Perhaps We Can Talk

2011 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 209-212
Author(s):  
David B. Ryden
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Annual Meeting ◽  
Science History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Social Science History ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Future ◽  
Interdisciplinary Exchange ◽  
Presidential Session

The title of the 32nd Annual Meeting of the Social Science History Association in 2007 was “History and the Social Sciences: Taking Stock and Moving Ahead.” David I. Kertzer (2007), the president of the association at that time, explained that the focus of the conference was to determine “how far we have come in social science history” and to isolate “the most promising avenues for research.” The following essays were presented at the presidential session, titled “The Past, Present, and Future of Economics for History.” The presenters put forward a number of provocative arguments before a fully engaged audience, whose numbers spilled into the hallway of Chicago's Palmer House. While the authors were all economists by training and by department affiliation, there was an intense interdisciplinary exchange between audience members and the panelists. The session, in short, was a huge success in generating a range of ideas about the future of economics for history.

What is Social Science History, Anyway?

1999 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 475-480
Author(s):  
Paula Baker
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Presidential Address ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Science History ◽  
Linguistic Turn ◽  
The Past ◽  
Social Science History ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Methodologies

This group of essays came out of an attempt to address the “usually unasked,” “bound to embarrass” question that Eric Monkkonen raised in his 1994 presidential address to the Social Science History Association. As both the social sciences and history have been reshaped in recent years by intellectual tendencies variously labeled “postmodernism,” “poststructuralism,” or the “linguistic turn,” the never especially clear relationship between the social sciences and history has grown even more muddy. The essays that follow are drawn from two sessions of the 1998 annual program of the Social Science History Association. The sessions brought together scholars from a variety of disciplines and cohorts who held divergent ideas about the links between social science and history and different substantive agendas for explaining historical change. A mix of essays that highlight new methodologies for analyzing the past and pieces that offer explanations or remedies, the articles printed here point to some of the central issues in the debate about what social science history might mean today.

scholarly journals Editor's Introduction to 40th Anniversary Issue: History and the Social Sciences: Past Imperfect; Future Promising

2016 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 525-534 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne EC McCants
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Annual Conference ◽  
Science History ◽  
Social Science History ◽  
The Social ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Interdisciplinary Exchange

It has been almost 40 years since Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie published an English translation of his (at the time) deeply unsettling essay, “Motionless History,” in the second issue of Social Science History (SSH, Winter 1977). For many historians, whose livelihoods depended on narrating the “march of history,” his claim that long periods of history were characterized by a distinct absence of change—his example was Europe from late antiquity up to the early eighteenth century—was nothing short of heretical. The newly established SSH was, however, an entirely logical place from which to launch this fusillade against the disciplinary norms of the Anglo-American historical profession, as the journal was the product of a contra-establishment project, the Social Science History Association (SSHA). Founded in 1974 and hosting its first annual conference in Philadelphia in the fall of 1976, the SSHA emerged out of the more general social and political ferment of that period. Its organizers had the specific intention to disrupt (to use our word and not theirs) what they thought were the rigid practices and limited vision of the then American Historical Association. In so doing they hoped to make space for a new kind of historical enquiry that had much to learn from the social sciences, and hoped to teach them something in return. They were joined in that enthusiastic moment by historically minded rebels from the American Sociological Association, as well as small numbers of anthropologists, demographers, economists, geographers, and political scientists who were all eager to incorporate both historical context and a theoretical appreciation of contingency into their work. In the intervening years since that hopeful beginning, many have argued that the anticipated interdisciplinary exchange failed in one way or another. But let me not get ahead of myself.

Life Cycles in Social Science History

1999 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 481-489
Author(s):  
Andrew Abbott
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Descriptive Analysis ◽  
Life Cycles ◽  
Science History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Social Science History ◽  
The Social ◽  
Definition Of

When one is asked to speak on the past, present, and future of social science history, one is less overwhelmed by the size of the task than confused by its indexicality. Whose definition of social science history? Which past? Or, put another way, whose past? Indeed, which and whose present? Moreover, should the task be taken as one of description, prescription, or analysis? Many of us might agree on, say, a descriptive analysis of the past of the Social Science History Association. But about the past of social science history as a general rather than purely associational phenomenon, we might differ considerably. The problem of description versus prescription only increases this obscurity.

scholarly journals Lessons of Social Science History

1994 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-168 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric H. Monkkonen
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Annual Meeting ◽  
Science History ◽  
Social Science History ◽  
Chinese Restaurant ◽  
The Social

I am pleased to be able to address this, the eighteenth annual meeting of the Social Science History Association. I have many valued memories of presidential addresses, but my favorite was Jerry Clubb’s 1984 talk in the Chinese restaurant in Toronto, where speakers, waiters, and many other patrons all competed in a cacophonic, noisy free-for-all. Jerry did not even try to finish the talk, so we had to wait until it appeared in the journal (Clubb 1986).

Social Anthropology and Social Science History

2009 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
David I. Kertzer
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Cultural Anthropology ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Anthropology ◽  
Science History ◽  
Social Science History ◽  
The Social ◽  
Clifford Geertz ◽  
Simultaneous Movement

In the 1970s, when the social science history movement emerged in the United States, leading to the founding of the Social Science History Association, a simultaneous movement arose in which historians looked to cultural anthropology for inspiration. Although both movements involved historians turning to social sciences for theory and method, they reflected very different views of the nature of the historical enterprise. Cultural anthropology, most notably as preached by Clifford Geertz, became a means by which historians could find a theoretical basis in the social sciences for rejecting a scientific paradigm. This article examines this development while also exploring the complex ways cultural anthropology has embraced—and shunned—history in recent years.

Reputed Changes in Social Scientists' Sympathies Regarding the Nature-Nurture Controversy: An Exploratory Comparison

1984 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 194-197 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lee Ellis
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Behavior ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Science History ◽  
Social Science History ◽  
The Social ◽  
Evolutionary Genetic ◽  
History Of ◽  
Human Social Behavior

Probably the most enduring question throughout the history of the social sciences pertains to how much human social behavior is a product of evolutionary, genetic, nonsocial, “natural” sorts of variables as opposed to learned sociocultural, environmental, “nurturing” variables (Hammond, 1983). Regardless of where individual social scientists themselves happen to have settled on this issue, many have offered an opinion about the prevailing position of social scientists generally on this question at various points in social science history. The present study compares these opinions, especially as they pertain to the twentieth century.

Futures Honed

Futures ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 118-134
Author(s):  
Barbara Adam
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Original Work ◽  
Collective Responsibility ◽  
The Past ◽  
Writing Theory ◽  
Time Space ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Future ◽  
Verse Form ◽  
The Way

This chapter comprises an interview between Barbara Adam and the editors, and is followed by Adam’s ‘Honing Futures’, which is presented in four short verses of distilled theory. In the interview Adam reflects on thirty-five years of futures-thinking rooted in her deeply original work on time and temporality, and her innovative response to qualitative and linear definitions of time within the social sciences. The interview continues with a discussion of the way Adam’s thinking on futures intersects in her work with ideas of ethics and collective responsibility politics and concludes with a brief rationale for writing theory in verse form. In ‘Honing Futures’, a piece of futures theory verse form, Adam charts the movements and moments in considerations of the Not Yet and futurity’s active creation: from pluralized imaginings of the future, to an increasingly tangible and narrower anticipated future, to future-making as designing and reality-creating performance. Collectively, the verses identify the varied complex interdependencies of time, space, and matter with the past and future in all iterations of honing and making futures.

A TEORIA DA MENTE ENTRE SEMÂNTICA E PRAGMÁTICA

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Crisbelli Domingos ◽  
Sebastião Lourenço dos Santos
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Literary Study ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Basic Ideas ◽  
Adaptationist Program

In the past decade or so, a small but rapidly growing band of literary scholars, theorists, and critics has been working to integrate literary study with Darwinian social science. These scholars can be identified as the members of a distinct school in the sense that they share a certain broad set of basic ideas. They all take “the adapted mind” as an organizing principle, and their work is thus continuous with that of the “adaptationist program” in the social sciences. Adaptationist thinking is grounded in Darwinian conceptions of human nature (2004, p. 6).

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