The rapidly changing field of genetics affects society through advances in health-care and through implications of genetic research. This study addresses the impacts of new genetic discoveries and technologies on different segments of today's society. The book begins with a chapter on genetic complexity, and subsequent chapters discuss moral and ethical questions arising from today's genetics from the perspectives of health care professionals, the media, the general public, special interest groups and commercial interests.

Academia is a competitive environment. Early Career Researchers (ECRs) are limited in experience and resources and especially need achievements to secure and expand their careers. To help with these issues, this book offers a new approach for conducting research using the combination of mindsponge innovative thinking and Bayesian analytics. This is not just another analytics book. 1. A new perspective on psychological processes: Mindsponge is a novel approach for examining the human mind’s information processing mechanism. This conceptual framework is (...) used to construct models in studies. The framework is highly flexible and widely applicable for many different types of information processes. The mindsponge approach can help researchers discover interesting ideas or even formulate their very own theories when investigating psychosocial phenomena. This approach brings a fresh wind to the current landscape of social sciences and humanities (SSH). 2. Easy-to-follow analysis protocol: The Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF analytics) is useful in terms of computing and visualizing power but also easy to learn and apply. Contrary to being intimidating, the Bayesian analytics section of this book is presented in a reader-friendly manner with a detailed yet clear step-by-step procedure. Examples are from published BMF articles, allowing readers to immediately practice the method and quickly create their own applications. With educational purposes in mind, the book is very suitable for ECRs who are looking to innovate their research methods. 3. Advocating for low-cost, high-quality research: Doing science can be very costly. Mindsponge innovative thinking and BMF analytics help produce impactful studies using openly available data on online repositories. This is based on the authors’ previous works and experiences. The book presents examples of employing the open R package bayesvl on secondary data from different sources. With less financial constraints, researchers can have more freedom of thought to pursue their curiosity and creativity. ECRs in low- and middle-income countries may find this aspect crucial in their careers. 4. Support and collaboration: The authors share their insights from experiences in the academic publishing system to help readers get through the processes of manuscript writing and peer-reviewing more easily. The authors are also ready to support other researchers with further inquiries and collaboration opportunities at the following website, mindsponge(dot)info. This book is for: a) ECRs whose only abundant resources are their innovation capacity and strength of will; b) Researchers in SSH who want to explore a novel approach to thinking and study conducting; c) Low- and middle-income countries’ researchers looking for a cost-effective research protocol; and, d) Innovative thinkers who want to turn their interesting thoughts into good publications. (shrink)

We researchers in the humanities and social sciences, similar to the archaeologists but only less literally, are constantly digging through unknown dirt and even uncharted territories in hopes of finding “diamonds.”.

There is wide agreement among scholars in research policy that the position of the social sciences and humanities (SSH) in interdisciplinary research is not as good as it should be. Academics give many reasons why SSH fields should become more active collaborators in interdisciplinarity, including the capacity within these disciplines to introduce new research questions and to make interdisciplinary research more ethically and societally grounded. This article assesses the conditions attached to 127 recent funding (...) programmes for interdisciplinary and crossdisciplinary research. The findings indicate that the exclusion of SSH from interdisciplinary fields is an ongoing problem in research funding. Furthermore, when given funding, SSH disciplines are less likely to be given the opportunity to connect their research questions and targets solely to the advancement of knowledge. These priorities increase the likelihood of SSH disciplines contributing to multidisciplinary research rather than focusing on interdisciplinarity with knowledge integration. (shrink)

On the basis of bibliometric data, this chapter shows that international collaboration in the social sciences and humanities has increased strongly between 1980 and 2014, but that the pattern of exchange has known few structural changes. At the basic level of production capacity and article output, the global field of the SSH is best described as a Euro-American duopoly. At the higher level of co-authorships and citations, however, the field structure tends to be monopolistic: no language can compete (...) with English, no country can rival with the USA. Globalization effects have been relatively weak, and the growth of transnational exchange has reproduced rather than undermined existing hierarchies. Due to its hegemonic position, USA journals remain largely national in their authorship and references, and researchers in the USA are less frequently involved in transnational co-authorship than their colleagues in Europe. For European researchers, transnational collaboration has become somewhat more global in scope, but most of it has remained with the USA and other English speaking countries; China is the only country that has become significantly more important. In European countries the reference pattern indicates that bi-nationalism is the predominant form of transnational exchange: citation hierarchies are dominated by a combination of national and American journals, whereas international and European journals are virtually absent. Patterns of transnational collaboration and exchange thus tend to be structured like star networks with many relations to the center, less frequent relations among semi-central countries, and infrequent or absent relations among semi-peripheral and peripheral countries. (shrink)

This edited volume focuses on big data implications for computational social science and humanities from management to usage. The first part of the book covers geographic data, text corpus data, and social media data, and exemplifies their concrete applications in a wide range of fields including anthropology, economics, finance, geography, history, linguistics, political science, psychology, public health, and mass communications. The second part of the book provides a panoramic view of the development of big data (...) in the fields of computational social sciences and humanities. The following questions are addressed: why is there a need for novel data governance for this new type of data?, why is big data important for social scientists?, and how will it revolutionize the way social scientists conduct research? With the advent of the information age and technologies such as Web 2.0, ubiquitous computing, wearable devices, and the Internet of Things, digital society has fundamentally changed what we now know as "data", the very use of this data, and what we now call "knowledge". Big data has become the standard in social sciences, and has made these sciences more computational. Big Data in Computational Social Science and Humanities will appeal to graduate students and researchers working in the many subfields of the social sciences and humanities. (shrink)

This book examines very important issues in research evaluation in the Social Sciences and Humanities. It is based on recent experiences carried out in Italy in the fields of research assessment, peer review, journal classification, and construction of indicators, and presents a systematic review of theoretical issues influencing the evaluation of Social Sciences and Humanities. Several chapters analyse original data made available through research assessment exercises. Other chapters are the result of dedicated and (...) independent research carried out in 2014-2015 aimed at addressing some of the debated and open issues, for example in the evaluation of books, the use of Library Catalog Analysis or Google Scholar, the definition of research quality criteria on internationalization, as well as opening the way to innovative indicators. The book is therefore a timely and important contribution to the international debate. (shrink)

The book discusses the multiple issues of a digital research ethic in its interdisciplinary diversity. Digitization and mediatization alter social behavior and cultural traditions, thereby generating new objects of study and new research questions for the social sciences and humanities. Furthermore, mediatization and digitization increase the data volume and accessibility of research and proliferate methodological opportunities for scientific analyses. Hence, they profoundly affect research practices in multiple ways. While consequences concerning the subjects, objects, (...) and addressees of research in the social sciences and humanities have rarely been reflected upon, this reflection lies at the center of the book. (shrink)

This paper presents three cases of research ethics violations in the social sciences and humanities that involved major educational institutions in Vietnam. The violations share two common points: the use of sophistry by the accused perpetrators and their sympathisers, and the relative ease with which they succeeded unpunished. The strategies the violators used to avoid punishment could be summarised as: (i) relying on people not paying enough attention when asked to do something relatively quickly, (ii) asking for (...) the benefit of the doubt, (iii) redefining the meaning of ethics, and (iv) defaming the whistleblowers and showing how fighting ethics violations is too costly, slow and, in the end, worthless. We offer suggestions to improve transparency: investment in translation and education about codes of conduct in Vietnam; investment in research ethics and integrity; the use of open online resources and platforms; and educating Vietnamese researchers about international standards. (shrink)

Background: Academic productivity has been studied by scholars all round the world for many years. However, in Vietnam, this topic has scarcely been addressed. This research therefore aims at better understanding the correlations between gender, age, research experience, the leading role of corresponding authors, and the total number of their publications in the specific realm of social sciences and humanities. Methods: The study employed a Scopus dataset with publication profiles of 410 Vietnamese researchers between 2008 and (...) 2017. Results: Men did not differ from women in academic publications (P=0.827). The proficiency of corresponding authors positively correlated with the number of published papers (rs=0.61, P<0.001). Lastly, the age of lead authors strongly correlated with scientific output (rs=0.74, P<0.001 for authors between 40 and 50 years of age). Conclusion: While scientific output correlated with the author ages and number of articles in which they led, it was not correlated with their gender in Vietnamese social science and humanities authors. (shrink)

This study presents a description of an open database on scientific output of Vietnamese researchers in social sciences and humanities, one that corrects for the shortcomings in current research publication databases such as data duplication, slow update, and a substantial cost of doing science. Here, using scientists’ self-reports, open online sources and cross-checking with Scopus database, we introduce a manual system and its semi-automated version of the database on the profiles of 657 Vietnamese researchers in (...) class='Hi'>social sciences and humanities who have published in Scopus-indexed journals from 2008 to 2018. The final system also records 973 foreign co-authors, 1,289 papers, and 789 affiliations. The data collection method, highly applicable for other sources, could be replicated in other developing countries while its content be used in cross-section, multivariate, and network data analyses. The open database is expected to help Vietnam revamp its research capacity and meet the public demand for greater transparency in science management. (shrink)

This paper finds its origin in a debate between Georges Bataille (1897-1962) and Octavio Paz (1914-1998) on what is central to the idea of eroticism. Bataille posits that violence and transgression are fundamental to eroticism, and without prohibition, eroticism would cease to exist. Paz, however, views violence and transgression as merely intersecting with, rather than being intrinsic to, eroticism. Paz places focus on imagination, and transforms eroticism from a transgressive, to a ritualistic act. Eroticism thus functions as an intermediary, turning (...) animal sexuality into ceremony and rite. In this paper, I argue that Paz and Bataille are not fundamentally at odds in their conceptualisation of eroticism. Instead, Paz redefines the locus of eroticism by subverting its unsettling aspects. His conception of eroticism gives precedence to the imagination, which in itself is an act of violation. Imagination transgresses normal life, but this transgression – the violation of the habitual world – also introduces a glimpse of the numinous that Paz associates with belongingness. The paper further explores eroticism, as this is perceived today, and argues that it ultimately eliminates the threshold marked by transgression. The rise of the contemporary pornographic society is marked by a loss of imagination and transcendence, which ultimately reduces the subject into a mere automaton that demands instant gratification. (shrink)

This paper concerns design thinking (Lawson, 1980), system thinking (systems theory) (von Bertalanffy, 1968), and system dynamics modeling as methodological platforms for analyzing large amounts of qualitative data and transforming it into quantitative mode. The aims of this article are to present an integral (mixed) research process including the design thinking process—a solution oriented approach applicable in the social sciences and humanities which enables to reveal causality in research on societal and behavioral issues. This integral approach (...) is illustrated by an empirical pilot study from art/design-educational environment. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the study of electronic culture as a new phenomenon of the information age, as a special sphere of human activity associated with the creation of digital objects, the simulations of objects of “living” culture, virtual spaces and processes. The concept of “electronic culture” is explained in comparison with relative (but not identical) to it terms, such as cyber culture, Internet culture, online culture, digital culture, etc. The purpose of this study is to identify the internal (...) structure of electronic culture as a system of various information phenomena and processes, to examine the relations between them and their general characteristics as part of a single whole. The electronic culture is reviewed as a system of elements which are in different ways described by researchers in the modern social sciences and humanities. The author systematizes the main methodological approaches to the study of electronic culture and reveals meanings and connotations of the concept of electronic culture in various scientific discourses. The novelty of the study is associated with the modeling the structure of electronic culture from the perspective of existential-axiological analysis, with the identification of its key elements and the relations between them. A new typology of electronic culture objects of various nature is proposed: anthropological, ontological, social, communicative, existential, etc. The research describes various phenomena of information space as a general system, defines the basic concepts of electronic culture, developing in recent decades in the social sciences and humanities. (shrink)

The experience with genetically modified foods has been prominent in motivating science, industry and regulatory bodies to address the social and ethical dimensions of nanotechnology. The overall objective is to gain the general public’s acceptance of nanotechnology in order not to provoke a consumer boycott as it happened with genetically modified foods. It is stated implicitly in reports on nanotechnology research and development that this acceptance depends on the public’s confidence in the technology and that the confidence (...) is created on the basis of information, education, openness and debate about scientific and technological developments. Hence, it is assumed that informing and educating the public will create trust, which will consequently lead to an acceptance of nanotechnology. Thus, the humanities and social sciences are seen as tools to achieve public acceptance. In this paper, the author argues that this is a narrow apprehension of the role of the humanities and social sciences. The humanities and social sciences have a critical function asking fundamental questions and informing the public about these reflections. This may lead to scepticism, however, the motivation for addressing the social and ethical dimensions of nanotechnology should not be public acceptance but informed judgement. The author illustrates this critical function by discussing the role, motivation and contribution of ethics as an example. Lastly, the author shows that a possible strategy for incorporating the humanities and the social sciences into nanotechnology research and development is Real-Time Technology Assessment, where the purpose is to integrate natural science and engineering investigations with ethical, legal and social science from the outset. (shrink)

What is the role of the Social Sciences and Humanities in the journey to the Fourth Industrial Revolution? What is the impact of these disciplines for the challenges the world faces, supposedly defined by a highly dynamic phase of industrial and social restructuring, where the adaptive capacity of societies needs to be enhanced by specific skills and techno-social dependencies? What is the role of SSH in building cognitive competences, and new professional paths? This paper, part of (...) the special focus of the Annual Review of New Directions in the Humanities, seeks to unveil the importance of SSH disciplines to the major STEM disciplines. Although disciplines and research in Social Sciences and Humanities play a fundamental role in the production of knowledge relevant to society, the last decade of the 20th century has seen a continuous trend towards their devaluation. After a relatively glorious period during the first half of the century, when SSH disciplines still held a relative social influence, the arrival of digital technologies in 1990s, accelerated their decline. This article traces a brief overview of this decline and explores some of the causes as well as the challenges in valuing SSH. Focusing mainly on Europe, the paper presents the attempts, on behalf of the European Commission, to correct this decline. It also outlines some new ideas that could help a true integration and transfer of knowledge across STEM AND STEAM disciplines, such as the creation of specific 'missions'. Precisely, one of the diagnoses of the Horizon 2020 experience in Europe has been that investment in research is not effectively linked to the solution of specific problems. Thus, it is necessary to put in motion co-creation mechanisms among research disciplines and advance in the establishment of intersectoral bridges, bringing SSH research closer to the industry and other social sectors in order to solve the pressing challenges we face. (shrink)

This article addresses the issue of how Social Science and Humanities (SSH) researchers frame and argue relevance, where there are no explicit expectations to do so. It uses research project reports submitted to a Swedish research council, to distil and further analyze ‘relevance expressions’. These expressions illustrate some methodological differences along the lines of the long-standing distinction between nomothetic (generalization oriented) and idiographic (case /description oriented). We extracted relevance claims from a database of project abstracts (...) and reports from the following fields: History, Linguistics, Political Science and Psychology. We interrogated these statements for possible differences with respect to how relevance is expressed. The study finds differences in the way that nomothetic and idiographic expressions imply, argue or derive support for relevance, and that these may be somewhat associated with fields, although with certain qualifications. Importantly, relevance expressions can be viewed as epistemic operations that occur in degrees of concretization, broadly or narrowly formulated, and in different levels of everyday and technical expressions. A key insight is that relevance in SSH appears to be closely associated with the way subjects relate to the empirical. This ultimately lends support for the application of the nomothetic/idiographic as a conceptual, albeit not exhaustive, analytical approach to understanding the relevance of SSH. (shrink)

BackgroundOpen peer review practices are increasing in medicine and life sciences, but in social sciences and humanities they are still rare. We aimed to map out how editors of respected SSH journals perceive open peer review, how they balance policy, ethics, and pragmatism in the review processes they oversee, and how they view their own power in the process.MethodsWe conducted 12 pre-registered semi-structured interviews with editors of respected SSH journals. Interviews consisted of 21 questions and lasted an average (...) of 67 min. Interviews were transcribed, descriptively coded, and organized into code families.ResultsSSH editors saw anonymized peer review benefits to outweigh those of open peer review. They considered anonymized peer review the “gold standard” that authors and editors are expected to follow to respect institutional policies; moreover, anonymized review was also perceived as ethically superior due to the protection it provides, and more pragmatic due to eased seeking of reviewers. Finally, editors acknowledged their power in the publication process and reported strategies for keeping their work as unbiased as possible.ConclusionsEditors of SSH journals preferred the benefits of anonymized peer review over open peer and acknowledged the power they hold in the publication process during which authors are almost completely disclosed to editorial bodies. We recommend journals to communicate the transparency elements of their manuscript review processes by listing all bodies who contributed to the decision on every review stage. (shrink)

This book offers a provocative account of interdisciplinary research across the neurosciences, social sciences and humanities. Setting itself against standard accounts of interdisciplinary 'integration,' and rooting itself in the authors' own experiences, the book establishes a radical agenda for collaboration across these disciplines. Rethinking Interdisciplinarity does not merely advocate interdisciplinary research, but attends to the hitherto tacit pragmatics, affects, power dynamics, and spatial logics in which that research is enfolded. Understanding the complex relationships between brains, (...) minds, and environments requires a delicate, playful and genuinely experimental interdisciplinarity, and this book shows us how it can be done. This book is open access under a CC-BY license and funded by The Wellcome Trust. (shrink)

This is an open access book. The aim of the Conference is to provide a shared platform for academics, scholars, PhD students, and graduate students with different cultural backgrounds to present and discuss research, developments and innovations in the fields of contemporary education, social sciences and humanities are referred with the understanding of the Human being. Papers concerning education, philosophy, philosophical anthropology, sociology, theory and history of culture, epistemology, religions, ethics are strongly related with analyzing of the (...) Human being will be considered. Interdisciplinary approach and comparative perspective are encouraged. (shrink)

'This is a smart and compelling book. Difficult ideas are presented in an accessible manner, with plenty of supporting illustrations…Students will enjoy the research material and other supporting material. A definite winner!'- Professor Jay Gubrium, University of Missouri This book gets to the heart of what the social sciences really know about the elusive and contradictory object of research: human reality. Drawing on a wide range of international examples and scenarios, Social Theory and Human Reality examines (...) key sociological concepts that we use to understand human behaviour such as: norms, rules and meanings; language and discourse; ritual; and personality and identity construction. Alasuutari clearly and convincingly demonstrates: - The constant interplay between routines and reflexivity that grounds social order - how the body and our bodily experiences mediate our social reality - that language plays a multi-faceted role as it describes, reflects and constructs human reality Building on the work started by Berger and Luckmann in The Social Construction of Reality, this book is a lucid and contemporary analysis of the premises shared across the social sciences, and of the kaleidoscope of 'human reality'. This important book will be welcomed by students and scholars alike in the fields of Cultural Studies, Sociology and Anthropology. (shrink)

Ethical conduct is a maxim in scholarly research as well as scholarly endeavour generally. In the case of research involving humans, few if any question the necessity for ethics approval of procedures by ethics boards or committees. However, concerns have been raised about the appropriateness of ethics approval processes for social science research arguing that the orientation of ethics boards and committees to biomedical and experimental scientific research, institutional risk aversion, and other factors lead (...) to over-protection of research participants and overly restrictive processes that delay and sometimes prevent important social science research. This is particularly significant when social science research is required to respond to social, environmental, or health emergencies and in contract research projects for the reasons explained. This analysis of an ethics approval case study adds to increasing concerns that ethics approval processes can have perverse effects in the social sciences. While a single case study does not provide generalizable findings, in-depth analysis of a significant case can identify issues that need to be further explored. Recommendations offer pathways for facilitating social science research including in emergency situations in which timeliness is important and in collaborative approaches such as participatory action research, while maintaining high ethical standards. (shrink)

Although the idea of the Anthropocene originated in the earth sciences, there have been increasing calls for questions about the Anthropocene to be addressed by pan-disciplinary groups of researchers from across the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. We use data analysis techniques from corpus linguistics to examine academic texts about the Anthropocene from these disciplinary families. We read the data to suggest that barriers to a broadly interdisciplinary study of the Anthropocene are high, but we are also (...) able to identify some areas of common ground that could serve as interdisciplinary bridges. (shrink)

Science breaks new trails for technology but social science has yet to break new trails for social technology. Why is this? One hypothesis explains this with reference to the complexity of the social world and the still rudimentary nature of the social sciences. This paper argues for an alternative hypothesis, claiming that social science research is incapable of generating technologies not already part of the human repertoire. Drawing on a range of (...) social science inquiry from economics to psychology, it shows that the ?mechanisms? posited to explain normal and puzzling human behavior depend on familiar facts about humans which future investigations cannot overturn. Finally, it is shown that even when these familiar facts are themselves explained, the generative mechanisms posited to account for them are no longer within the sphere of the social sciences. (shrink)

Aims and Scope -/- The Vietnamese Social Sciences and Humanities at a Fork in the Road, utilizing an object-oriented structured database on the productivity of Vietnamese researchers, seeks to provide a comprehensive overview of the development of Social Sciences and Humanities in Vietnam from 2008 to 2018. -/- Quan-Hoang Vuong (Ph.D., Université Libre de Bruxelles) is the director of Centre for Interdisciplinary Social Research, Phenikaa University in Hanoi, Vietnam. He is chairman of the Vietnam (...) chapter of the European Association of Science Editors and serves in the NAFOSTED Scientific Council on Basic Research in the Social Sciences and Humanities (2019-2021). Dr. Vuong has published more than 120 academic articles, and book chapters in about 50 refereed journals and books by such publishers as Elsevier, Inderscience, Nature Publishing Group, Springer, Praeger, Wiley, World Scientific, etc. -/- Trung Tran is an Associate Professor of Mathematics Education and works at Vietnam Academy for Ethnic Minorities. He is a member of the Vietnam chapter of The European Association of Science Editors (EASE), a leader of the Vietnamese Science Editors (VSE) Team, and a chairman of Editor's Board of Journal of Ethnic Minorities Research (ISSN: 0866-773X). (shrink)

This broad and insightful book presents current scholarship in important subfields of philosophy of science and addresses an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary readership. It groups carefully selected contributions into the four fields of I) philosophy of physics, II) philosophy of life sciences, III) philosophy of social sciences and values in science, and IV) philosophy of mathematics and formal modeling. Readers will discover research papers by Paul Hoyningen-Huene, Keizo Matsubara, Kian Salimkhani, Andrea Reichenberger, Anne Sophie Meincke, Javier Suárez, (...) Roger Deulofeu, Ludger Jansen, Peter Hucklenbroich, Martin Carrier, Elizaveta Kostrova, Lara Huber, Jens Harbecke, Antonio Piccolomini d'Aragona and Axel Gelfert. This collection fosters dialogue between philosophers of science working in different subfields, and brings readers the finest and latest work across the breadth of the field,illustrating that contemporary philosophy of science has successfully broadened its scope of reflection. It will interest and inspire a wide audience of philosophers as well as scholars of the natural sciences, social sciences and the humanities. The volume shares selected contributions from the prestigious second triennial conference of the German Society for Philosophy of Science/ Gesellschaft für Wissenschaftsphilosophie (GWP.2016, March 8, 2016 - March 11, 2016). (shrink)

Criteria of the growth of knowledge proposed in modern philosophy of science are considered. It is argued that the model of growth that fits the peculiarities of social sciences&humanities is provided by the methodology of scientific research programmes. Yet one has to correct some drawbacks. The author concludes that the real growth of knowledge consists in the growth of causal explanations and in the corresponding growth of empirical content of the theories from superseeding scientific research (...) programmes. -/- Key words: R.Rorty, M.Weber,N.Cartwright -/- . (shrink)

Since Circular 34 from the Ministry of Science and Technology of Vietnam required the head of the national project to have project results published in ISI/Scopus journals in 2014, the field of economics has been dominating the number of nationally-funded projects in social sciences and humanities. However, there has been no scientometric study that focuses on the difference in productivity among fields in Vietnam. Thus, harnessing the power of the SSHPA database, a comprehensive dataset of 1,564 Vietnamese (...) authors (854 males, 705 females) with 2,410 publications in the 2008 – 2018 period was extracted and analyzed. Various factors were considered including age, gender, new authors, leading authors, co-authorship, and Impact Factor. The findings suggest a high level of contribution from authors at the age of 40 – 44 in economics (858 publications) in a 12-years period, which is equivalent to the social medicine total output, and two times more than the total output of the education. Moreover, the presence and reinforcement of male researchers are still dominating in Economics and other fields, with the only exception of education. Despite the rapid rise in the number of Vietnamese lead authors, gender disparity among disciplines is an issue. Contrary to the strong international collaboration-oriented tendency in social medicine, economics, and other fields, educational authors are not open to international collaborating. Finally, most of the publications in economics belong to the group with JIF from 0 to 2, in contrast with the high number of social medicine publications with JIF from 2 to 5, which suggesting the field of economics is fulfilling the quantity, but still, need more quality publications. (shrink)

The social sciences stand at a strange crossroads. There is a greater need for disciplined inquiry into the issues of policy facing the United States. Yet the incentives in the political system, and in the professional guilds of those performing social research, discourage a close involvement of many prominent social scientists with policy. The political system, fearing an elite imposing its values on society, welcomes the natural scientist who seems to conform to the model of the (...) politically neutral expert who solves problems and addresses “facts”. This model also fits the higher ranks of the civil service, made up of specialists rather than generalist administrators, and the outside advisers serving officials concerned with high policy. Likewise, to protect themselves from changes of partisanship, leading academic social scientists forsake policy concerns for topics within the analytic traditions of Weberian Wertfreiheit. Just as Weber sought to avoid censorship by value neutral scholarship, the modern social scientist disdains the normative concerns of policy in favour of more tractable, morally neutral issues defined as the core of the discipline.The country needs to draw some of the best analytical talent in the social science community into the policy process and advisory roles. Disciplined inquiry cannot be left only to technicians whose professional interests are far removed from political, economic, social and other human sciences. To promote better policy and better social science, we should encourage serious, professionally grounded inquiry into social values, the directions of policy, and the role and proper limits of state power. In the clamour of American politics, there is little danger that policy will be monopolised by an elite group, but considerable danger that debate on policy will be impoverished by the absence of those most knowledgeable about social and economic reality. (shrink)

We received 23 spirited commentaries on our target article from across the disciplines of philosophy, economics, evolutionary genetics, molecular biology, criminology, epidemiology, and law. We organize our reply around three overarching questions: (1) What is a cause? (2) How are randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and within-family genome-wide association studies (GWASs) alike and unalike? (3) Is behavior genetics a qualitatively different enterprise? Throughout our discussion of these questions, we advocate for the idea that behavior genetics shares many of the same pitfalls (...) and promises as environmentally oriented research, medical genetics, and other arenas of the social and behavioral sciences. (shrink)

Incentives for improving research productivity at universities prevail in global academia. However, the rationale, methodology, and impact of such incentives and consequent evaluation regimes are in need of scrutinization. This paper explores the influences of financial and career-related publishing incentive schemes on research cultures. It draws on an analysis of 75 interviews with academics, senior university administrators, and journal editors from China, a country that has seen widespread reliance on international publication counts in research evaluation and reward (...) systems. The study focuses on humanities and social sciences as disciplinary sites, which embody distinct characteristics and have experienced the introduction of incentive schemes in China since the early 2000s. Findings reveal tensions between internationalization and indigenization, quality and quantity, integrity and instrumentalism, equity and inequity in Chinese academia. In particular, we argue that a blanket incentive scheme could reinforce a managerial culture in higher education, encourage performative objectification of academics, and jeopardize their agency. We thereby challenge ‘one-size-fits-all’ policymaking, and suggest instead that institutions should have the opportunity to adopt an ethical and ‘human-oriented’ approach when developing their research incentives and evaluation mechanisms. (shrink)

Research in the humanities and social sciences thrives on critical reflections that unfold with each research project, not only in terms of knowledge created, but in whether chosen methodologies served their purpose. Ethics forms the bulwark of any social science research methodology and it requires continuous engagement and reengagement for the greater advancement of knowledge. Each chapter in this book will draw from the empirical knowledge created through intensive fieldwork and provide an account (...) of ethical questions faced by the contributors, placing them in the context of contemporary debates surrounding the theory and practice of ethics. The chapters have been thematically organized into five sections: Feminist Ethics: Cross-Cultural Reflections and Its Implications for Change; Researching Physical and Sexual Violence in Non-Academic Settings: A Need for Ethical Protocols; Human Agency, Reciprocity, Participation and Activism: Meanings for Social Science Research Ethics; Emotions, Conflict and Dangerous Fields: Issues of “Safety” and Reflective Research; and Social Science Education: Training in Ethics or “Ethical Training” and “Ethical Publicizing." This inter-disciplinary volume will interest students and researchers in academic and non-academic settings in core disciplines of Anthropology, Sociology, Law, Political Science, International Relations, Geography, or inter-disciplinary degrees in Development Studies, Health Studies, Public Health Policy, Social Policy, Health Policy, Psychology, Peace and Conflict studies, and Gender Studies. The book features a foreword by His Holiness The Dalai Lama. (shrink)

This article brings together the history of the social sciences and the history of social thought in Socialist Romania. It is concerned with the development of ideas about the social beyond collectivism, especially about the relationship between individual and society under socialism, from the early 1960s to the end of the 1970s. The analysis speaks to three major themes in the current historiography of Cold War social science. First, the article investigates the role of disciplinary (...) specialization in the advancement of new ideas about the social in the postwar period. Specifically, it asks how the debate over the relationship between sociology and Marxism-Leninism has challenged ideas about collectivism from Stalinist social science. Second, the article shows how social practice, individual and collective agency, and people's subjectivities became theoretically relevant in the 1960s, and how they were integrated, via empirical sociological research, into the reworked conceptual apparatus of post-Stalinist Marxism-Leninism. This complicates accounts about the role of quantification and theorization in postwar social science by foregrounding the intense reflection on the role of empirical research in sociology under state socialism. Third, the article shows how the relationship between individual and society became a topic of interest across social sciences in the 1960s and 1970s. The Marxist humanist approach to the social, although it never achieved the institutional status of a distinct discipline, adds an important perspective from East Central Europe to the existing historiography of the ‘thinning’ of the social in social sciences and social thought beginning in the 1950s. (shrink)

Philosophy and social science assume that reason and cause are objective and universally applicable concepts. Through close readings of ancient and modern philosophy, history and literature, Richard Ned Lebow demonstrates that these concepts are actually specific to time and place. He traces their parallel evolution by focusing on classical Athens, the Enlightenment through Victorian England, and the early twentieth century. This important book shows how and why understandings of reason and cause have developed and evolved, in response to (...) what kind of stimuli, and what this says about the relationship between social science and the social world in which it is conducted. Lebow argues that authors reflecting on their own social context use specific constructions of these categories as central arguments about the human condition. This highly original study will make an immediate impact across a number of fields with its rigorous research and the development of an innovative historicised epistemology. (shrink)

A century ago historian of science George Sarton argued that “science is our greatest treasure, but it needs to be humanized or it will do more harm than good”. The systematic cultivation of an “historical spirit,” a philosophical appreciation of the dynamic nature of scientific inquiry, and a recognition that science is irreducibly a “collective enterprise” was, on Sarton’s account, crucial to the humanizing mission he advocated. These elements of Sarton’s program are more relevant than ever as (...) philosophers of science articulate research programs that take seriously the contextual factors, situated interests, and historical contingencies that shape the sciences we study. I trace the trajectory of a long-term philosophical engagement with archaeology that illustrates a succession of ways in which social, cultural, and political values configure inquiry, culminating in a program of collaborative research that raises the question of what role philosophers can usefully play when the challenges of humanizing scientific practice have centrally to do with navigating entrenched asymmetries of power. (shrink)

Animals are commonplace in genomic research, yet to date there has been little direct interrogation of the position, role and construction of animals in the otherwise flourishing social science of genomics. Following a brief discussion of this omission, I go on to suggest that there is much of interest for the social sciences and the humanities in this field of science. I show that animal genomics not only updates and extends established debates about the (...) use of animals in science and society, but also raises novel issues and promotes new ways of thinking about what animals are, and the social and biological relationships between animals and humans. Organising the science of interest into six themes (sameness, difference and classification; crossing boundaries; the maintenance of borders; farmyard supermodels; laboratory supermodels; knowing, relating and looking at animals), for each I review some of the science that is being done, some of the conceptual issues that are raised, and some of the social science that is or could be done. I conclude by briefly considering the development of socially responsive policies for animal genomics. (shrink)

Social media posts are full of potential for data mining and analysis. Recognizing this potential, platform providers increasingly restrict free access to such data. This shift provides new challenges for social scientists and other non-profit researchers who seek to analyze public posts with a purpose of better understanding human interaction and improving the human condition. This paper seeks to outline some of the recent changes in social media data analysis, with a focus on Twitter, specifically. Using Twitter (...) data from a 24-hour period following The Sisters in Spirit Candlelight Vigil, sponsored by the Native Women’s Association of Canada, this article compares three free-use Twitter application programming interfaces for capturing tweets and enabling analysis. Although recent Twitter data restrictions limit free access to tweets, there are many dynamic options for social scientists to choose from in the capture and analysis of Twitter and other social media platform data. This paper calls for critical social media data analytics combined with traditional, qualitative methods to address the developing ‘data gold rush.’. (shrink)

Interdisciplinary research needs innovation. As an action-oriented intervention, this Manifesto begins from the authors’ experiences as social scientists working within interdisciplinary science and technology collaborations in agriculture and food. We draw from these experiences to: 1) explain what social scientists contribute to interdisciplinary agri-food tech collaborations; (2) describe barriers to substantive and meaningful collaboration; and (3) propose ways to overcome these barriers. We encourage funding bodies to develop mechanisms that ensure funded projects respect the integrity of (...) social science expertise and incorporate its insights. We also call for the integration of social scientific questions and methods in interdisciplinary projects from the outset, and for a genuine curiosity on the part of STEM and social science researchers alike about the knowledge and skills each of us has to offer. We contend that cultivating such integration and curiosity within interdisciplinary collaborations will make them more enriching for all researchers involved, and more likely to generate socially beneficial outcomes. (shrink)

Ethical questions posed by emerging technologies call for greater understanding of their societal, economic, and environmental aspects by policymakers, citizens, and the engineers and applied scientists at the heart of their development and application. This article reports on the efforts of one research project that assessed the growth of critical thinking and awareness of these multiple aspects in undergraduate engineering and applied science students, with specific regard to nanotechnology. Students in two required courses, a first-year writing and engineering (...) ethics course and a second-year social science course, went through nanotechnology modules as a part of their regular coursework. In the first-year humanities course, we observed self-reported increases in risk awareness, significant educational impact of the module, and a greater awareness of nanotechnology’s applications and social context. In the second-year social science course, we noted changes in risk/benefit analysis as well as in the character and depth of students’ historical analysis, but no change in comparative awareness of other topics, including labor issues and corporate motivations. (shrink)

This broad and insightful book presents current scholarship in important subfields of philosophy of science and addresses an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary readership. It groups carefully selected contributions into the four fields of I) philosophy of physics, II) philosophy of life sciences, III) philosophy of social sciences and values in science, and IV) philosophy of mathematics and formal modeling. Readers will discover research papers by Paul Hoyningen-Huene, Keizo Matsubara, Kian Salimkhani, Andrea Reichenberger, Anne Sophie Meincke, Javier Suárez, (...) Roger Deulofeu, Ludger Jansen, Peter Hucklenbroich, Martin Carrier, Elizaveta Kostrova, Lara Huber, Jens Harbecke, Antonio Piccolomini d'Aragona and Axel Gelfert. This collection fosters dialogue between philosophers of science working in different subfields, and brings readers the finest and latest work across the breadth of the field,illustrating that contemporary philosophy of science has successfully broadened its scope of reflection. It will interest and inspire a wide audience of philosophers as well as scholars of the natural sciences, social sciences and the humanities. The volume shares selected contributions from the prestigious second triennial conference of the German Society for Philosophy of Science/ Gesellschaft für Wissenschaftsphilosophie (GWP.2016, March 8, 2016 - March 11, 2016). (shrink)

Long debated has been whether or not the “objectivistic” epistemologies, quantitative methods and causal explanations, developed by the natural sciences for the study of physical objects, their actions and interactions, might also be applied to the study of human subjects, their experiences, actions and social interactions. Pointing out that such supposedly objective approaches would be singularly inappropriate to the study of the significance or meanings, qualitative values and freedom of choice, widely regarded as essential aspects of human subjects, their (...) experiences, actions, and social interactions, and drawing attention, a la Alfred Schutz, to the two meanings of the term “subjective” it is first argued that many of the claims of the natural sciences themselves are “empirically” unverifiable, in the Positivistic sense of that term. Moreover, and most crucially, it is further argued that the “objectivity” of an experience cannot be empirically established on the basis of its supposed correspondence to some “objective” world—for, as precisely appearance or experience transcending, the existence of such a world, much less its nature, is clearly empirically unverifiable—and must therefore rest upon inter-subjective coherence, which in turn must, as Schutz has pointed out, depend precisely upon the very subjective experiences which those who would council such an “objective” approach, had ipso facto, sought to avoid as unverifiable. Thus, paradoxically, the criterion of objective verification cannot itself be objectively verified, but rests upon appeals to “subjective” experiences. (shrink)

This book explores three worlds shared by the humans in their collective experiences. It identifies and explores the world of commonsense, the world of religion, and the world of science as three essential dimensions of human experience. The book helps understand that humans can gain comfort and pleasure in commonsense, achieve meaning and purpose from religion, and attain truth and rationality through science. It actively applies theories to and develops theoretical explanations from different domains or situations of human (...) existence. This book is of interest to theorists, researchers, instructors, and students across major academic disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. (shrink)

This volume, Applied Social Sciences: Philosophy and Theology, provides the reader with an important set of essays related to the two aforementioned fields of study. Aesthetics plays a key role in contemporary philosophy and several authors examine its various aspects, such as the question of identification of works of art; the concept of â oesocial aestheticsâ ; the social therapeutic function that art can have; and the relationships among hermeneutics, aesthetics and communication sciences. Other papers deal with ethical (...) issues, such as the role of human values in applied ethics and moral determinations in public life. The meaning and role of postmodernism in philosophy and society is examined at length in various contributions to the volume, and the same is true for phenomenology at large. Even the theoretical seduction and practical failure of Marxism is addressed, while anthropological issues are studied with reference to truth and other key philosophical concepts. John Searleâ (TM)s theory of intentionality is seen as a factor for creating social institutions, and the real meaning of â oeglobalizationâ is investigated in another article. Many essays deal directly with theological and religious topics. For instance the alleged â oeillusionâ of religion versus its persistency is analyzed, along with the current relations between Church and civil government in Romania, the presence of different forms of Christianity in the Romanian nation, the dialogue between social theology and anthropological research, and the antinomic nature of the Church. All papers included in the volume are original and open new perspectives on the many issues addressed by the authors. Even the philosophical styles are different: hermeneutics, analytic philosophy, historical approach, postmodernism, communication theory and linguistic approach. Some papers are theoretical and others have a more empirical or historical flavour. There is however an underlying unity because they all purport to provide new ideas to professionals involved in the socio-humanistic field. The information is divided into chapters in order to help readers to form by themselves an image of the issues that are studied. However, the volume is not addressed only to specialists, and is accessible to a wider public interested in an interdisciplinary approach. (shrink)

How a social science of big data would look like? In this article, we exemplify such a social science through a number of cases. We start our discussion with the epistemic qualities of big data. We point out to the fact that contrary to the big data champions, big data is neither new nor a miracle without any error nor reliable and rigorous as assumed by its cheer leaders. Secondly, we identify three types of big data: (...) natural big data, artificial big data and human big data. We present and discuss in what ways they are similar and in what other ways they differ. The assumption of a homogenous big data in fact misleads the relevant discussions. Thirdly, we extended 3 Vs of the big data and add veracity with reference to other researchers and violability which is the current author’s proposal. We explain why the trinity of Vs is insufficient to characterize big data. Instead, a quintinity is proposed. Fourthly, we develop an economic analogy to discuss the notions of data production, data consumption, data colonialism, data activism, data revolution, etc. In this context, undertaking a Marxist approach, we explain what we mean by data fetishism. Fifthly, we reflect on the implications of growing up with big data, offering a new research area which is called as developmental psychology of big data. Finally, we sketch data resistance and the newly proposed notion of omniresistance, i.e. resisting anywhere at any occasion against the big brother watching us anywhere and everywhere. (shrink)

Social Information Science (or Social Informatics) is a new and interdiscipline branch subject in China. This paper probe the emergence and the research outline of social information science. 1. The proposal of the social information science. We set up the research from an extension from the theoretical informatics to the concrete informatics; a internal bond of integrating various subjects in humane and social sciences; an intersection and mutual permeation between the (...) social science and the natural science; a the intersection and interaction among humane and social sciences, modern information science and information technology; a strengthening to the research into Social Epistemology. Ⅱ. On the concept of social information. Social information directly is different with selfexistent and natural information, and more related to human’s autonomous creative activities, to society’s culture inheritance, to social value, to human’s spiritual interaction and to human’s emotions. Ⅲ.On the theoretical orientation of the social information science. Social Information Science is a concrete branch of informatics, a generation of sub-disciplines of social information, a kind of traversing and comprehensive research on individual social science from the angle of information, a kind of exchange and interaction between social theoretical research and the modern information technology. Ⅳ. The research focus of the social information science. The paper lists 10 main focus in the research of social information science. Ⅴ.The system and frame of the social information science. In general, there should be four levels of researches if the social information science is to be viewed as a relatively independent subject: the philosophical level, the scientific theoretical level, concrete apply level, social information technology and methods. (shrink)

Central Asian researchers are underrepresented in the global research production in social sciences, resulting in a limited Central Asian perspective on many social issues. To stimulate the production of local knowledge, it is important to develop strong research cultures, including knowledge of ethical practices in research with human participants. There is currently scarce evidence about research ethics regulations used by social science researchers working in the Central Asian region. This article reports findings (...) from an online survey conducted in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan ( n = 296) from October 2021 to January 2022. Focusing on three Central Asian countries, this article addresses the following research questions: What are the attitudes and practices of social science researchers based in Central Asia toward research ethics regulations and research ethics committees (RECs)? Is research ethics training associated with improved attitudes and practices in relation to research ethics among social scientists based in Central Asia? Is research experience associated with improved attitudes and practices in relation to research ethics among social scientists based in Central Asia? Regression analyses results demonstrate that locally based social scientists with prior research ethics training implement ethical procedures in their empirical research practice more often compared to researchers without any prior research ethics training. The preliminary findings indicate that research ethics training is positively associated with Central Asia-based social science researchers’ engagement in ethical research, thus potentially increasing the amount and quality of empirical social science research produced in the region. (shrink)

Following in the wake of a certain epistemological and analytical crisis in positivism (its methodology is mercifully in good shape), a revival in the popularity and `scientific' legitimacy of various `comprehensive' analytical approaches in the social sciences has been witnessed over the last ten years. However, by insisting on the significant subjective dimension of action, these interpretive approaches have brought the problem of normativity inherent in the research object, as well as the problem of the `ideological' implication of (...) the human sciences, back into the centre of epistemological preoccupations. The question now is to know to what extent the so-called human sciences are prepared to accept, from a theoretical point of view, this dual objective and subjective dimension of their cognitive practice, seen in critical relationship with society. It is also a question as to whether the human sciences have at their disposal an adequate model for recognizing this normative dimension in its ontological and epistemological specificity. This article sets out to outline just such a model from a philosophical point of view in order to identify some main ideas relating to a pedagogical reorientation, introspective rather than dogmatic, of the normative task which has fallen to the human sciences in contemporary society. (shrink)

This paper argues that recent ethics research guidelines fit poorly onto the kinds of research undertaken in the humanities, where a research conversation often forms a distinctive method of investigation that has no scientific equivalent The NH&MRC ethics guidelines pay little attention to the issues raised in humanities and social science research. Also, ethics committees are constituted primarily to look at ethical issues that arise from medical and scientific research, causing extra (...) problems for those in the humanities and social sciences. (shrink)