The Ibn Khaldon Center for Humanities and Social Sciences at Qatar University (QU) dedicated its annual Conference on Interdisciplinary Research to interdisciplinary research between social sciences with natural sciences with the participation of 28 researchers from around the world.
The conference sought to create a state of scientific interaction between social and natural disciplines – which rarely interact with each other, open horizons for researchers in these disciplines, and build a network of research relations between them, which will reflect positively on the development of their research topics and enhance the idea of knowledge integration among researchers and graduate students.
Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies at QU Prof. Mariam Al-Maadeed stressed the importance of the topic discussed by this conference, which is the topic of bridging between natural sciences and social sciences, for the benefit of society. The conference, she says, constitutes a scientific platform through which researchers from social and natural sciences can collaborate to acquire significant intellectual gains and obtain new perspectives on their research works, noting that the conference brings together scholars from diverse fields.
In turn, Director of the Ibn Khaldon Center Dr. Nayef Bin Nahar affirmed the importance of linking the natural sciences and the social sciences, but warned that “the relationship between the natural sciences and the social sciences is vital and dangerous at the same time, because the development of such a theory is not easy, especially in the Arab world, where we see a sharp and decisive separation between disciplines, and therefore researchers who have the ability to go beyond this separation should consider other disciplines to bridge the relationship.” Dr. Nayef presented the prevailing idea among a large number of people that the natural sciences are clearly different from the social sciences, because “the social sciences study man, while the natural sciences study matter.” He argued that this difference is not so clear and simple, because in the natural sciences, although there is an inevitable and certain dimension, the results are not always on the same scale, noting that there is certainty, but there is also what is speculative, and also what is probabilistic.
The conference covered seven different themes: Interdisciplinary Studies between Social Sciences and Natural Sciences: Philosophy and Reality, Sociology and Natural Sciences, Politics and International Relations and Natural Sciences, Economics and Natural Sciences, Islamic Sciences and Natural Sciences, Psychology and Natural Sciences, and finally Pedagogics and Natural Sciences.
Source: Qatar News Agency