About
The social and human sciences have a vital role to play in helping to understand and interpret the social, cultural and economic environment. They provide research, identify and analyse trends, propose paths of action. UNESCO has set itself a number of tasks that should help reduce the gap between what is and what should be. This also corresponds to the work of the Sector for Social and Human Sciences (SHS):
Determine what should be (ethics and human rights)
Anticipate what could be (philosophy and prospective studies)
Study what is (empirical social science research)
The School of Social Science brings together the disciplines of History, Political Science and International Relations and Sociology. These disciplines involve the study of human relationships and societies.
Sociology in general is the study of collective human action, social relationships, and individual human behaviour insofar as social forces influence these. Answers to sociological questions are sought via the systematic observation of social forces that shape human action, the fundamental assumptions being that much human behaviour is socially produced and many of the relations between social forces and human action are recurrent. |
