Research programme
Research programme at ISoS
Two focus areas
Research at the ISoS is ordered in two focus areas. The first, Science and Medicine in Practice, highlights the interdisciplinary mode. The second, Science and Medicine in Society, emphasizes the transdisciplinary one. Both focus areas share the integrative approach of connecting history, philosophy, and sociology of science, and both are interconnected in various ways.
The two focus areas of research at ISoS enable innovative research in their own traditions and styles, as well as enhancing interactions and intertwinement of activities between them.
Science and Medicine in Practice
Our research focus Science and Medicine in Practice covers approaches that center on how scientific work is done in the laboratory, the field, the clinic, or the library – to name just a few examples. We investigate experiments and experimental systems, theoretical work, model building, data gathering and analysis, and validation practices. In our investigations, we focus on how scientific concepts, mechanisms, models, and methods are created, evaluated, revised, and disseminated in scientific communities. For this, we use a broad range of historiographical (text and object analysis, oral history), ethnographical (participating observation, interviews), philosophical (conceptual analysis), and collaborative methods. Through close collaboration of all disciplines represented in ISoS, we seek to lay the groundwork for an epistemologically and socially robust handling of uncertainty as the core challenge for both knowing and shaping the world.
Science and Medicine in Society
Our research focus Science and Medicine in Society addresses the scientific system as being a crucial part of society, deeply embedded in its political, economic, and cultural dimensions. In our work, we study how scientific and medical expertise is set up and deployed in a variety of contexts, reaching from Arctic research and politics through commissions on radiological safety to the confines of forensic toxicology. We approach the interplay of social and epistemic values, study how the reliability and credibility of scientific evidence is built or attacked, and how governance and regulation are managed. Also in this focus area, we use a broad range of historiographical, philosophical and sociological methods, integrating them to a large degree and in this way developing them further.