Workshop 'The Good, the Bad and the Ugly'

Understanding collaboration between the social sciences and the life sciences

12-13 March 2012 - King’s College London, UK

Background

This strategic initiative of the ESF’s Standing Committee for the Social Sciences addresses the recognised need for the social sciences to develop closer links with cognate disciplines in the humanities and the life sciences.

Investigating the links between genes, brain, and human behaviour is an important new horizon for the social and life sciences. However, interdisciplinary collaboration between these domains of science remains largely unexplored in terms of theoretical and practical difficulties and intellectual and social dynamics. This ESF workshop will therefore spotlight and investigate cases of interdisciplinary research between the social and life sciences, in order to identify and discuss the new practices, experiences, achievements and added value of collaboration between social and life sciences. The nature of differences between the epistemic cultures of various life and social science disciplines will be explored, as will questions of how reliable knowledge is arrived at and established in these types of collaborations. The workshop will facilitate discussion about what counts as new, good or bad practice in interdisciplinary collaboration between the social and life sciences and will offer room for debate about needs and priorities for interdisciplinary collaboration between social and life sciences.

The workshop will result in a report synthesizing the insights gained into successful (and unsuccessful) collaboration between the social sciences and the life sciences and suggesting how this type of interdisciplinary research can be facilitated and fostered to help advance our understanding of human behaviour and social phenomena.