The Role of Social Sciences and Humanities in Higher Education: A scoping review

The “downfall” of SSH over the last few decades has previously been primarily reflected in a decrease in funding – which has caused calls for SSH-disciplines to “reconfigure them for the knowledge economy” (Bullen et al., 2004). This entailed a message to re-invent SSH disciplines as relevant for university and society, or at least justify their existence under an assumed usefulness paradigm. Legitimizing debates around SSH have therefore framed them as being instrumental to more “applied” fields of study (for example in medicine, Lechopier et al., 2018).
But also other, and more genuine arguments have been made for what SSH can contribute to understand and shape the world of tomorrow, for example, that SSH-disciplines can equip students with specific competences to understand problems in their human-made and societal relevant contexts (e.g., Walker, 2009; Fletcher-Watson et al., 2020). The Corona-pandemic seems to have sparked further reflections in this direction (Morgan Jones et al., 2020). However, the debate at times seems to be fuelled by a search for justifying arguments to prevent potential budgetary cuts to, for example, language departments and other study programs fighting decreasing numbers in students. And although a normative societal debate about what these disciplines can do for the greater idea of Bildung in the society of the future is necessary (e.g., Biesta, 2015; Nussbaum, 2016), our project will propose a shift in focus towards a more fine-grained analysis of conceptualizations of SSH’s role and contribution towards “educating” in and through higher education