ITHACA, N.Y. -- Social scientists are turning to their own methods in order to study themselves. The Ford Foundation has awarded $197,000 to Cornell University's Institute of European Studies for a project to enhance academic policy research and scholarship about the social sciences, a diverse area of study struggling in an increasingly competitive academic environment.
The project is called "The Social Sciences at Risk: The Differential Impact of Changing University Environments on the Sciences, the Social Sciences, and the Humanities." The Ford Foundation grant will fund a workshop and a symposium through 2003, under the direction of Davydd Greenwood, Goldwin Smith Professor of anthropology at Cornell. The workshop will be used to develop, and partly execute, a long-term research agenda and to organize a symposium composed of senior scholars, university administrators and foundation officers, and policymakers.
Academically, the social sciences move between the sciences and humanities, said Greenwood, and the area's hybrid character is causing big problems in various fields today.
"The social sciences emerged at the end of the 18th-century and are, thus, fairly recent," Greenwood said. "The area has never truly captured a space of its own and has oscillated between sciences and the humanities."
Increased emphasis on science and technology and the trend toward favoring quantitative as opposed to qualitative research methods, among other issues, threaten the productive tension between humanistic and scientific methods in the social sciences in general, said Greenwood. The fields of economics as well as psychology have adapted to these changes by becoming more "scientific" in approach. But, Greenwood added, the fields of sociology, anthropology and political science, which rely as well on interpretive and qualitative research methods, are "struggling to retain their diverse constitutions."
The Ford Foundation grant will help researchers define the problems facing the social sciences, compare their historical trajectories in several countries and allow international scholars and administrators to address these issues in an open forum.