The Anthropocene and the Time of Historians

2017 ◽  
Vol 72 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-197
Author(s):  
Grégory Quenet
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
The Political ◽  
Historical Time ◽  
Geological Time ◽  
Humanities And Social Sciences ◽  
Human Actors ◽  
Opening Up

The notion of the Anthropocene has arrived so rapidly on the political and academic scene that it is sometimes difficult to orient oneself amid the mass of publications and events, or even to situate the different arguments presented. This article proposes to take a step back by examining the effects of this concept on historians’ notion of time. In the absence of a sociological and intellectual study providing a precise map of the actors and places involved, a genealogical approach can reveal a certain number of conceptual displacements that have occurred since the idea was first proposed. In particular, the passage from geological time to historical time has transformed the nature of the Anthropocene as event. Furthermore, the response of the humanities and social sciences has been critical, revealing the tension between the Anthropocene as a label and forum for discussion, and the Anthropocene as an analytical frame applied to empirical studies. Finally, while applying the notion of period to the Anthropocene poses a certain number of difficulties (teleology, the return to a Western-centered vision of the global, the synchronization of history, etc.), the pluralization of thresholds and temporal breaks appears to enrich the writing of history, opening up new avenues of research receptive to materiality and to non-human actors.

Der kranke Mann im Golus

Aschkenas ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 175-195
Author(s):  
Andreas Kilcher
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Humanities And Social Sciences ◽  
The One

Abstract Zionism is rooted in the programme for overcoming the Diaspora. The descriptions of this programme go hand in hand with an in-depth »diagnosis« of the sufferings of the Diaspora as a symptom of the ongoing animosity towards Jews and their persecution even, and particularly, in the age of emancipation. This cultural, social and political diagnosis was described in Zionism - and it is no coincidence that this happened mostly through physicians - as the medical and psychiatric pathologization of the »Jewish people’s body«. In this process of naturalization and scientification paradigms and methods of the contemporary humanities and social sciences were applied, including concepts as controversial as that of the »Jewish race«. The present analysis examines this medical account from two complementary perspectives: the medical verbalization of the political discourse of Zionism on the one hand (Leon Pinsker, Max Nordau, etc.), and the politicization of medicine on the other (Arthur Kahn, Felix Theilhaber, etc.).

scholarly journals Will Brazil Follow the Japanese Educational Reforms and Cut the Funding for Research in Humanities? Possibilities and Psycho-political Implications

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
André Dias
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Higher Education ◽  
Graduate Programs ◽  
Educational Institutions ◽  
The Political ◽  
Japanese Education ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
Education Personnel ◽  
Humanities And Social Sciences ◽  
Brazilian Students

On May 2019 Brazilian Federal government declared it would follow the Japanese academic model, cutting funding for undergraduate and graduate-level programs and research on Humanities and Social Sciences. The cited reforms were implemented by Japanese Education Minister Shimomura in 2015, but Japan would later back down on these cuts. In Brazil, however, the cuts affect 30% of the budget for Federal educational institutions and frozen the continuity of the most important program from the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES), which distributed grants for researchers on graduate programs. This paper conducts a literature and bibliographic review in order to debate the Brazilian’s cuts on Higher Education. It is concluded that those cuts are mainly politically motivated, affecting mostly the hard sciences instead of Humanities and Social Sciences. It is also concluded the political motivations behind the slashing of funding for Education may backfire, fostering the actual and new forms of political associativism between Brazilian students and researchers.

scholarly journals Public-Private Partnership in Russia: Problems and Perspectives. The Papers of the “Round-Table” Conference of the Lecturers and Students of the Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia

2015 ◽  
pp. 61-96
Author(s):  
A A Kinyakin ◽  
Aleksey Vyacheslavovich Teplov ◽  
Mariya Gennad'evna Ivanova ◽  
Ekaterina Andreevna Lutsenko ◽  
Ivan Evgen'evich Khlebnikov ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Comparative Politics ◽  
Round Table ◽  
Public Private Partnership ◽  
The Political ◽  
Private Partnership ◽  
Humanities And Social Sciences

The paper dedicated to the “round-table” conference “Public-Private Partnership” which was organized by the Department of the comparative politics of the Peoples` Friendship University of Russia (PFUR) and held on December 1 2014 on the faculty of the humanities and social sciences. Among the participants of the conference were the lecturers and the students of the political department of the PFUR.

Historicity and Society

2019 ◽  
pp. 291-320
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Critical Theory ◽  
The Political ◽  
Theory Of Language ◽  
Humanities And Social Sciences

The three texts of this chapter are taken from the posthumous volume Langage, Histoire, une même théorie (Lagrasse: Verdier, 2012). They represent the ambition of Meschonnic’s work from its very beginning, that is, to develop a theory of language that establishes a new basis for all the humanities and social sciences by overthrowing the reign of the sign in our episteme. He focuses here on the connection between language and history through his notion of historicity which is a situatedness that constantly leaves this situation and remains active in the presence. Only poetics, an awareness of what language is and does, he argues, enables to think beyond the sign and to develop a critical theory, that is, a theory aware of its situatedness. Meschonnic connects language to historicity, the political and the ethical.

Post-processual Archaeology

Anthropology ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert W. Preucel
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
American Archaeology ◽  
Per Se ◽  
Humanities And Social Sciences ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Opening Up ◽  
Intellectual Movement

Post-processual archaeology refers to an intellectual movement in Anglo-American archaeology that emerged in the 1980s. As its name implies, it grew out of critiques of processual archaeology and advocated alternative interpretive perspectives, especially those encompassing questions of meaning, history, politics, and practice. At the broadest level, post-processual archaeology can be seen as a response to the widespread influences of post-structuralism, feminism, postcolonialism, and postmodernism on the humanities and social sciences. Significantly, post-processual archaeology expanded the reach of the field by opening up spaces for the investigation of gender, practice, materiality, and identity. It also encouraged archaeologists to acknowledge the relationships of humans and their object worlds and the different possible trajectories they travel. A key insight is that studies of materiality cannot simply focus upon the characteristics of objects; they must engage in the dialectic of people and things. Although post-processual archaeology per se no longer is the focus of contemporary debates, its legacy continues through these ongoing projects and interventions.

Politics of Affect

2021 ◽  
pp. 141-172
Author(s):  
Paul Earlie
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
The Political ◽  
Group Psychology ◽  
Self And Other ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Humanities And Social Sciences ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter explores the importance of affect in Derrida’s understanding of the political. The recent ‘affective turn’ in the humanities and social sciences is often seen as a turn away from the earlier ‘textualist’ models of poststructuralism. This chapter shows that affect is, however, central to deconstruction and to Derrida’s account of the relationship between subjectivity and the political, a relationship it traces to Derrida’s involvement in the 1980s with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s and Jean-Luc Nancy’s Centre de recherches philosophiques sur le politique (Centre for Philosophical Research on the Political). Derrida’s writings on the political (le politique) and on politics (la politique) begin from the premise that the passionate bonds which tie us to ourselves and to others are always accompanied by anxiety in the face of loss or destruction. This aporia, which emerges in dialogue with Freud’s theory of affect and group psychology, is fundamental to the psychical (an)economy of the subject of deconstruction. The latter poses difficult questions to contemporary philosophical and theoretical approaches to affect, some of which are explored here. Texts such as Politiques de l’amitié (Politics of Friendship), Voyous (Rogues), and Le “concept” du 11 septembre (Philosophy in a Time of Terror) underscore how politics can exploit the fragility of the bond between self and other in promising an end to anxiety. For Derrida, however, such anxiety is interminable because it is part of the aporetic structure of subjectivity from the very beginning.

scholarly journals NIGERIAN ACADEMIA AND THE POLITICS OF SECRECY

Africa ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 86 (2) ◽  
pp. 339-343 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olukoya Ogen ◽  
Insa Nolte
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
The Political ◽  
Global Knowledge ◽  
Political Sphere ◽  
Humanities And Social Sciences

In this issue, Jeremiah Arowosegbe makes a number of valid and important observations about the challenges facing the humanities and social sciences in Nigeria. But while he recognizes the importance of the political sphere by discussing the unequal and asymmetric landscape of global knowledge production, he locates most problems of knowledge production in Nigeria within the academy. Focusing on individual and generational responsibility and morality, Arowosegbe also suggests that recent generations of Nigerian academics have been ‘complacent and nonchalant’ in their engagement with global theoretical and methodological debates, and thus bear responsibility for the apparent decline of Nigerian academia.

Untimely Development, Ugly History:A Drama in Muslinand the Rejection of National-Historical Time

2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-183
Author(s):  
Mary L. Mullen
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Nation State ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Historical Time ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
The Core

This article considers the politics and aesthetics of the colonial Bildungsroman by reading George Moore's often-overlooked novel A Drama in Muslin (1886). It argues that the colonial Bildungsroman does not simply register difference from the metropolitan novel of development or express tension between the core and periphery, as Jed Esty suggests, but rather can imagine a heterogeneous historical time that does not find its end in the nation-state. A Drama in Muslin combines naturalist and realist modes, and moves between Ireland and England to construct a form of untimely development that emphasises political processes (dissent, negotiation) rather than political forms (the state, the nation). Ultimately, the messy, discordant history represented in the novel shows the political potential of anachronism as it celebrates the untimeliness of everyday life.

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