My short experience as a language teacher left me quite frustrated: I realized that all that fuss about civilization and everyday-practice in the taught language is nothing more than a vehicle for language-learning (and that at time of `communicative´ and `intercultural´ paradigms!). You actually only teach form and not content (or, even if you succeed in mixing this up a bit, hardly any). Therefore, the students leave speaking well (hopefully) German (or English, Spanish...) but hardly knowing anything about the society in question. In my opinion, the main problem is the syllabus, based only on grammatical learning and not on communication or general topics.
At the same time, I learned that there is quite an interest among the more advanced students to talk about the society in question -and that in the language that is learned. I organized a course on civilization based on short (and easy) academic texts and journal articles - and it went quite well. I would say, if you succeed to open up the syllabus integrating non-grammatical contents, it won't be a problem at all to discuss the basic topics of humanities and social sciences with the students. Maybe not the most advanced theories (actually, you will find many native speakers who don't understand Luhmann, Hegel or Adorno), but a nice panorama of what actually happens.
By the way, could you give us a bit more info on what exactly are you planning to do? Is it about a course "Social Sciences in English" or something like that? For whom? In what context?
Thanks for this view , but this topic is new for us . We teach English for Algerian university students , and you know every year we are obliged to follow what the ministry asks us to do ( about the modules ) last year , they made ( SHS) as a new module for 1st year students. I gave a simple idea about the syllabus: which is/( in short)
We have two semesters , during the first one I started with an introduction to these sciences , the difference between H and S and its relations with the language learning and teaching in general . In the 2nd semester , I chose some of H.S sciences and I metioned its individual relation with the language learning and teaching.