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Funders and institutions increasingly prioritize research that addresses the challenges and opportunities of an inherently interdisciplinary world. Policymakers and influential voices in science - including Nature - have also warned of a worrying disconnect between research and the needs and concerns of the public. One proposed solution is the integration of social scientists such as myself into publicly funded research initiatives. This is expected to contribute to the production of 'better' science.

\"Power is shifting--from large, stable armies to loose bands of insurgents, from corporate leviathans to nimble start-ups, and from presidential palaces to public squares. But power is also changing, becoming harder to use and easier to lose. In 'The End of Power,' award-winning columnist and former Foreign Policy editor Moisés Naím illuminates the struggle between once-dominant megaplayers and the new micropowers challenging them in every field of human endeavor. Drawing on provacative, original research and a lifetime of experience in global affairs, Naím explains how the end of power is reconfiguring our world\"--Page 4 of cover.

One of the most significant shifts in science policy of the past three decades is a concern with extending scientific practice to include a role for 'society'. Recently, this has led to legislative calls for the integration of the social sciences and humanities in publicly funded research and development initiatives. In nanotechnology - integration's primary field site - this policy has institutionalized the practice of hiring social scientists in technical facilities. Increasingly mainstream, the workings and results of this integration mechanism remain understudied. In this article, I build upon my three-year experience as the in-house social scientist at the Cornell NanoScale Facility and the United States' National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network to engage empirically and conceptually with this mode of governance in nanotechnology. From the vantage point of the integrated social scientist, I argue that in its current enactment, integration emerges as a particular kind of care work, with social scientists being fashioned as the main caretakers. Examining integration as a type of care practice and as a 'matter of care' allows me to highlight the often invisible, existential, epistemic, and affective costs of care as governance. Illuminating a framework where social scientists are called upon to observe but not disturb, to reify boundaries rather than blur them, this article serves as a word of caution against integration as a novel mode of governance that seemingly privileges situatedness, care, and entanglement, moving us toward an analytically skeptical (but not dismissive) perspective on integration.

Background The importance of integrating the social sciences in epidemic preparedness and response has become a common feature of infectious disease policy and practice debates. However to date, this integration remains inadequate, fragmented and under-funded, with limited reach and small initial investments. Based on data collected prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, in this paper we analysed the variety of knowledge, infrastructure and funding gaps that hinder the full integration of the social sciences in epidemics and present a strategic framework for addressing them. Methods Senior social scientists with expertise in public health emergencies facilitated expert deliberations, and conducted 75 key informant interviews, a consultation with 20 expert social scientists from Africa, Asia and Europe, 2 focus groups and a literature review of 128 identified high-priority peer reviewed articles. We also analysed 56 interviews from the Ebola 100 project, collected just after the West African Ebola epidemic. Analysis was conducted on gaps and recommendations. These were inductively classified according to various themes during two group prioritization exercises. The project was conducted between February and May 2019. Findings from the report were used to inform strategic prioritization of global investments in social science capacities for health emergencies. Findings Our analysis consolidated 12 knowledge and infrastructure gaps and 38 recommendations from an initial list of 600 gaps and 220 recommendations. In developing our framework, we clustered these into three areas: 1) Recommendations to improve core social science response capacities , including investments in: human resources within response agencies; the creation of social science data analysis capacities at field and global level; mechanisms for operationalizing knowledge; and a set of rapid deployment infrastructures; 2) Recommendations to strengthen applied and basic social sciences , including the need to: better define the social science agenda and core competencies; support innovative interdisciplinary science; make concerted investments in developing field ready tools and building the evidence-base; and develop codes of conduct; and 3) Recommendations for a supportive social science ecosystem , including: the essential foundational investments in institutional development; training and capacity building; awareness-raising activities with allied disciplines; and lastly, support for a community of practice. Interpretation Comprehensively integrating social science into the epidemic preparedness and response architecture demands multifaceted investments on par with allied disciplines, such as epidemiology and virology. Building core capacities and competencies should occur at multiple levels, grounded in country-led capacity building. Social science should not be a parallel system, nor should it be “siloed” into risk communication and community engagement. Rather, it should be integrated across existing systems and networks, and deploy interdisciplinary knowledge “transversally” across all preparedness and response sectors and pillars. Future work should update this framework to account for the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the institutional landscape.

Social science-environmental health (SS-EH) research takes many structural forms and contributes to a wide variety of topical areas. In this article we discuss the general nature of SS-EH contributions and offer a new typology of SS-EH practice that situates this type of research in a larger transdisciplinary sensibility: (1) environmental health science influenced by social science; (2) social science studies of environmental health; and (3) social science-environmental health collaborations. We describe examples from our own and others’ work and we discuss the central role that research centers, training programs, and conferences play in furthering SS-EH research. We argue that the third form of SS-EH research, SS-EH collaborations, offers the greatest potential for improving public and environmental health, though such collaborations come with important challenges and demand constant reflexivity on the part of researchers.

Food systems must operate within environmental constraints to avoid disastrous consequences for the biosphere. Such constraints must also take into account nutritional quality and health outcomes. Given the intrinsic relationships between the environmental sciences and nutritional sciences, it is imperative that public health embraces environmental nutrition as the new frontier of research and practice and begins a concerted focus on the new discipline of environmental nutrition, which seeks to comprehensively address the sustainability of food systems. We provide an overview to justify our proposition, outline a research and practice agenda for environmental nutrition, and explore how the complex relationships within food systems that affect public health could be better understood through the environmental nutrition model.