The conference fosters interdisciplinary research that connects disparate branches of scientific knowledge in research written in Arabic.
The Ibn Khaldon Center for Humanities and Social Sciences at Qatar University (QU) organizes the Annual Conference of Ibn Khaldon Center on Interdisciplinary Research that would seek to promote interdisciplinary research among the social sciences, including economics, politics, international relations, education, management, psychology, sociology, religion, anthropology, and public health. There is a vital need to integrate social sciences with natural sciences (i.e., biology, physics, chemistry, medicine, mathematics, artificial intelligence) in a clear interdisciplinary research paradigm to solve key societal challenges.
The conference opened with a welcoming speech from Prof. Mariam Al-Maadeed, Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies at QU, who welcomed the guests participating in this conference and the honorable attendees and pointed out the importance of the topic discussed by this conference, which is the topic of bridging between natural sciences and social sciences, for the benefit of society. The conference, she says, constitutes as a scientific platform through which researchers from social and natural sciences can collaborate to acquire significant intellectual gains and to obtain new perspectives on their research works, noting that the conference brings together scholars from diverse fields.
In his keynote speech, Dr. Nayef Bin Nahar, Director of the Ibn Khaldon Center, spoke about the importance of linking the natural sciences and the social sciences, but warned that “the relationship between the natural sciences and the social sciences is vital and dangerous at the same time, because the development of such a theory is not easy, especially in the Arab world, where we see a sharp and decisive separation between disciplines, and therefore researchers who have the ability to go beyond this separation should consider other disciplines to bridge the relationship.”
Dr. Nayef presented the prevailing idea among a large number of people that the natural sciences are clearly different from the social sciences, because “the social sciences study man, man has a will, will means freedom, freedom means multiple options, and therefore it is difficult to predict in social sciences; while the natural sciences study matter, matter means laws, and laws mean inevitability.” He argues that this difference is not so clear and simple, because the natural sciences, although there is an inevitable and certain dimension, the results are not always on the same scale, noting that there is certainty, but there is also what is speculative, and also what is probabilistic.
The conference covered seven different themes: Interdisciplinary Studies between Social Sciences and Natural Sciences: Philosophy and Reality, Sociology and Natural Sciences, Politics and International Relations and Natural Sciences, Economics and Natural Sciences, Islamic Sciences and Natural Sciences, Psychology and Natural Sciences, and finally Pedagogics and Natural Sciences.