The voices of epidemiologists and public health experts have inevitably dominated initial responses to the coronavirus crisis. This has meant that other disciplines have been sidelined and risk being shut out altogether from the thinking processes informing decisions about how to move forward.
So what can those in the social sciences bring to the table, both at the present time and when we “return to normal” and seek to rebuild our societies? And what will Covid-19 mean for such disciplines in the longer term? Some broad answers are provided by Diarmaid MacCulloch, professor of the history of the church at Oxford University, who also serves as vice president for public engagement at the British Academy, the UK’s national academy for the humanities and the social sciences.
“It’s the humanities and social sciences that are best placed to steer society in refocusing its priorities once the heroic work of medical science has provided us with a workable relationship with the current pandemic. We can’t go on as we were… The social and political sciences will show us how human behaviour of the present day has led us into folly,” he says.
Political science in particular, says Matthew Flinders, vice president of the Political Studies Association of the United Kingdom and professor of politics at the University of Sheffield, is “a discipline that goes to the heart of fundamental questions about public risks and the role and reach of the state — and so the demands placed on the discipline by potential research users, future students and society are likely to grow”. “The challenge, however, is that if Covid-19 has done anything, it has revealed the weakness of thinking in mono-disciplinary terms and also the limits of thinking about scholarship as still wedded to the lone-scholar model. Massive opportunities will fall to those disciplines and institutions that recognise that shift and seize the agenda,” says Flinders.