ScienceHumanities: Introduction

Abstract

The ScienceHumanities was founded at Cardiff University in 2016 to investigate the present and future challenges, functions and successes of collaborative research between the humanities and the sciences. It was led by the authors: Martin Willis and James Castell from the School of English, and Keir Waddington from the School of History, Archaeology and Religion. Over the course of 2016 the ScienceHumanities initiative focused on generating new discussions and ways of thinking within and beyond Cardiff. Leading international scholars across disparate humanities disciplines were invited to give seminars and public lectures, while we attended international events to discuss the nature and role of the ScienceHumanities. We held workshops and exhibitions investigating discrete forms of collaboration between the humanities and the sciences in order to build and develop new critical interactions between different fields of inquiry. In December 2016, we held a colloquium that brought together scholars from three continents and multiple disciplines to begin to offer initial definition to the ScienceHumanities and the role that it might play in our research future. This special issue of the Journal of Literature and Science arises from that colloquium and our thinking. The ScienceHumanities is an ambitious attempt to think and rethink the relationships and the boundaries between the humanities and the sciences. Rather than rehearsing the familiar two cultures debates, we believe that the global challenges facing us now and in the future demand an urgent and rigorous reassessment of how we conceptualize disciplinary boundaries and the production of knowledge. It is for this reason that our term – ScienceHumanities – exists as a blended version of an earlier disciplinary binary. At its core, ScienceHumanities highlights the theoretical, political, and practical necessity of plural humanities approaches in place of the more singular disciplinary methodologies that continue to remain, in our view, more common. The term also positions the disparate disciplines of the sciences and the humanities in close proximity. This is intended to produce new perspectives