Truth and Method in Southern Criminology

What does it mean to “do” southern criminology? What does this entail and what demands should it place on us as criminologists ethically and methodologically? This article addresses such questions through a form dialogue between the Global North and the Global South. At the center of this dialogue is a set of questions about ethical conduct in the pursuit of knowledge and understanding in human relations. These develop into a conversation that engages South Asian scholars working at the forefront of critical social science, history and theory with a foundational text of European hermeneuticist theory and practice, Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method, published in 1960. Out of this exercise in communication across culture, histories and knowledge practices emerges a new kind of dialogue and a new way of thinking about ethical practice in criminology. To give such abstractions a concrete reference point, the article illustrates their possibilities and tensions through a case study of penal reform and the question of whether so-called “failed” Northern penal methods—like the prison—should be exported to the Global South. The article thus works dialogically back and forth through these scholars’ accounts of ethical conduct, research practice, the weight of history, and the work of theory with a very concrete and common criminological context in sight. The result is what might be understood as a norm of ethical engagement and an epistemology of dialogue.

Not Like Everybody Else. Essays in Honor of Kees Mandemakers

This collection of essays pays tribute to Kees Mandemaker's great contribution to the data infrastructure of social science history, in the Netherlands and elsewhere. Several essays discuss (the future of) historical databases. Yet other provide examples of research on topics covering important life course transitions. All demonstrate the scale, scope and variation of research based on well-constructed databases.

Let’s Talk about Archives. Archival Gordian Knot in the Soviet Ukrainian-Polish Scholarly Collaboration (the 1950s-1960s)

The article explores an unknown aspect of Soviet Ukrainian-Polish scholarly rela-tions: the collaboration between historians on issues pertaining to archives during the Thaw (1950s-1960s). At the core of this academic collaboration was the desire of Polish scholars to access the former Polish archives, the main bone of contention be-tween the PRL and the USSR. In this paper, I will reveal the mechanism of the Krem-lin’s control over the archives, as well as the politics of access to them by Poles, which provoked multiple crises at the highest levels. The Soviet politics of scholarship, and particularly of the most ideologized social science, history, differed from that of other countries and other forms of state politics in its tight control and censorship. However, despite the tight control and numerous obstacles, Soviet authorities failed to impose their rules on Polish scholars. Ukrainian historians played an important role as they could procure the necessary archival inventories and provide their Polish colleagues with access to the archives. The foregoing produced results quite opposite to Mos-cow’s expectations, fostering the creation of an informal collaborative network.

Who Is He Calling WEIRD?

In The WEIRDest People in the World, Henrich offers something of a big-think, global, social-science history that covers everything from psychology experiments to anthropological narrative, economic argumentation, and kinship studies, all grounded in a purported history of religious and family law. The book seeks to persuade that the West is cognitively different from the rest of the world and that its uniqueness explains every fundamental aspect of its modern trajectory—its wealth and education distributions, the progress and spread of its innovations, the presence or absence of trust outside its local communities, its formal institutions of democratic governance, and its beliefs about fairness and equality. Even more important for historically oriented readers, the book seeks to uncover how this major cognitive development emerged. The quantitative methods that the book employs to support its sweeping claims, however, are flawed, and its version of European church- and family-law history is inconsistent with the consensus view of specialist historians.

The Rich Past and Desiccated Future of Parish Register Demography

This paper is a presentation of a paper given at the 1988 Social Science History Association Conference in Washington DC in which some of the limitations of parish register demography were outlined. This is followed by a postscript describing some points that might be deployed against the assertion in the 1988 paper that the future of parish register demography was 'desiccated'.

Alleviation of Refugees COVID-19 Pandemic Risks- A Framework for Uncertainty Mitigation

The impact of COVID-19 pandemic on the refugees has been a global concern where the possibility of its impact on the total life and livelihood is expected to be tremendous; unless drastic intervention programs are deployed in time of disaster.  This paper explores the three largest most vulnerable refugee groups facing the pandemic of COVID-19. The work was approached from a multidisciplinary perspective with the aim of observing the topic from various mindsets such as economy, social science, history, and culture so that a holistic solution can be proposed.  Refugees’ variables of uncertainty are examined during both the literature review and the case study. Then the formula of uncertainty is developed, based on the synthesis of both the cases and literature. The uncertainty is then mitigated and eliminated while talking about the risks of the COVID-19, and its potential spread. Finally, a generic framework is proposed so that the refugees not only are protected, but believe that they can have alternative solutions as they come out of the crisis. The paper brings in lots of implications to the international funding agencies, the refugees hosting countries and the local NGOs in the ground; beside the refugees themselves.

Institutional Logics and the Limits of Social Science Knowledge

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.