as it pertains to research in Asia, can be said to be postcolonial or decolonial social science at the same time. While there has been much discussion on public social sciences in some parts of the West, as well as on postcolonial/decolonial social sciences in the Third World, the idea of public postcolonial/decolonial social science needs more consideration. The central question here would be to what extent postcolonial/decolonial discourses are confined to theoretical and conceptual issues with little relevance to the larger society beyond academia.