A Note on the RISE FR–UK Initiative: What Role for the Humanities and Social Sciences?
On November 3, 2026, the French Embassy in London organised an event bringing together scientific diplomats, scientific researchers, and industry stakeholders to discuss Anglo-French science collaboration at the Royal Society in the context of RISE FR–UK (Research and Innovation Excellence in Science for Europe – France–UK), a project described as aiming “to identify and highlight outstanding European projects where Franco-British cooperation plays a central role.”
Now, before I say something about this particular diplomatic event, let me first remind the reader what we are doing in the research project to which this blog is associated. NOTCOM is funded by a 2.3 million euros Advanced Grant from the ERC in 2023-2027. It is concerned with the collaborative structures and social epistemology of early modern science; in other words, we study how modern natural science emerged as a collective project with shared (or sometimes conflicting) principles of truth, methods of discovery, and research aims. NOTCOM is however not just about the collaborative practices and social epistemology in science; it also itself creates collaborative practices and social epistemology in science. We have set up a unique transnational research environment where one half of the team is placed at the CNRS research institute in intellectual history, IHRIM at the ENS de Lyon, and the other half is situated at the Maison Française d’Oxford, a CNRS unit abroad originally established after WWII to promote bilateral relations between French and British research. NOTCOM encourages members of the team—doctoral and post-doctoral researchers—to circulate freely between the two sites of the project, allowing them to compare, confront, and absorb the practices of two distinct national research cultures and institutions at the same time. In short, NOTCOM, in it scientific aims as well as its methods and overall construction, is a major European research project dedicated to a better understanding of collaborative science. This is our entire business. Knowing this is a necessary context for understanding the motivations behind this blog post.
Let me now return to RISE. Apart from a series of key note addresses, the event included a session on the relations between the scientific community and industry stake holders and a session on interuniversity agreements across the English channel to facilitate mobility. A final session introduced some currently ongoing UK-France collaborative projects in scientific research, including a project for prospective sustainable agricultural management based on crop rotation (TRANSFORM), a project in astronomy using a wide field spectroscopic telescope (WST), a project for testing hydro-powered ships (RESHIP), and a project for mapping the ocean floors to support a more sustainable management of marine resources (NECCTON). A number of programmatic key areas the European research area were identified, including the usual suspects: artificial intelligence, sustainability, security, etc. Thibault Cantat, director of scientific operations at the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR), noted in passing that in fact the majority of currently ongoing UK-France collaborative projects fall within the humanities and social sciences. But apart for participants in the audience like myself, the RISE event included no representation of those areas of scientific study, or even clear acknowledgement that they exist and make a contribution.
It would be pointless to simply complain about that fact. It makes better strategic sense to point out why these discussions among scientific diplomats, industry stakeholders, university administrators, and “hard” scientists could perhaps have benefitted from some input from the humanities and social sciences. And one way to do that is by taking a closer look at the discursive registers pervading the language in which they themselves speak of and promote scientific cooperation. Indeed, from a NOTCOM perspective, taking a kind of participant observer’s approach to the whole event, the RISE conference offered an interesting window into the discursive categories and normative concepts that are summoned by scientific diplomats and administrators when speaking about science and collaboration. To mention just a few among a number of very similar professions of faith, we thus learned from Julie Maxton, executive director of the Royal Society, about “forging new friendships and restoring old ones” and creating “long-term stability,” while Jean-Luc Moullet, general director of research and innovation at the French Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Space, announced the establishment of a French-British Joint committee for Science, Technology, and Innovation to support “collaboration in science” and a “shared scientific agenda.” Jean-Pierre Bourignon former head of the ERC, stressed the importance of “consolidating trust in science and scientists,” while establishing four normative principles or ambitions for a successful European agenda for science, including restoring “trust in science,” promoting “freedom to think out of the box,” striving to “offer hope,” and always “search for excellence.” Friendship, sharing, stability, trust, freedom, hope, and excellence. We can all be for it. But what does it mean, exactly?
It is easy enough to simply consider the convocation of such sunny notions as largely non-committal statements of mutual goodwill—indeed one diplomatic speaker at the RISE event made light of their own reputation for making such airy statements with uncertain consequences and limited applicability. Understanding the various statements cited above in such a deflationary manner would however involve reducing the entire underlying normative framework of scientific diplomacy to a series of platitudes. If the scientific administrators and diplomacy corps are happy with that interpretation of their own statements, I will rest my case. If not, and I will assume so, we must take their statements more seriously as conveying applicable normative principles rather than mere fluff, recognise the conceptual and historical depths to those notions—trust, friendship, freedom, and so on—, and grant that their elucidation can offer a clearer and more structured image of what these values consist in, help articulate guidelines how to sustain and promote them, and issue warnings about pitfalls to avoid in their conception and concrete implementation. And for that humanities and social science are required. They are the disciplines that can explain what these ideals amount to, when and from what they originated, what they imply, and what they commit the scientific community and the political stakeholders to, exactly. Let me give a couple of very simple examples.
Numerous speakers insisted strongly on the importance on fostering “friendly” relations between our respective countries and scientific communities. However, what such declarations truly commit partners to—i.e. what does it mean precisely for one scientific community to be “friendly” to another—requires a deep historical dive into the ways that classical virtues of intellectual friendship translated into early modern conceptions of cultivated interpersonal relations among natural philosophers, embracing variable combinations of classical and humanist conceptions of sincerity, boldness, equality, and open discussion; gentlemanly virtues of honour and trustworthiness; imported theological ideals of charity and disinterestedness in the exploration of creation; and mercantile virtues of fairness and equity in the exchange of goods. In reality, the convocation of “friendship” among scientists does not merely evoke some vague notion of non-hostility or general goodwill. It mobilises a very complex set of positive rules historically drawn and derived from a wide variety of disciplinary and social contexts. This is something we can already learn for example from the rules of engagement governing the first, modern scientific networks created through learned correspondence, or from the statutes of the first incorporated and chartered scientific academies in the mid-seventeenth century which describe in detail the expected behaviour of natural scientists when working in collective and collaborative contexts. Complexity aside, the situation today is no different.
As another example, one keynote speaker stressed the importance of broader collaborative research on a European scale as a means of neutralising “local rivalries” and to survive in a “competitive environment.” In the language of scientific diplomacy collaboration becomes systematically opposed to rivalries and competition, according to a corporate logic of “stronger together.” However, if history is any witness, it is clear that when we consider the collaborative structures of scientific research as they first appeared in early modern Europe, recently neatly summarised in Lorraine Daston’s little book on Rivalries (Columbia Global Reports, 2023) but studied extensively by sociologists of science over the last half century, it becomes quite clear that such dichotomies represent neither a correct description of how collaborative research actually works, nor offer a helpful prescriptive roadmap for how such collaborative research can be conducted with the greatest benefit. What history and deeper conceptual exploration teaches is that successful collaboration is not about neutralising “local rivalries” or building a bulwark against “competitors,” but about channelling rivalries and managing competitors as a means of cultivating knowledge production rather than create or sustain hostility or animosity among individuals or groups. For a simple illustration, we can for example study how scientific institutions like the Royal Society or the French Academy of Sciences at their inception ambitioned to set a common research agenda based on shared principles and programmatically defined collective priorities project while at the same time having to contend with priority disputes, diverging methods, and conflicting personal agendas. Correctly managed, rivalry and competition always was and will remain among the most potent forces driving forward scientific innovation. At the same time, when badly managed, rivalry and competition was and always will be among the greatest obstacles. But simply opposing collaboration to rivalry and competition is misguided, because historically and still today, rivalry and competition just are collaborative practices, when correctly managed.
These two examples regarding about the exact nature of “friendship” and “collaboration,” two key notions frequently repeated and emphasised at the RISE event, are very simple illustrations of how a humanities perspective—in this case, a perspective coming from philosophy, the sociology of scientific knowledge, and general intellectual history—can inform the discourse and debates regarding scientific cooperation. When the scientific diplomats or administrators proclaim that we should forge new friendly relations and foster collaboration, the humanities and social sciences—including and in particular a project like NOTCOM—can give such proclamations their exact and applicable meaning. In other words, in this context, the humanities and social sciences are not only a frustratingly overlooked part of science, the parent pauvre of “real” science who can be safely ignored. It becomes an essential tool for understanding and identifying the fundamental norms, methods and modes of implementation underlying the collective and collaborative constitution and operation of all science. And was that not what RISE was to be all about?
MOGENS LÆRKE
Research for this blog post was funded by the European Union (NOTCOM, ERC Advanced Grant no. 101052433). Views and opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the European Union nor of the ERC. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for any of the views expressed herein.
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OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Mogens Lærke (October 6, 2025). A Note on the RISE FR–UK Initiative: What Role for the Humanities and Social Sciences? NOTCOM. Retrieved June 17, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/15405






