Rethinking the Roles of Social Scientists and Humanities Experts
Professor Richard M WALKER speaks at CityU’s BOLD Forum and offers an inspiring vision of how humanities and social sciences can help create a better tomorrow
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Academics in humanities and social sciences shape the way to tackle societal problems and make positive impact on society, so said Professor Richard M WALKER, Dean of CityU’s College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences and recently elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in the United Kingdom.
As the title suggests, the sharing focuses on how humanities and social sciences combat social, political and natural disturbances, like those we have been facing since last year. To Walker, humanities and social sciences matters in the course of understanding the world, society and communities we live in. “To understand the world, we need to understand people. We need to understand the relationship between people and institutions, in order to understand how processes in the world operate,” he stated. Involving systematic studies in disciplines like communications, history, linguistics, literature, politics, sociology, and psychology, these two broader areas of knowledge explain how people interact with each other. This understanding is crucial as it helps make better decisions now and in the future.
Learn from the Past and Present for a Better Future
This interpretation may sound abstract to the audience, so Walker illustrated his views with an issue that probably everyone cares about most at the moment: the COVID-19 pandemic. Its scale is unprecedented, and its influences on norms and people’s behaviour are massive. Everyone is looking to put an end to the outbreak.
In the course of fighting the disease, people pay tribute to healthcare workers for looking after the patients day and night, and depend upon scientists and medical experts for discovering effective testing and treatment approaches and inventing vaccines. While recognising the efforts these professionals have made, Walker opined that experts in humanities and social sciences also play a key role in this battle.
They shed light on many questions and doubts in our mind. Some CLASS faculty members, for example, query why some places handled the crisis better than others, and are providing explanations by studying the reactions of different healthcare systems. Witnessing rumours spread like wildfire on the Internet and hinder the dissemination of useful precautious information, communication specialists here are looking for ways to communicate the urgency and severity of the pandemic to the public and investigating the impacts of social networking sites and instant messaging. In response to the deteriorating mental health situation amid the pandemic, our psychology experts draw on the results of their research studies conducted after the 2003 SARS outbreak and provide practical recommendations. Language educators are providing training for clinicians and nurses on shift-to-shift handover for better patient care.
