Nov 3, 2000
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THE UNIVERSITY OF VICTORIA Nov 3, 2000 |
Alone, the humanities are “old news.” But combined with other disciplines, they can play a key role in public policy decisionsby Dr. Harold Coward “In our fish ethics project, oral knowledge of wives of fishermen proved to be a better indicator of when the cod problem began than did the data of the fisheries scientists.” The global problems of the contemporary world make interdisciplinary research a necessity. While narrowly focused disciplinary work has produced much valuable knowledge, today’s problems are so complex in nature that a team interdisciplinary approach is required. This is as true for the humanities as it is for science. Humanities alone are unlikely to be listened to by decision-makers in government, the private sector, the NGOs or even the general public. But if the humanities join their wisdom with the best that science, social science and community knowledge has to offer, then they will be welcomed and sought out. Science, not humanities, is the key idea of our age. Humanities alone are old news. But humanities together with the best that science, law, economics, etc., have to offer — that’s worth considering in the arena of contending policy proposals. At UVic, we have 12 centres doing interdisciplinary research — on aging, environmental health, forests, earth and oceans, and dispute resolution, to name just a few. All of them are interdisciplinary in their approach because of the size and complexity of the problems with which they deal. Left on their own, however, few of them would include the wisdom of the humanities in their interdisciplinary mix. Only if we take the lead and formulate the problem to include humanities knowledge — along with the best of science, social science and the professions — will humanities have a place at the table to make their contribution. Only then, too, will grant applications originating from the humanities be competitive at granting agencies. And when a research team includes the top scholars in science, law, philosophy, history and sociology, for example, then the policy-makers will take seriously the results which the wisdom of the humanities has helped to shape. That certainly has been our experience at UVic’s centre for studies in religion and society. Take our fish ethics project, for example. Although Canada’s top fisheries scientists doubted at the outset that ethics had anything to do with fisheries, by the end of the project they had made the radical move (for fisheries scientists) of building ethical values as well as historical and local knowledge into the modeling schemes they use to generate fisheries policy recommendations. Now they’re so convinced of the value of involving humanities knowledge that they’re including the expertise of our centre in many of their research project proposals and ethical dimensions in all of their modeling activity. Expanding our disciplinary focus so that we can respond to policy problems is only the first step. We must reach out even further until we bridge the gown-town boundary and include the practical wisdom of community partners. This is important for two reasons. First, people in the community (from professionals to lay people) who are wrestling with a problem bring experiential knowledge that often proves to be important data for the scholarly analysis. In our fish ethics project, for example, oral knowledge of wives of fishermen (women who worked in the fish canneries) proved to be a better indicator of when the cod problem began than did the data of the fisheries scientists. Similarly, the West Coast aboriginal Haida knowledge of the salmon and herring fisheries, handed down from generation to generation in oral form, gave valuable data on the original baseline of the fishery — important for the fisheries scientists’ modeling program. A second reason why building bridges is important has to do with funding of the research and taking the resulting policy recommendations seriously. For example, grant guidelines for the project Ethics and Climate Change: The Greenhouse Effect required that some funding come from a community partner. I convinced Shell Canada to become a partner and invited them to send two of their scientists as full members of our research team. Not only did the Shell researchers prove to be able scientists keenly interested in the ethical issues surrounding the “greenhouse effect,” but they authored a chapter on corporate responsibility in the resulting book. Even more importantly, they took our results back to their own company, producing a change in Shell’s policy, and used their high-level community contacts to get spaces on the agendas of provincial and federal environmental roundtables for the presentation of our policy recommendations. Publishing an academic book through a refereed university press will effectively reach our colleagues and foster the development of knowledge within academe. But it will not reach government ministers, senior bureaucrats, company CEOs, NGOs or the lay public. Yet they are the ones who make the policy decisions. In addition, the results must be packaged in a concise easy-to-read form for decision-makers. In the Ethics and Climate Change project, I hired Lydia Dotto, one of Canada’s top science journalists, to join the research team for its final seminar and then write a popular digest of our academic volume with its policy recommendations. While our academic book did not make the Globe and Mail or CBC’s Morningside radio program, Lydia Dotto’s popular summary did. In our fish ethics project, our popular digest was released at workshops with decision-makers and media on both coasts. This helped to generate major articles in The Vancouver Sun, The Ottawa Citizen, and the St. John’s Telegram, followed by many calls from policy-makers, including MPs and senior bureacrats in Ottawa. In more recent projects we have included Vision TV and Knowledge Network as community partners. This enables us to build video production costs into the grant application, so that we can “package” our results for use on television, as a classroom aid or study guide. In all of these ways we can build bridges to the community and place humanities and their research in a position to play a role in policy decision-making, as well as fulfil our fundamental role as humanists — to help society understand what it means to be human in today’s world. Dr. Harold Coward is director of UVic’s centre for studies in religion and society. The above text is extracted from his plenary speech at a national conference on the humanities held in Toronto in late October. |
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