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Ne'er the twain shall meet
22 June 2010
By Sarah Davies
I was originally going to title this post ‘Lab rats and Culture kids’ and write about the balance between the sciences and humanities in terms of research staff numbers (inspired by bloggers’ Freudian slips of researcher = scientist). But the numbers quite took my breath away. According to the latest CROS survey, around 50% of researchers work in medicine and biological sciences, while 28% are mathematicians, physicists, computer scientists or engineers (apologies for lumping you all together like that). Just 8% work in social studies – which encompasses economics, political science, sociology, geography and anthropology – and none of the other discipline groups (English studies, languages, business) are above 2% of the total numbers of research staff. It seems that in many cases researcher does, in fact, equal scientist.
But perhaps this emphasis on disciplinary groupings is unhelpful: we live in an age of ‘Mode-2’ science in which we are expected to boundary-cross and to move beyond our traditional ghettos of ‘physics’, ‘geography’ or ‘medicine’. Perhaps I’ve been lucky in this regard. I work in a discipline – social studies of science – in which many academics, including myself, are escapees from the natural sciences, and have spent time in a geography department which engineered office shares between its social and natural scientist members. I’ve been to talks on iceberg modelling and spent my PhD interviewing scientists. I’m not saying that interdisciplinarity is my middle name – it’s Rachael – but I certainly feel as though I move in circles in which slipping between disciplines is normal. But what I’m not sure about is how common an experience this is for other researchers. How much do you collaborate with researchers from other disciplinary backgrounds? Outside of geography departments, are there spaces where social and natural scientists get together for coffee? Or is – in your experience – the academy still wedded to CP Snow’s ‘two cultures’ of the sciences and humanities?
Matthew Salois23 June 2010 at 02:49 PM
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Great post Sarah, I too found the numbers shocking. I sometimes feel like social scientists are often not taken as real scientists by some people. However, I do believe that cross-disciplinary collaboration between the social and natural realms has benefited both sides immensely and has helped to bridge the gap. As a PhD student in an applied economics department, I worked as a research assistant in an epidemiology department. The experience was truly enlightening as it introduced me to a different way of looking at the same problem. In my current research fellowship, the project involves collaborating with nutritionists, health professionals, and other medically related scientists. Their expertise has proven invaluable and I know they have found the economic perspective equally helpful.