TASK 3
Modes of collaboration between life and social sciences

This task aims at investigating the corresponding modes of collaborations (cross-disciplinary visiting research fellowships, inter-departmental regular meeting, common labs, etc.) between life and social sciences belonging to different “epistemic cultures” (Knorr-Cetina 1999) or, at least, the possible ways different disciplinary studies of a given phenomenon can take advantage from each other.

Questions: Is it possible to integrate their respective cultures of knowing – that include the contents and methods of scientific research but also the personal, social and cultural context in which it takes place? Or, on the contrary, the way they respectively know what they know (the impact of environment on human health) has been already too much established to change? Could their collaboration produce an interdisciplinary, common style and space of research or, on the contrary, each discipline should rather try to preserve its own distinctive approach in order to better collaborate with the others? What would be the result of such collaborations in terms of the kind of relationship between life and social scientists and of the organization of these epistemic groups? And how their professional and social relations would affect, in return, the contents and methods characterizing their respective research approach?