The ScienceHumanities initiative at Cardiff University is an ambitious attempt to think and rethink the relationships and the boundaries between the sciences and the humanities.

We believe that our contemporary moment demands an urgent and rigorous reassessment of how we conceptualise disciplinary boundaries and the production of knowledge. Our work aims to respond and contribute to diverse discourses both within the academy and beyond it, developing not only new interdisciplinary research but also best practice guidelines on running interdisciplinary projects.

Why ScienceHumanities? We have chosen to run the two words together to emphasise our desire to think without borders. At the same time, we have decided against putting punctuation between them to avoid prescribing or caricaturing forms of relation or separation in advance.

The ScienceHumanities Initiative is a collaborative cross-disciplinary project with investigators and collaborators from a variety of academic specialities and institutional backgrounds. The Initiative hosts a range of events, including an international summer school, workshops, public talks, lectures, reading groups, and colloquia to build and develop new and emerging critical interactions between different fields of inquiry. The ScienceHumanities Initiative is a member of the Consortium of Humanities Centres and Institutes. It is also home to the Journal of Literature and Science.

With a strong environmental focus, the Initiative has received generous funding from the Wellcome Trust, ESRC, Wales Innovation Network, Cardiff University’s College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, and the Bremen-Cardiff partnership. Current projects explore the Welsh Energy Humanities, COVID Futures and the environment, and the Blue Humanities.