Research between historical and social sciences – confronting interdisciplinarity, its challenges and future

Authors

• Maria Salmela-Mattila Tampereen yliopisto

Abstract

The article discusses interdisciplinarity from a theoretical and historical point of view. The problemacy arises from the writer’s personal experience and connects to her dissertation project, in which she aims to study the Finnish university-environment relationships both from a historical and sociological perspective. The first part of the article addresses the topics of differentiation of the scientific disciplines, conceptualisation of the relationships between the disciplines and the phenomena of scientific identities and cultures. The second part presents an overview of narrativity and theory in history and sociology and the role of these two disciplines as social sciences and sciences in society. In the closing paragraph the author discusses the present state and future of scientific disciplines in a society, which increasingly stresses cooperation between different disciplines in societal problem solving.