Towards Better Engagement between HASS and STEM

Canberra.
The next speaker at DHA2012 is Zoë Sofoulis, whose focus is on cross-connections between urban water management and humanities research. Humanities perspectives are often overlooked in national infrastructure planning and development, which means that social concerns are often ignored in such processes; the same is true also for national research strategies, even though humanities research is often vastly less expensive than research in conventional science and technology sectors. Over 50% of researchers are in the humanities, arts and social sciences (HASS) field, but 95% of the research funding goes to the science, technology, engineering and manufacturing (STEM) sector.

(Hard) science remains the master discourse in this context, then; social science is merely an add-on and afterthought. As a result, such science defines the terms of engagement and methodologies even for social scientists; representative survey data is valued well above richer, qualitative investigation, for example. HASS researchers must translate their findings into a language which STEM researchers can understand.

How can this be addressed? The STEM fantasy of knowledge integration doesn’t help here – there is an unquestioned assumption that HASS knowledge can simply be imported into broader STEM frameworks, but the reality must be a more complex collation and synthesis of disparate data sources, rather than a mere, unquestioned ingestion of HASS data. Indeed, in addition to available data, the absence of data must also be recognised more clearly.

This, then, needs to be a much more open conversation, with far less inherently predictable results.