What should be the role of the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) in wider research agendas? How should SSH relate to the aims and assumptions of such agendas, especially as regards technoscientific innovation? What is the need and potential to open up the issues? How do and can SSH intervene in technoscientific research policy and priorities?
The term ‘embedding’ has become prominent in discussions on the European Union's (EU) 2014–2020 research programme. For example, a European Commission official suggested the need to ‘embed’ the SSH across all Societal Challenges, towards closer collaboration with science and engineering. According to the Vilnius Declaration from a 2013 EU Presidency conference, SSH has knowledge which can ‘enable innovation to become embedded in society’. What could this mean?
The term ‘embed’ has an instructive etymology. In the eighteenth century it denoted geological processes embedding fossils in rock formations, while perhaps anthropomorphically projecting a social stability onto nature. It soon acquired an overt figurative meaning about human practices fixing an object within a wider system. By the late twentieth century, it could mean an item encapsulated within an electronic document or data file. It also has meant ‘dedicated’, whereby a special-purpose computer system is designed to perform specific functions more effectively or quickly.
Perhaps such meanings converged during the second Gulf War in 2003. To promote its propaganda war, the US military invited journalists to become assigned to travel with a military unit so that they would experience events from its standpoint. ‘Embedded journalist’ became a pejorative term for structurally biased observation and reportage. As in earlier usages, here ‘embedded’ denoted a special-purpose design which enhances effectiveness while pre-empting diversions.
From those etymological metaphors, there follow extra questions about a research context: In what ways have the SSH been embedded in travelling with policy frameworks—or questioning them? How have the SSH devised various kinds collaboration with science and engineering? What kinds should be promoted—or avoided? How to stimulate a broad debate on these issues?
Such a debate has been initiated by Uli Felt's article, originally a talk at the EU Presidency conference, on the European role of SSH. In particular, she advocates efforts towards a comparative epistemology, both within SSH as well as in the sciences and engineering. This could facilitate ‘a serious engagement with and novel articulations of different knowledges’, towards more open ways to imagine and make European futures.
Some of her concepts and questions are taken up by other articles in this Forum section. Les Levidow and Claudia Neubauer describe efforts to open up EU research agendas so that the SSH can play roles beyond dominant policy frameworks. Mark Winskel describes initiatives for interdisciplinary approaches within UK energy research, as well as constraints arising from institutional contexts and professional reward structures. Mads Dahl Gjefsen and Erik Fisher describe strategies and benefits of social-science interventions in scientific laboratories, as a research activity complementing studies of how laboratory knowledge both models and influences the wider society. Amit Prasad shows how economic-geographical imaginaries have mapped a North–South ‘technology gap’, thus setting the task of ‘technology transfer’ to a deficient South.
SaC welcomes full-length research articles on these themes.