This is part two in a four-part report from the workshop, ‘The Future of the History of the Human Sciences,’ which was held at the University of York, 7-8 April 2016 (see a storify from the workshop here). The workshop was jointly hosted by HHS and Chris Renwick (History, York), and was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Wellcome Trust, and the University of York. Here, Maria Damjanovicova (European Institute of Oncology, University of Milan) reports on another of the workshop’s core problematics: The Problem of The Social.

How do models of ‘the social’ in the life sciences challenge those in the social sciences and humanities? The first talk of this session was Des Fitzgerald’s ‘The Commotion of the Social’. Fitzgerald (School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University) engaged with a crisis of sociology considered to have been brought about by the challenge that technology poses to sociological research, and confronted the idea of duality in mainstream sociology – that sociology must be dead or alive, digital or analogue, etc. Using urban life, a case with long established interest for both biology and sociology, Fitzgerald introduced the idea of a ‘limit sociology’ – a concept inspired by Stefan Helmreich’s notion of a ‘limit biology’ – as a form of practice, in a time of ecological crisis, and an edge case for connecting sociology and biology in an interesting way. Describing his current project, which embraces a ‘limit sociology approach,’ and looks at stress and the topologies of stress in Shanghai, Fitzgerald proposed an alternative future for the sciences of the social to go on living into the twenty-first century.

In ’The Social as the Non-Biological: Genealogy and Perspectives’, Maurizio Meloni (Department of Sociological Studies, University of Sheffield) examined how we came to think, ‘it is social vs. biological’ via the notion of inheritance and its division into biological heredity and social heritage. Locating the split into soft/hard heredity and genetics/epigenetics in the period after Erasmus Darwin, Meloni identified the postulation of Weismann’s barrier as the moment in which the sphere that we call ‘the social’ became entirely possible as something transcending the biological or the organic. He focused then on epigenetics – as opposed to simple/hard heredity – as an instantiation of the contemporary challenge posed to the biology/society debate, suggesting that heredity, heritage, and inheritance may be increasingly merging today, much like in Erasmus Darwin’s time.

In the final talk, ’Synthesis at What Price?’ Marianne Sommer (Department of Cultural and Science Studies, University of Lucerne) discussed attempts towards a knowledge synthesis by three influential figures, each of whom claimed epistemological superiority for the objects they used in pursuing their political goals. Henry Osborn, for example, argued for epistemic superiority of fossils vis-à-vis other historical approaches, endorsed synthesis of organic and inorganic through integrated anthropology, and advocated progress through notions of racial purity. Julian Huxley, on the other hand, claimed that organisms have epistemic superiority vis-à-vis other historical sources and molecular biology, arguing for the synthesis of research on all the levels on which living phenomena manifest themselves. Huxley advocated evolutionary humanism, social equality, democracy, and peace, while being strongly against racial anthropology and classical eugenics. And Luca Cavalli-Sforza, today, argues for an epistemological pre-eminence of genes vis-à-vis historical sources in linguistics, archaeology (paleo), anthropology, ecological, climatic and human history, and endorses mathematical models of cultural evolution.

What these different approaches to the problem of the social – division in knowledge production; attempts of knowledge synthesis; and crisis of sociology – highlighted, is that the future of the history of the human sciences itself entails the prospect of both a ‘new merger’ of and ‘new boundary work’ between and within the social and the biological sciences.

Maria Damjanovicova is a PhD candidate in Foundations and Ethics of the Life Sciences (European Institute of Oncology, University of Milan) and she has a background in molecular biology and physiology (Faculty of Biology, University of Belgrade). Her PhD project is focused on epigenetics and policy and it is an outgrowth of the Italian Epigenetics Consortium (EPIGEN) project on Public Engagement and Policy Work on Epigenetics.