Social Science Biases and Collective Knowledge

Understanding, investigating, and adapting to the biases inherent in social science research is the best path toward accumulating and advancing social science knowledge. Social science faces many categories of bias, from those stemming from unrepresentative researcher demographics to those based on research practices and incentives. Each has implications for research practices, but none makes social science impossible. Scholars face inherent challenges larger than those of natural scientists, with more disagreement on the most important biases to address and the kinds of research necessary to do so. But there are important advances in scholars’ self-understanding that can serve as the basis for our future progress.

Autopsy as a site and mode of inquiry: de/composing the ghoulish hu/man gaze

For centuries the autopsy has been a key technology in Western culture for generating clinical/medical as well as cultural knowledge about bodies. This article hails the anato-medical autopsy as a generative trope and apparatus in reconfiguring Western humanist knowledge of bodies and bodies of knowledge and takes up the possibilities of working with the concept of autopsy in disrupting qualitative research methodology. In doing so, the article outlines and returns (to) a series of research-creation experiments assembled at an academic conference, which engaged with the challenges for social science knowledge laid out by Law’s (2004) After Method book. Our research-creation experiments centred autopsy as a theoretical-methodological gaze and apparatus for de-composing qualitative research methodology by engaging with post-humanist and new material feminist thinking.

Practising social work

The chapter considers changes and developments in the content of social work education under the three headings of social science disciplines, understanding human development and relationships, and theories, approaches and methods for practice. At the start of the period under review, social science knowledge (primarily from sociology and social policy) and human development theories predominated, but as their research base and published literature have expanded, theories and methods for practice have become more prominent. The contribution to knowledge from research conducted by social workers themselves is acknowledged, as is the contribution made by experts by experience, both directly and through research interviews. The prominence of sequences on law for social workers is noted. The chapter concludes by asserting that the broad partnership of interests which should determine the content of the social work knowledge base is threatened by Government's much-expanded role, but that most social work programmes continue to ensure a balanced curriculum.

Institutional Logics and the Limits of Social Science Knowledge

As someone whose training is in political science and who writes about the history of my own discipline, I admit to some hesitation in recommending future avenues of research for historians of education. For that reason, the following thoughts are directed toward disciplinary history broadly and social science history specifically. Moreover, the three articles that contributors to this forum were asked to use as inspiration suggest that any future I would recommend has been under way in one form or another for a while. For those reasons, I want to reframe my contribution as a reflection on a particular mode of analysis all three authors employed and how it may be particularly useful for exploring the questions of power, exclusion, and race- and gender-making in the academy that are present in all three articles and that explicitly animate two of them.

Teaching the Social Sciences in Residency

Social sciences are only rarely integrated into graduate medical curricula, though there have been several calls for increasing social sciences in medical education. The usual approaches to teaching the social sciences in graduate medical education in the current literature include basing curricula on the Behavioral and Social Sciences model or the Social Determinants of Health model. One further approach attempts to teach competencies that suggest intersections between the social sciences and competency frameworks. A foundation of social science knowledge, analogous to the foundational basic science and clinical science knowledge learned by trainees to support medical expertise, could support the broader competencies required for trainees to become competent physicians. This chapter describes a model of foundational social science knowledge, developed from research findings. The chapter provides curricular ideas, practical tips, discussion questions, and helpful links for program directors looking to incorporate social science teaching in their programs.