The conference... I was a little embarrassed about it at first. Quick background story: For those of you who don't know, I live in a house with 5 other graduate students, rent-free, courtesy of Bibb Latané. Bibb is a former professor at UNC and Florida Atlantic, a noted social psychologist, and founder of the Latané Center for Human Science. The Latané Center administers our housing fellowship, frighteningly titled the "Julie Gatewood Latané Experiment in Interdisciplinary Living." Like The Real World for grad students, except (we think) without the TV cameras. The point of us living in the house together is to gain a broader, more humanistic perspective on our fields, which range from social psych to epidemiology to information science.
And basically, the point of the conference was Bibb inviting all of the Latané fellows to his other house on the beach in Fort Lauderdale to talk about ourselves -- ourselves as human scientists, I mean. It struck me as ivory tower navel-gazing of the highest order.
But actually, the discussion was fairly insightful and lively, even if all we did was raise millions of unanswerable questions. It's given me a new outlook on what it means to be an academic, an academic in the social sciences, an academic surrounded by a community of academics who care about the human condition, an academic with a responsibility to the public.
For example:
* What message does science offer to the general public? Is it surprising that most people turn to religion or literature for guidance? And if not, why are scientists so quick to look down on the explanatory power (in the sense of explaining the phenomena and experience of everyday life on earth) of these alternative messages?
* Given that we think our scientific, empirical messages are important, how can we make them more compelling and understandable? How can we communicate complex topics in simple terms?
* How much should our research be directed by what the public wants to know, when it conflicts with what we think are interesting, if esoteric, questions?
* Perhaps our role is to present the issues and questions, not the answers and outcomes. But where does that leave us if people don't care to know both sides of the stories we care about?
The other main goal of the conference was to discuss a working definition of "human science," since it's the field we all profess to be a part of. A Google search turns up several other organizations with varying aims, none of which quite captured what we thought we were talking about. At the end, all we could agree on were the following bullet points. Human science is:
* The study of humanity in its social context
* Multidisciplinary, at its core. This does not mean just the borrowing across fields of a tool here or a framework there, but a holistic investigation that spans the boundaries of traditional departmental classifications.
* Systematic and empirical (most people used this to argue that literary and historical analysis are not human science).
Posted on March 04, 2002 at 11:29 AM
Post a comment