How best to share knowledge and ideas about the latest developments in social science?
Nikolas Rose has been active in knowledge exchange since his earliest time as an academic, helping develop new, interdisciplinary approaches to thinking about, and governing, human beings.
In the 1970s, he worked with colleagues developing radical approaches to psychology to found the independent journal Ideology and Consciousness (later I&), which developed into a major English source for the work of Michel Foucault and his colleagues. At the end of the 1970s, as he became critical of the utility of Marxist approaches for the analysis of our present, he joined with a group of like-minded critical socialists and feminists to establish the short-lived journal Politics & Power: New Perspectives on Socialist Politics. In 1989, he founded the History of the Present Research Network, an international group of researchers influenced by the writings of Michel Foucault. From 1996 to 2004 he was managing editor of Economy and Society, one of Britain’s leading scholarly interdisciplinary journals of social sciences. He is founder and co-editor of BioSocieties: an interdisciplinary journal for social studies of the life sciences..
Nikolas has also sought to build networks of social science researchers on emerging themes, thus BioSocieties and the BIOS Centre, see elsewhere on this website, initially took shape in the form of the bios email list he established while at Goldsmiths College, and his later work on social dimensions of neuroscience began with the ‘neuro’ email list and developed into the Neuroscience and Society Research Network, later funded by the European Science Foundation, which introduced the concept of interdisciplinary ‘NeuroSchools’ for sharing creative thinking, innovative research practices and developing novel collaborations in neuroscience. He sought, with limited success, to bring this way of thinking into the work of the European Commissions Flagship Human Brain Project, as a member of the Social and Ethical ‘pillar’ of this programme at its inception, bringing in the approach known as Responsible Research and Innovation, and developing Foresight into social consequences of this research as Director of the Foresight Lab, based initially at LSE and later at King’s College London.
Nikolas has also worked with a number of academic and advisory bodies. For six years he was a Member of Council of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics (NCOB) where he was on the Working Parties for the NCOB reports on pharmacogenomics, personalised medicine and novel neurotechnologies. He has worked with the Royal Society, where he was a member of the Social Policy Advisory Group, and was a member of the Wellcome Trust Public Engagement Strategy Committee. He was a Member of the Advisory Committee for the ESRC Virtual Society programme and Chair of the Advisory Board of the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change. Nikolas was also one of the founders of the Global Social Medicine Network, which brings together scholars from all regions who are committed to a vision of social medicine as a vital intersection of social sciences, medical practice and policy. Funded by a Wellcome Trust grant, and launched at an international conference in London in 2018, this global network links, supports and builds upon existing interdisciplinary programs from social medicine centres across the world.