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SCOPE AND CONCERNS | EDITORS AND ADVISORY BOARD | ASSOCIATE EDITORS | JOURNAL PROFILE | CONTACT

Scope and Concerns

Scope and Concerns

The International Conference on Science in Society and its companion The International Journal of Science in Society provide an interdisciplinary forum for the discussion of the past, present and future of the sciences. Conference presentations and Journal articles range from broad theoretical, philosophical and policy explorations, to detailed case studies of particular intellectual and practical activities at the intersection of science and society.

The Conference and the Journal are located in a time of significant change in public and professional understandings of the relations between science and society.

Modern Science, Conventionally Understood

Conventional, modern science has had a number of characteristic features, which remain resilient today, but which are now also increasingly coming under challenge. Conventional science is about the physical-natural world, relatively autonomous of the social world. It is disinterested, striving to be independent of human agendas, values and interests. Its methods are consistent, stable and replicable, allowing the objective phenomena of the natural-physical world, external to human understanding, more or less to speak for themselves. It circulates its knowledge making practices amongst initiates to a self-enclosed discipline—an exclusive institutional, methodological and discursive space accessible only to participants who have been duly apprenticed as learners and passed disciplinary tests. And the connections between science and the everyday lifeworld are primarily through a unilinear, transmission model, from basic to applied science and from science to technology. Evaluations of social impacts are incidental, or the beginnings of new lines of research rather than an integral to systemic feedback at the core of the scientific endeavour itself.

Changing Science: Towards Greater Social Engagement

The Science in Society Conference and Journal recognise the strengths, power and historic achievements of modern science in its conventional public and professional forms and self-understandings. However, the Conference and the Journal also explore the emergence in recent times of a more socially engaged science. This is a socially reflexive science, a science which reciprocates its understandings of the natural-physical word with the social world. It is a more open and dynamic science.

Here are some key propositions about the relations of science and society in a new, reciprocal science:

Society is deeply intertwined with science. Clear-cut and definitive separations cannot be made between the social-human and the natural-physical. This is both an epistemological proposition (our knowing the natural-physical world) and an ontological one (our being of and in the natural-physical world). Our methods may deceive when they purport to represent external phenomena in an unproblematic way.

Science is intrinsically interested. At its most cogent and most productive, science is engaged, responsible and accountable to the social world. It is integrally linked to agendas, interests, values and ethical stances. These need to be declared and exposed to examination, just as much as science’s propositions about the character of the natural-physical world itself. A constant and searching investigation of human interests goes to the heart of the question of the social credibility and ongoing viability of science.

Science’s methods are as humanist as they are objectivist. The methods of science must test the human-social context of knowing as much as they do knowable realities in the natural-physical world. Reciprocal science provides a full account of the conditions of knowing, not only in the microdynamics of observation, induction and calculation in relation to the natural-physical but also the broader social contexts of agenda-setting, risk assessment and application.

Interested, reciprocal science is increasingly interdisciplinary. The most pressing questions of our times—sustainability, climate, health, well-being, to name just a few of the great contemporary human interests—require holistic answers. Scientists need to cross disciplinary boundaries to answer them, not only the various disciplines amongst the sciences, but also the social sciences, humanities and professions. Scientists routinely cross disciplinary boundaries, and they need to do this if they are to have a science which changes the world, albeit in small and incremental ways much of the time, and maybe also in potentially big ways.

A dynamic, socially engaged science must be an open science. It must not favour particular geographic, national or cultural centres. It must not be skewed by demographic closures which restrict access for some kinds of potential participant. It will cross many sites of knowledge making, some conventional and some new: companies, communities, schools, non-government organisations, the public sector, informally self-constituted groups. It must be decentralised in its locations and distributed in its modes of operation. It must be pluralistic, tolerant of paradigm clashes and open to new disciplinary and interdisciplinary practices. It must be collaborative in its spirit, bringing together cross-disciplinary teams marked by the complementarity of their differences. It must be as equitable and fair as it is rigorous in its modes of evaluation of intellectual quality and practical applicability.

Reciprocal science is subject-driven as well as object-oriented. Rather than being primarily investigator-instigated as has been conventionally the case in modern science, the new science should equally start with social questions that beg scientific investigation of natural-physical phenomena and their human context. This will require a change in the balance of agency between the lay public and the scientific expert, blurring the boundaries of where scientific questions are raised, how they are addressed and where they are answered.

Reciprocal science is more powerfully recursive. The knowledge system of reciprocal science is enabled in part by new technologies and social processes of scientific communication. Peer review is opened out, its criteria more explicitly stated rather than embedded in implicit professional and network-bound processes. The review process becomes more reflexive and responsive in its rating and moderation systems. Scientific writers and readers come from a wider variety of places, and evaluation of scientific worth without is without prejudice to the geographical or institutional source of scientific knowledge-making. Science and scientists are exposed to a wider public, and for that become more accountable.

None of this is to say that that the newer, socially engaged science is unequivocally good. The more conventional modern science in still has a role to play in many places, and is not without its peculiar merits. Although the Conference and Journal are future-oriented and agenda-setting, they do not assume a partisan position, supporting new kinds of science unequivocally against conventional science. Rather, they are an open forum for debate. In moments of resolution of this debate, Conference and Journal participants might be able to decide what of conventional disciplinary science that we want to preserve and what we want to renovate.

Whichever model of science we chose to practice, one thing likely can be agreed. Science faces great challenges in these times, not only in terms of the depths and breadths of the questions it is expected to address, but in the dialectic of what seems to be simultaneously greater public trust in science and greater skepticism about its costs and benefits.

Editors and Advisory Board

Editors |Advisory Board

Editors of the International Journal of Science in Society

• Bill Cope, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA.
• Michael Peters, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA.

International Advisory Board

• Bill Cope, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA.
• Michael Peters, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA.

Associate Editors

Journal Profile

STATISTICS/CITATIONS

Statistics/citations

At this stage we are unable to provide citation statistics as the journal is relatively new. However, we envisage a high impact factor insofar as the journal is both part of the conventional world of academic publishing and highly visible to internet search engines.

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