Me-Search All the Way Down

2021 ◽  
pp. 80-102
Author(s):  
Matt Grossmann

The most commonly cited distinct difficulty of social science compared to science in general is that researchers are studying ourselves. But most thinkers have evolved toward a contemporary scientific realism on this point: there are biases, but they can be managed with close attention. Beyond perennial difficulties of self-knowledge, scholars tend to study their own time period, countries, and social groups, introducing additional biases while enabling research on how they affect our questions, methods, and interpretations. This often leads to accusations of “me-search,” especially by underrepresented minorities. But many of the same considerations that drive those critiques and their responses apply to scholars studying their own countries and time periods, and to all of us studying our own species. I argue that the successful history of racial and gender studies shows that progress requires acknowledgment of biases and diversification of viewpoints.

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Babette Hellemans

This pioneering textbook explores the theoretical background of cultural variety, both in past and present. How is it possible to study 'culture' when the topic covers the arts, literature, movies, history, sociology, anthropology and gender studies? Understanding Culture examines the evolution of a concept with varying meanings depending on changing norms. Offering a long-duration analysis of the relationship between culture and nature, this book looks at the origins of studying culture from an international perspective. Using examples from the several scholarly traditions in the practice of studying culture, Understanding Culture is a key introduction to the area. It identifies the history of interpreting culture as a meeting point between the long-standing historical investigation of 'humanism' and 'postmodernism' and is a comprehensive resource for those who wish to further their engagement with culture as both a historical and contemporary phenomenon.


2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 239-258 ◽  
Author(s):  
James W. McAllister

Abstract This article offers a critical review of past attempts and possible methods to test philosophical models of science against evidence from history of science. Drawing on methodological debates in social science, I distinguish between quantitative and qualitative approaches. I show that both have their uses in history and philosophy of science, but that many writers in this domain have misunderstood and misapplied these approaches, and especially the method of case studies. To test scientific realism, for example, quantitative methods are more effective than case studies. I suggest that greater methodological clarity would enable the project of integrated history and philosophy of science to make renewed progress.


Aspasia ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-36
Author(s):  
Julie Hemment ◽  
Valentina Uspenskaya

In this forum, we reflect on the genesis and history of the Tver’ Center for Women’s History and Gender Studies—its inspiration and the qualities that have enabled it to flourish and survive the political changes of the last twenty years, as well as the unique project of women educating women it represents. Inspired by historical feminist forebears, it remains a hub of intergenerational connection, inspiring young women via exposure to lost histories of women’s struggle for emancipation during the prerevolutionary and socialist periods, as well as the recent postsocialist past. Using an ethnographic account of the center’s twentieth anniversary conference as a starting point, we discuss some of its most salient and distinguishing features, as well as the unique educational project it represents and undertakes: the center’s origins in exchange and mutual feminist enlightenment; its historical orientation (women educating [wo]men in emancipation history); and its commitment to the postsocialist feminist “East-West” exchange.


Author(s):  
Russell Keat

A central issue in the philosophy of the social sciences is the possibility of naturalism: whether disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, economics and psychology can be ‘scientific’ in broadly the same sense in which this term is applied to physics, chemistry, biology and so on. In the long history of debates about this issue, both naturalists and anti-naturalists have tended to accept a particular view of the natural sciences – the ‘positivist’ conception of science. But the challenges to this previously dominant position in the philosophy of science from around the 1960s made this shared assumption increasingly problematic. It was no longer clear what would be implied by the naturalist requirement that the social sciences should be modelled on the natural sciences. It also became necessary to reconsider the arguments previously employed by anti-naturalists, to see whether these held only on the assumption of a positivist conception of science. If so, a non-positivist naturalism might be defended: a methodological unity of the social and natural sciences based on some alternative to positivism. That this is possible has been argued by scientific realists in the social sciences, drawing on a particular alternative to positivism: the realist conception of science developed in the 1970s by Harré and others.


2020 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-213
Author(s):  
Jessica Blatt

As someone whose training is in political science and who writes about the history of my own discipline, I admit to some hesitation in recommending future avenues of research for historians of education. For that reason, the following thoughts are directed toward disciplinary history broadly and social science history specifically. Moreover, the three articles that contributors to this forum were asked to use as inspiration suggest that any future I would recommend has been under way in one form or another for a while. For those reasons, I want to reframe my contribution as a reflection on a particular mode of analysis all three authors employed and how it may be particularly useful for exploring the questions of power, exclusion, and race- and gender-making in the academy that are present in all three articles and that explicitly animate two of them.


1982 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 267-291 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Scott Smith

Despite the emergence of social science history, the profession remains organized around the study of periods in the history of societies. Departments of history still structure their curricula mainly along national and temporal lines, and the same principle of socialization thereby defines most academic positions (Darnton, 1980). To judge by the sessions of the annual meetings of the Social Science History Association (SSHA), those sympathetic with that orientation focus on topics, approaches, and methodologies. Only one association network, that for the study of Asia, mentions a locale in its title, and none specifies a particular time period. This article will examine the findings and implications of social science history for one well-established national/period field, that of early American history.


2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (5) ◽  
pp. 22-33
Author(s):  
Maria V. Vasekha ◽  
Elena F. Fursova

Purpose. The article presents a brief overview of the 30-year period of the development of Russian gender studies and reviews the state of gender studies in Siberia in the last decade. Results. The authors came to the conclusion that the gender approach in Russia was very successful in the field of historical disciplines, especially in historical feminology and women’s studies. The authors analyze the emergence of various areas within this issue, the key topics and approaches that have been developed in the Russian humanities. The main directions were reflected in the anniversary collection digest on gender history and anthropology “Gender in the focus of anthropology, family ethnography and the social history of everyday life” (2019). Conclusion. The authors describe the current position of Siberian gender studies and conclude that gender issues in Siberia are less active in comparison with the European part of Russia. In recent years, Siberian researchers have increasingly replaced the category of “gender” with neutral categories of “family research”, “female”, “male”, and so on. More often researchers choose “classical” historical problems raised in historical science before the “humanitarian renaissance”, which began in the 1990s in Russia. In modern gender studies in the Siberian region, the capabilities of critical feminist optics and gender methodology are rarely used, and queer-issues are not developed.


Author(s):  
Alla V. Kirilina ◽  

The issue deals with the transformations taking place at the turn of the XX–XXI centuries in the understanding of gender and gender studies; the presence of two trends is established – the globalist trend towards rejection of the binary model of gender and gender correlation, as well as the fundamentalist patriarchal model of gender and their interaction in our country. The history of development and the main features, results and problems of gender linguistics in Russia are also characterized.


2017 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 143-147 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Bray

The idea that there can be histories of everything or anything has not yet taken root in the field of Islamic history, which is still dominated by political history. There has been a revival of women's history, and gender studies is flourishing, but these developments have brought about only one radical rethinking of mainstream narratives: Nadia Maria El Cheikh'sWomen, Islam, and Abbasid Identity, which argues that Abbasid society's construction of early Islam and of its own self-image is profoundly gendered, because “Women, gender relations, and sexuality are at the heart of the cultural construction of identity, as they are discursively used to fix moral boundaries and consolidate particularities and differences.”


2003 ◽  
Vol 182 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Boydell ◽  
J. Van Os ◽  
M. Lambri ◽  
D. Castle ◽  
J. Allardyce ◽  
...  

BackgroundThere has been much debate about changes in the incidence of schizophrenia.AimsTo identify any changes in incidence of schizophrenia in Camber well, south-east London, between 1965 and 1997.MethodResearch Diagnostic Criteria and DSM–III–R diagnoses were generated for all first contacts by the OPCRIT computer program, and incidence rates of schizophrenia in seven time periods were measured. Indirect standardisation and Poisson models were used to measure the effect of time period and to examine interactions with age and gender.ResultsThere was a continuous and statistically significant increase in the incidence of schizophrenia, which was greatest in people under 35 years of age and was not gender-specific.ConclusionsThe incidence of schizophrenia has doubled in south-east London over the past three decades.


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