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Interdisciplinarity and Society: An International Colloquium
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Saturday 24th February, St Catherine's College, Oxford
There is a widespread sense today that the relationship between the natural sciences and engineering, on the one hand, and the social sciences and arts, on the other, is changing. Whereas once social scientists were preoccupied with the question of how they could emulate (or critique) the methods of the natural sciences, today the problematic is likely to be different. At the heart of contemporary discussions of the relationship between scientific and technical fields and the social sciences and arts is the idea of interdisciplinarity. How can the social and natural sciences address complex problems such as climate change through interdisciplinary collaboration? How can innovation be tailored more closely to the needs of users, publics, policy or business through the involvement of social scientists? Can artists catalyse innovation through their imaginative engagement with evolving technologies? Can interdisciplinary collaborations with artists and social scientists make the sciences more accountable to society, or foster greater public understanding of science? Do existing science policies inhibit interdisciplinary research? In brief, the idea of interdisciplinarity has come to be critical to a series of contemporary debates concerning the governance of science, the relations between scientific research and its publics, and the conduct and organisation of both university and corporate research.
Yet despite the current interest in interdisciplinarity, systematic research and debate on the question of interdisciplinarity, the diversity of its forms, practices and purposes, remains surprisingly limited. While government, industry and universities have increasingly sought to promote interdisciplinarity, our understanding of what interdisciplinarity has meant historically, and has come to mean in practice, remains remarkably undeveloped. This colloquium, which brings together international scholars from anthropology, sociology, geography, policy studies, STS and the history of science, will present the results of recent studies of a number of key areas of contemporary interdisciplinary practice for discussion. These areas include: the role of Ethical, Legal and Social Implications (ELSI) research in genetics research, the incorporation of social research into IT research and development, interdisciplinary environmental and climate change research, and the burgeoning fields of Art-Science and New Media Art. It will also include papers on the history of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity, and on the contemporary formation of disciplines - geography and anthropology - that continue to straddle the division between the natural and social sciences. It is expected that participants will present draft papers at the colloquium, which will subsequently form the basis for an edited collection for publication by a major academic press. The aim of the colloquium, in short, is to facilitate intensive discussion of the findings from recent research, which will later circulate in both academic and policy circles.
Participation in the colloquium is by invitation only. For further details contact Andrew Barry and Gisa Weszkalnys (OUCE) or Prof. Georgina Born (Social and Political Sciences, Cambridge University).
The organisation of the workshop is supported by the Part of Phase 2 of the ESRC Science in Society programme and forms part of the project on Interdisciplinarity and Society.