Similar Journals
|
History of the Human Sciences
Journal Prestige (SJR): 0.498  Citation Impact (citeScore): 1 Number of Followers: 6  Hybrid journal (It can contain Open Access articles)ISSN (Print) 0952-6951 - ISSN (Online) 1461-720X Published by Sage Publications  [1176 journals]
|
- Archiving the COVID-19 pandemic in Mass Observation and Middletown
-
Free pre-print version: Loading...Rate this result: What is this?Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating.
A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors: Nick Clarke, Clive Barnett
Pages: 3 - 25
Abstract: History of the Human Sciences, Volume 36, Issue 2, Page 3-25, April 2023.
The COVID-19 pandemic generated debates about how pandemics should be known. There was much discussion of what role the human sciences could play in knowing – and governing – the pandemic. In this article, we focus on attempts to know the pandemic through diaries, other biographical writing, and related forms like mass photography. In particular, we focus on the archiving of such forms by Mass Observation in the UK and the Everyday Life in Middletown (EDLM) project in the USA, and initial analyses of such material by scholars from across the human sciences. Our main argument is that archiving the pandemic was informed by, and needs viewing through, the history of the human sciences – including the distinctive histories and human sciences of Mass Observation and Middletown. The article finishes by introducing a Special Section that engages with archiving the pandemic in two senses: the archiving of diaries and related forms by Mass Observation and the EDLM project, and the archiving of initial encounters between researchers and this material by History of the Human Sciences. The Special Section seeks to know the pandemic from the human sciences in the present and to archive knowing the pandemic from the human sciences for the future.
Citation: History of the Human Sciences
PubDate: 2023-04-30T08:50:03Z
DOI: 10.1177/09526951231152139
Issue No: Vol. 36, No. 2 (2023)
-
- Rupture, repetition, and new rhythms for pandemic times: Mass Observation,
everyday life, and COVID-19-
Free pre-print version: Loading...Rate this result: What is this?Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating.
A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors: Dawn Lyon, Rebecca Coleman
Pages: 26 - 48
Abstract: History of the Human Sciences, Volume 36, Issue 2, Page 26-48, April 2023.
The COVID-19 pandemic has foregrounded the significance of time to everyday life, as the routines, pace, and speed of social relations were widely reconfigured. This article uses rhythm as an object and tool of inquiry to make sense of spatio-temporal change. We analyse the Mass Observation (MO) directive we co-commissioned on ‘COVID-19 and Time’, where volunteer writers reflect on whether and how time was made, experienced, and imagined differently during the early stages of the pandemic in the UK. We draw on Henri Lefebvre and Catherine Régulier's ‘rhythmanalysis’, taking up their theorisation of rhythm as linear and cyclical and their concepts of arrhythmia (discordant rhythms) and eurhythmia (harmonious rhythms). Our analysis highlights how MO writers articulate (a) the ruptures to their everyday rhythms across time and space, (b) their experience of ‘blurred’ or ‘merged’ time as everyday rhythms are dissolved and the pace of time is intensified or slowed, and (c) the remaking of rhythms through new practices or devices and attunements to nature. We show how rhythm enables a consideration of the spatio-temporal textures of everyday life, including their unevenness, variation, and difference. The article thus contributes to and expands recent scholarship on the social life of time, rhythm and rhythmanalysis, everyday life, and MO.
Citation: History of the Human Sciences
PubDate: 2023-04-30T08:50:09Z
DOI: 10.1177/09526951221133983
Issue No: Vol. 36, No. 2 (2023)
-
- Seeing like an epidemiologist' Mobilising people against COVID-19
-
Free pre-print version: Loading...Rate this result: What is this?Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating.
A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors: Nick Clarke, Clive Barnett
Pages: 49 - 70
Abstract: History of the Human Sciences, Volume 36, Issue 2, Page 49-70, April 2023.
Diaries and other materials in the Mass Observation Archive have been characterised as intersubjective and dialogic. They have been used to study top-down and bottom-up processes, including how ordinary people respond to sociological constructs and, more broadly, the footprint of social science in the 20th century. In this article, we use the Archive’s COVID-19 collections to study how attempts to govern the pandemic by mobilising ordinary people to see like an epidemiologist played out in the United Kingdom during 2020. People were asked to think in terms of populations and groups; rates, trends, and distributions; the capacity of public services; and complex systems of causation. How did they respond' How did they use the statistics, charts, maps, concepts, identities, and roles they were given' We find evidence of engagement with science plural; confident and comfortable engagement with epidemiological terms and concepts; sceptical and reluctant engagement with epidemiological subject positions; use of both scientific and moral literacy to negotiate regulations and guidance; and use of scientific literacy to compare and judge government performance. Governing the pandemic through scientific literacy was partially successful, but in some unexpected ways.
Citation: History of the Human Sciences
PubDate: 2023-04-30T08:50:11Z
DOI: 10.1177/09526951231170574
Issue No: Vol. 36, No. 2 (2023)
-
- ‘There is nothing less spectacular than a pestilence’: Picturing the
pandemic in Mass Observation's COVID-19 collections-
Free pre-print version: Loading...Rate this result: What is this?Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating.
A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors: Annebella Pollen
Pages: 71 - 104
Abstract: History of the Human Sciences, Volume 36, Issue 2, Page 71-104, April 2023.
What is to be gained by studying visual observation in Mass Observation's COVID-19 collections' What can we see of the pandemic through diarists’ images and words' Visual methods were part of the plural research strategies of social research organisation Mass Observation (MO) in its first phase, when it was established in 1937, but remained marginal in relation to textual research methods. This continues with the post-1981 revival of the Mass Observation Project (MOP), with its emphasis on life writing. With wider shifts in technology and accessibility, however, even when they are not solicited, photographs now accompany MOP correspondents’ submissions. In MO’s substantial COVID-19 collections, images appear in or as diary entries across a range of forms, including hand-drawn illustrations, correspondent-generated photographs, creative photomontages, and screengrabs of memes. In addition, diarists offer textual reflections on COVID-19's image cultures, such as the role of photographs in pandemic news media, as well as considering how the pandemic is intersecting with the visual in more abstract ways, from themes of surveillance and ‘Staying Alert’ in public health messaging to internal pictorial imaginaries produced as a result of isolation and contemplation. Positioning these materials in relation to wider patterns in pandemic visual culture, including public photographic collecting projects that make explicit reference to MO as their inspiration, this article considers the contribution of the visual submissions and image-rich writing in MO's COVID-19 collections to the depiction of a virus commonly characterised as invisible.
Citation: History of the Human Sciences
PubDate: 2023-04-30T08:50:05Z
DOI: 10.1177/09526951221134002
Issue No: Vol. 36, No. 2 (2023)
-
- Time shifts: Place, belonging, and future orientation in pandemic everyday
life-
Free pre-print version: Loading...Rate this result: What is this?Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating.
A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors: Patrick Collier, James J. Connolly
Pages: 105 - 127
Abstract: History of the Human Sciences, Volume 36, Issue 2, Page 105-127, April 2023.
The disruptions to everyday life wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic include distortions in the experience of time, as reported widely by ordinary citizens and observed by journalists and social scientists. But how does this temporal disruption play out in different time scales—in the individual day as opposed to the medium- and long-term futures' And how might place influence how individuals experience and understand the pandemic's temporal transformations' This essay examines a range of temporal disruptions reported in day diaries and surveys submitted to the Everyday Life in Middletown project, an online archive that has been documenting ordinary life in Muncie, Indiana, USA since 2016. Viewing these materials as instances of life writing, the essay probes the interactions between temporal disruptions and the local setting as they inflect the autobiographical selves our writers construct in their pandemic writings. It shows how living in Muncie—a postindustrial city with its particular combination of historical, demographic, economic, social, and political dynamics—structures the autobiographical stories available to our writers, and how the disruption of time produces new variations and problems for life writing. In the midst of a global crisis, we glimpse the pandemic's reshaping of a local structure of feeling in which a pervasive, local narrative of civic decline frames individual self-fashioning.
Citation: History of the Human Sciences
PubDate: 2023-04-30T08:50:06Z
DOI: 10.1177/09526951221139377
Issue No: Vol. 36, No. 2 (2023)
-
- Horizons of Passion: Hermeneutics as fusion or as fracture
-
Free pre-print version: Loading...Rate this result: What is this?Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating.
A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors: David Liakos
Abstract: History of the Human Sciences, Ahead of Print.
How can a post-Christian, secular audience understand the devoutly Christian, sacred music of Johann Sebastian Bach's St. Matthew Passion' This article addresses this question with reference to the hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Hans Blumenberg. Their confrontation reveals broad implications for the theory of humanistic interpretation at large. Gadamer celebrates Bach as a ‘classical’ touchstone of Western culture whom we may productively interpret through a ‘fusion of horizons’. Blumenberg, by contrast, cautions that our relation to Bach's Passion is fractured because it is impossible to ‘pace off the horizon’. Blumenberg emphasizes the first-person experience of the diminution of historical meaning, a position this article calls ‘shattered hermeneutics’. The article concludes that Blumenberg's interpretation of Bach and his critique of Gadamer thereby usefully and plausibly deepen and radicalize hermeneutics.
Citation: History of the Human Sciences
PubDate: 2023-08-30T07:51:59Z
DOI: 10.1177/09526951231194192
-
- Managing power and psychiatric training in the United States,
1945–1990-
Free pre-print version: Loading...Rate this result: What is this?Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating.
A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors: Laura Hirshbein
Abstract: History of the Human Sciences, Ahead of Print.
In the wake of their heightened role in addressing the emotional challenges of United States soldiers during World War II, American psychiatrists increasingly argued that their knowledge of human nature, based on interpretation of unconscious processes, was a powerful tool in effecting changes in society. As they turned to training an adequate supply of psychiatrists to meet expanding demand, educators in psychiatry residency programs faced questions about whom to entrust with the power of psychiatric interpretation, how educators’ knowledge about trainees’ own unconscious processes should be harnessed, and how much to adhere to strict psychoanalytic doctrine in training. During the 1970s, social and cultural upheavals outside and inside psychiatry began to dismantle the grand claims of the postwar generation of psychiatrists, while shifts in the 1980s led educators to focus more on seemingly objective educational measures. Trainees’ and critics’ serious questioning of authority and structures in American society, and within psychiatry training programs, was perhaps as much of a factor – if not more – in the shift away from an emphasis on the interpretive power of psychoanalysis in favor of more eclectic and ultimately biological approaches in academic psychiatry.
Citation: History of the Human Sciences
PubDate: 2023-08-30T07:01:34Z
DOI: 10.1177/09526951231185485
-
- Corrado Gini's economic anthropology
-
Free pre-print version: Loading...Rate this result: What is this?Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating.
A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors: Roberto Romani
Abstract: History of the Human Sciences, Ahead of Print.
Corrado Gini was a key intellectual in the Fascist establishment. His scientific programme included statistics, demography, eugenics, economics, and sociology, as well as occasional forays into political thought and anthropology. Historians have focused on his statistics and eugenics, in connection with his spell as head of the Italian bureau of statistics. This article, integrating economics with the other threads of Gini’s programme, takes economic anthropology as a standpoint to reassess the inspiration behind his whole oeuvre. That anthropology consisted of two parts: the criticism of economists’ ‘economic man’ and the attempt to replace it with an instinctual economic agent, inspired by the nationalist rhetoric of ‘young peoples’ bound to conquer the world. Once the perspective is enlarged, the usual definition of Gini as a technocrat proves insufficient, for his science incorporated essential pieces of Fascism’s political ideology and cultural legitimacy.
Citation: History of the Human Sciences
PubDate: 2023-08-25T04:29:19Z
DOI: 10.1177/09526951231178493
-
- Mother-blaming revisited: Gender, cinematography, and infant research in
the heyday of psychoanalysis-
Free pre-print version: Loading...Rate this result: What is this?Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating.
A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors: Felix E. Rietmann
Abstract: History of the Human Sciences, Ahead of Print.
This article examines cinematographic observational studies of infants conducted by a loosely connected group of female psychologists and physicians in the USA from the 1930s to the 1960s. Largely forgotten today, these practitioners realized detailed and carefully planned research projects about infant behavior in a variety of settings—from the laboratory to the well-baby clinic. Although their studies were in conversation with better-known works, such as John Bowlby's research on attachment and René Spitz's films on institutionalized infants, they differed in a close examination of individual characteristics of babies and a critical attitude toward contemporary notions of ‘pathological mothering’. In closely following the work of several researchers, including but not limited to pediatrician Margaret Fries (1898–1987), the clinical psychologist Sibylle Escalona (1915–96) and her team members—child psychiatrist Mary Leitch (1914–') and avant-garde photographer Ellen Auerbach (1906–2004)—and psychologist Anneliese Korner (1918–2010), I argue that their cinematographic works shed a more nuanced light on the landscape of infant research and child psychiatry in the mid 20th century, and open a way for alternative readings of gender, psychoanalysis, and scientific observation at that time.
Citation: History of the Human Sciences
PubDate: 2023-07-26T05:58:36Z
DOI: 10.1177/09526951231187556
-
- Vico and the conspiracy of the sciences
-
Free pre-print version: Loading...Rate this result: What is this?Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating.
A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors: Víctor Alonso-Rocafort
Abstract: History of the Human Sciences, Ahead of Print.
On 18 October 1708, Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) gave his seventh inaugural oration, De nostri temporis studiorum ratione (De ratione) at the University of Naples. There, he used the term conspirare to propose collaboration among the sciences. An initial study of the historical context, specifically the scholar’s involvement with the Conspiracy of the Prince of Macchia (1701) and the debates on university reform, makes it possible to formulate a hypothesis regarding Vico’s intent and word choice that enriches our understanding of the preserved text. On a personal level, the Neapolitan professor was looking for a modicum of protection from the new authorities, especially the recently named viceroy in audience that day, Cardinal Vicenzo Grimani. On the political plane, along with a surreptitious argument against tyranny, Vico sought to dissuade the new governors from subscribing to the divisive approach embodied in the university policy of the Cartesian and Bourbonic reformers. Direct analysis of the text of De ratione enabled theoretical scrutiny of the frame from which Vico called for more than mere encyclopaedic knowledge. He was setting forth a vision for a conspiratorial project among the sciences based on a broad understanding of rhetoric. His original proposal for inter- and trans-disciplinarity can inform current debates on the same topic.
Citation: History of the Human Sciences
PubDate: 2023-07-26T05:57:36Z
DOI: 10.1177/09526951231186314
-
- Behavior takes form: Tracing the film image in scientific research
-
Free pre-print version: Loading...Rate this result: What is this?Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating.
A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors: Scott Curtis
Abstract: History of the Human Sciences, Ahead of Print.
The use of motion pictures for research has a long history, of course, but beyond documenting a phenomenon and then projecting it for demonstration, scientists using this technology spent much energy figuring out how to extract information from a strip of film. Understanding film (or audiovisual) analysis is therefore necessary to grasping the relationship between an object of study, moving-image technology, and scientific evidence. This article explores one common technique within that history of film analysis: projecting a frame of the motion picture and then tracing the object of study onto paper, which was especially important for behavioral sciences such as developmental psychology or ethology. Behavior became tangible through a variety of means, but for those who relied on film for their observations, such as developmental psychologist Arnold Gesell, behavior took form at least partly through the process of tracing. Gesell's use of this technique reveals the broader functions of tracing as well as the patterns that emerge from its interplay with other inscriptions in the creation of evidence. How does behavior take form' The practice of tracing provides one answer to this larger question.
Citation: History of the Human Sciences
PubDate: 2023-07-26T05:56:51Z
DOI: 10.1177/09526951231186295
-
- Socialist gerontology' Or gerontology during socialism' The
Bulgarian case-
Free pre-print version: Loading...Rate this result: What is this?Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating.
A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors: Daniela Koleva, Ignat Petrov
Abstract: History of the Human Sciences, Ahead of Print.
This article focuses on the emergence and development of gerontology in communist Bulgaria, looking at the interplay of various circumstances: scientific and political, national and international. We ask if an apparently ideologically neutral field of knowledge such as gerontology may have had some intrinsic qualities imbued by the regimes of knowledge production under a communist regime. More specifically, we ask to what extent and in which ways the production of such specialized, putatively universal knowledge could be ideologically driven and/or politically controlled. To this end, we unpack the ideological, political, institutional, and epistemic circumstances that may have affected the emergence, the institutionalization, and the paradigm of Bulgarian gerontology. We focus in on the social actors, both individuals and organizations, and the roles they played in the process, as well as on international networking and the uses of international contacts and agendas.
Citation: History of the Human Sciences
PubDate: 2023-07-26T05:55:57Z
DOI: 10.1177/09526951231178434
-
- The regional survey movement and popular autoethnography in early
20th-century Britain-
Free pre-print version: Loading...Rate this result: What is this?Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating.
A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors: Harry Parker
Abstract: History of the Human Sciences, Ahead of Print.
This article’s subject is the theory and practice of ‘regional survey’, the method of social and environmental study associated with Scottish thinker Patrick Geddes (1854–1932). Despite being overlooked or dismissed in most accounts of early 20th-century social science, regional survey had a wide influence on the development of the nascent disciplines of anthropology, sociology, and human geography. Emerging from late 19th-century field biology, the regional survey came to typify a methodological moment in the natural and social sciences that favoured the holistic analysis of geographically delimited areas. By the interwar period, the kinds of projects that went under its name can clearly be seen as forerunners of the post-Second World War tradition of community studies. Additionally, in its self-presentation as a civic, participatory exercise, the regional survey can be read as a form of popular autoethnography that contrasts with other, more familiar social-scientific ventures in the first half of the 20th century, and defies the dichotomy between ‘gentlemanly’ and ‘technical’ modes of social science. As a result, this article argues, the regional survey provides an alternative point of departure for thinking about the origins and development of the modern social sciences in Britain.
Citation: History of the Human Sciences
PubDate: 2023-05-26T05:08:39Z
DOI: 10.1177/09526951231167038
-
- The crisis of modern society: Richard Titmuss and Emile Durkheim
-
Free pre-print version: Loading...Rate this result: What is this?Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating.
A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors: John Stewart
Abstract: History of the Human Sciences, Ahead of Print.
This article examines the influence of Emile Durkheim's sociology on Richard Titmuss, founder of the academic field of social policy. While operating in different environments and historical eras, they shared concerns about modernity's impact on contemporary societies, heightened by their experiences of living in periods of considerable political and socio-economic upheaval. Their social thought embraced crucial complementarities, and understanding these adds a previously under-explored dimension to Titmuss's influential analyses of Britain's post-war ‘welfare state’.
Citation: History of the Human Sciences
PubDate: 2023-05-18T05:43:12Z
DOI: 10.1177/09526951231169399
-
- The moral economy of diversity: How the epistemic value of diversity
transforms late modern knowledge cultures-
Free pre-print version: Loading...Rate this result: What is this?Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating.
A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors: Nicolas Langlitz, Clemente de Althaus
Abstract: History of the Human Sciences, Ahead of Print.
We may well be witnessing a decisive event in the history of knowledge as diversity is becoming one of the premier values of late modern societies. We seek to preserve and foster biodiversity, neurodiversity, racial diversity, ethnic diversity, gender diversity, linguistic diversity, cultural diversity, and perspectival diversity. Perspectival diversity has become the passage point through which other forms of diversity must pass to become epistemically consequential. This article examines how two of its varieties, viewpoint diversity and educational diversity, have come to transform the moral economy of science. Both aim at multiplying perspectives on a given subject, but their political subtexts differ markedly. The valorization of educational diversity followed a US Supreme Court decision in 1978 that enabled universities to advance social justice, if they justified race-conscious admissions in terms of the pedagogic benefits of a more diverse student body for all. By contrast, the proponents of viewpoint diversity aim at the reform of scientific knowledge production and distribution rather than the reallocation of status and power among different social groups. We examine the political epistemology of viewpoint diversity by analyzing a controversy between social psychologists who, amid the American culture wars of the 2010s, debated how to rein in their political biases in a scientific field supposedly lacking political diversity. Out of this scientific controversy grew Heterodox Academy, an activist organization promoting viewpoint diversity in higher education. By relating and comparing viewpoint and educational diversity, we clarify what is at stake epistemically in the US-centric moral economy of diversity.
Citation: History of the Human Sciences
PubDate: 2023-05-10T05:11:43Z
DOI: 10.1177/09526951231166533
-
- The pincer movement of The Idea of a Social Science: Winch, Collingwood,
and philosophy as a human science-
Free pre-print version: Loading...Rate this result: What is this?Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating.
A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors: Jonas Ahlskog, Olli Lagerspetz
Abstract: History of the Human Sciences, Ahead of Print.
This article argues that, in order to understand Peter Winch's view of philosophy, it is profitable to read him together with R. G. Collingwood's philosophy of history. Collingwood was both an important source for Winch and a thinker engaged in a closely parallel philosophical pursuit. Collingwood and Winch shared the view that philosophy is an effort to understand the various ways in which human beings make reality intelligible. For both, this called for rapprochement between philosophy and the humanities. Like Collingwood, Winch wanted to reformulate philosophy as a form of human science. Both thinkers advanced a conception of logic where the validity of judgements, propositions, and thought are dependent on their function as instruments in human dialogue. In their treatments of logic, Winch and Collingwood were fleshing out their idea that questions concerning human meaningful behaviour also tie back to the question of what philosophical analysis is about. There is a deep connection between two main issues in both Collingwood's and Winch's writings: on the one hand, the need for ‘internal’ understanding of how human beings relate to reality, and on the other hand, their critique of the idea of logic as a self-sufficient system, external to historically embedded forms of life. At the core of their shared vision there was a comprehensive critique of metaphysical realism.
Citation: History of the Human Sciences
PubDate: 2023-05-05T05:03:54Z
DOI: 10.1177/09526951231159225
-
- Mental recovery, citizenship roles, and the Mental After-Care Association,
1879–1928-
Free pre-print version: Loading...Rate this result: What is this?Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating.
A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors: Hannah Blythe
Abstract: History of the Human Sciences, Ahead of Print.
This article argues for the importance of studying life after mental illness. A significant proportion of people who experience mental illness recover, but the experience continues to affect their lives. Historical examination of the birth of mental after-care through the Mental After-Care Association (MACA) highlights the challenges faced by those who were discharged recovered from English and Welsh lunatic asylums between 1879 and 1928. This research demonstrates the relationship between ideas regarding psychiatric recovery and citizenship. Throughout the period, certification of insanity for institutional treatment stripped patients of the status and rights of citizenship. Discharge on account of recovery restored a patient's legal access to citizenship, yet suspicions about their right and ability to particate in society lingered. The MACA designed after-care to facilitate restoration to full citizenship. The MACA was a product of the active citizenship movement, according to which, one's right to identify as a citizen depended on the performance of certain duties to the community. These duties varied according to socio-economic position and sex, meaning that each individual was prescribed a gendered personal citizenship role. MACA personnel saw their endeavours as part of their own citizenship roles, and designed their treatments accordingly. The MACA used a patient's assumption of a citizenship role to indicate recovery, and believed that supporting the performance of that role had mentally healing effects for patients who had been discharged recovered. MACA workers thus imbued the psychiatric innovation of after-care with the liberal political and social values of active citizenship.
Citation: History of the Human Sciences
PubDate: 2023-04-21T05:44:20Z
DOI: 10.1177/09526951231164266
-
- Was Thomas Hobbes the first biopolitical thinker'
-
Free pre-print version: Loading...Rate this result: What is this?Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating.
A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors: Samuel Lindholm
Abstract: History of the Human Sciences, Ahead of Print.
Thomas Hobbes's name often comes up as scholars debate the history of biopower, which regulates the biological life of individual bodies and entire populations. This article examines whether and to what extent Hobbes may be regarded as the first biopolitical philosopher. I investigate this question by performing a close reading of Hobbes's political texts and by comparing them to some of the most influential theories on biopolitics proposed by Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, and others. Hobbes is indeed the first great thinker to assert the supreme political importance of safeguarding life. Furthermore, this prominence of non-contemplative life is not limited to mere survival but also seeks to allow for the people's happiness. This may indeed allow us to consider him as the first biopolitical philosopher, at least in some limited capacity. However, the Englishman's biopolitical stance lacks the practical aspects seen in examples of ‘properly modern’ biopolitics. Moreover, peoples’ lives were already governed radically in antiquity. I argue that Hobbes's biopolitical system was, therefore, minimal in the sense of a ‘biopolitical nightwatchman state’. However, he acted as an undeniable catalyst to the ‘properly biopolitical era of modernity’, when mundane life and happiness became the explicit main objects of virtually all politics.
Citation: History of the Human Sciences
PubDate: 2023-04-20T06:14:42Z
DOI: 10.1177/09526951231159260
-
- The critique of social reason in the Popper–Adorno debate
-
Free pre-print version: Loading...Rate this result: What is this?Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating.
A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors: Iaan Reynolds
Abstract: History of the Human Sciences, Ahead of Print.
This article examines the differences and affinities between Karl Popper's critical rationalism and Theodor Adorno's critical theory through renewed attention to the original documents of their 1961 debate. While commentaries often describe the Popper–Adorno encounter as a theoretical disappointment, I reveal a confrontation between conceptually opposed programs of social research. Though both theorists are committed to critique as a political and epistemological struggle for human freedom, their conceptions of this struggle are starkly different. In the original seminar papers, we find a conflict between critique as a practice of social rationality (Popper) and a critique of social rationality itself (Adorno). The versions of critical rationalism and critical theory meeting in this debate thus emphasize opposite dimensions of a reflexive practice of immanent critique. In closing, I suggest dissolving this conceptual tension by recovering the educational orientation of critique.
Citation: History of the Human Sciences
PubDate: 2023-04-20T06:14:03Z
DOI: 10.1177/09526951221146657
-
- Contrary to reason: Documentary film-making and alternative
psychotherapies-
Free pre-print version: Loading...Rate this result: What is this?Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating.
A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors: Des O’Rawe
Abstract: History of the Human Sciences, Ahead of Print.
This article explores how post-war documentary film-makers negotiated complex social, formal, and autobiographical issues associated with representing mental illness and its treatments, and the extent to which their respective approaches helped to challenge conventional attitudes to alternative psychotherapies – especially within the context of advances in new documentary film-making technologies, alongside a wider culture of social activism. Focussing on A Look at Madness (Regard sur la folie; Mario Ruspoli, 1962, France) and Now Do You Get It Why I Am Crying' (Begrijpt u nu waarom ik huil'; Louis van Gasteren, 1969, Netherlands), the article discusses how the collaborative, democratic aims of cinéma direct coincided with the ethos of institutional psychotherapy, and compares this with the relations between the documentary form and the subject of LSD-assisted psychotherapeutic techniques in Van Gasteren's film.
Citation: History of the Human Sciences
PubDate: 2023-03-30T03:54:50Z
DOI: 10.1177/09526951231155058
-
- Yeast, coal, and straw: J. B. S. Haldane's vision for the future of
science and synthetic food-
Free pre-print version: Loading...Rate this result: What is this?Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating.
A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors: Matthew Holmes
Abstract: History of the Human Sciences, Ahead of Print.
British biologist and science populariser J. B. S. Haldane was known as a contrarian, whose myriad ideas and beliefs would shift to oppose whomever he chose to argue with. Yet Haldane's support for synthetic food remained remarkably stable throughout his life. This article argues that Haldane's engagement with synthetic food during the 1930s and 1940s was shaped by his frustration with the status and direction of scientific research in Britain. Drawing upon the Haldane Papers, I reconstruct how Haldane's interest in synthetic food emerged from the biochemical and physiological optimism of the early 20th century. His mid-20th-century writings were an opportunity for Haldane to voice his political opinions. He attempted to erase the conceptual divide between farm and factory, maintained that food shortages were a capitalist construct, and criticised British colonialism. By pointing out the failure of existing economic systems and governments to develop synthetic food, Haldane made the case that food production should be placed under the control of biologists.
Citation: History of the Human Sciences
PubDate: 2023-03-27T07:55:42Z
DOI: 10.1177/09526951231156729
-
- Arguments with fictional philosophers: Spengler's Kant and the conceptual
foundations of Spengler's early philosophy of history-
Free pre-print version: Loading...Rate this result: What is this?Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating.
A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors: Gregory Morgan Swer
Abstract: History of the Human Sciences, Ahead of Print.
Most commentators on Spengler's philosophy tend to focus on the details of his cyclical theory of world-history, according to which history should be understood in terms of the rise and fall of great cultures. I argue that Spengler's philosophy of history is itself an expression of his primary concern with philosophical analysis of the structures of human consciousness, and that an awareness of Spengler's account of the existential structures of subjective consciousness enables one to grasp the reasoning behind some of the key features of his philosophy of history, such as his cultural isolation hypothesis and critique of Eurocentric historiography. I further argue that the way to access Spengler's theory of consciousness, and the ways in which it informs his philosophy of history, is via his critical engagement with the Kant character that recurs in the first volume of The Decline of the West.
Citation: History of the Human Sciences
PubDate: 2023-03-23T05:10:04Z
DOI: 10.1177/09526951231156040
-
- Psychoanalytic practice in the light of psychiatric patient records: The
elusive history of Freudian-inspired psychotherapy (Strasbourg,
1940s–1970s)-
Free pre-print version: Loading...Rate this result: What is this?Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating.
A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors: Florent Serina
Abstract: History of the Human Sciences, Ahead of Print.
This article delves into a problem that is still seldom addressed by historians—namely, the use of medical records testifying to the implementation of a psychoanalytically inspired treatment within a psychiatric institution for historical research. Based on publications, a broad spectrum of medical patient records, and interviews with former practitioners, it more broadly addresses issues related to the attention to patients’ voices at the University Psychiatric Clinic of Strasbourg, a central institution of psychiatric care in Northeastern France that was once considered a bastion of French Freudianism. Eventually, it contends with the fundamentally elusive nature of medical patient records when it comes to talking cures, highlighting the challenges and limitations inherent in the historical exploitation of this type of source.
Citation: History of the Human Sciences
PubDate: 2023-02-17T06:10:25Z
DOI: 10.1177/09526951221148638
-
- Trauma and loss in the Adult Attachment Interview: Situating the
unresolved state of mind classification in disciplinary and social context
-
Free pre-print version: Loading...Rate this result: What is this?Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating.
A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors: Lianne Bakkum, Carlo Schuengel, Sarah L. Foster, R. M. Pasco Fearon, Robbie Duschinsky
Abstract: History of the Human Sciences, Ahead of Print.
This article examines how ‘trauma’ has been conceptualised in the unresolved state of mind classification in the Adult Attachment Interview, introduced by Main and Hesse in 1990. The unresolved state of mind construct has been influential for three decades of research in developmental psychology. However, not much is known about how this measure of unresolved trauma was developed, and how it relates to other conceptualisations of trauma. We draw on previously unavailable manuscripts from Main and Hesse's personal archive, including various editions of unpublished coding manuals, and on Main–Bowlby correspondence from the John Bowlby Archive at the Wellcome Trust in London. This article traces the emergence of the unresolved state of mind classification, and examines the assumptions about trauma embedded in the construct. These assumptions are situated both in the immediate context of the work of Main and Hesse and in terms of wider discourses about trauma in the period. Our analysis considers how a particular form of trauma discourse entered into attachment research, and in doing so partly lost contact with wider disciplinary study of trauma.
Citation: History of the Human Sciences
PubDate: 2023-02-09T05:13:31Z
DOI: 10.1177/09526951221143645
-
- Metapsychy's border: Henri Piéron's (1881–1964) role as the gatekeeper
of French psychology-
Free pre-print version: Loading...Rate this result: What is this?Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating.
A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors: Renaud Evrard, Stéphane Gumpper, Bevis Beauvais
Abstract: History of the Human Sciences, Ahead of Print.
Metapsychy, or metapsychics, is the French science known in English-speaking countries as parapsychology or psychical research. As Régine Plas has shown, the ‘psychic’ phenomena were among the first subjects of psychological inquiry. Like many of his colleagues, Henri Piéron began his career researching apparent telepathic phenomena, and in collaboration with Nicolae Vaschide explained them in terms of an ‘intellectual parallelism’. From 1913 onward, Piéron developed the ‘Métapsychie’ section of L’année psychologique, where he used his critical skills to sometimes foster and sometimes discourage this field of research. In the background to these events was the issue of metapsychy's place within the field of psychology, a field on which Piéron had himself helped to confer institutional and professional status. The growing disparity between metapsychy and psychology suggested a distinct demarcation between the two disciplines, with Piéron zealously fulfilling a missionary role as one of several gatekeepers. While open to what were presented as new examples of physiologically objectified psychic activity, he never really seems to have observed anything he considered convincing and so generally suspected fraud. His interventions played a role in the emancipation/expulsion of metapsychy from the nascent field of psychology, with the advantage of increasing recognition of the epistemic authority of the latter.
Citation: History of the Human Sciences
PubDate: 2023-02-01T06:11:45Z
DOI: 10.1177/09526951221140001
-
- Verdicts on Hans Eysenck and the fluxing context of British psychology
-
Free pre-print version: Loading...Rate this result: What is this?Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating.
A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors: David Pilgrim
Abstract: History of the Human Sciences, Ahead of Print.
An account is provided of the historical context of the work one of the best-known figures in British psychology in the 20th century, Hans Eysenck. Recently some of this has come under critical scrutiny, especially in relation to claims of data rigging in his model of smoking and morbidity, produced from the 1960s to the 1980s. The article places that controversy, and others associated with Eysenck, in the longer context of the shifting forms of epistemological and political legitimacy within British psychology in the past hundred years. Eysenck was both lionised and disparaged during his life and after his death. This account explores that ambiguity in order to discern the challenge for British psychology to maintain disciplinary coherence. An understanding of this fluxing historical picture is guided by the meta-theoretical resource of critical realism.
Citation: History of the Human Sciences
PubDate: 2023-01-06T05:54:25Z
DOI: 10.1177/09526951221143888
-
- A diagrammatics of race: Samuel George Morton's ‘American Golgotha’
and the contest for the definition of the young field of anthropology-
Free pre-print version: Loading...Rate this result: What is this?Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating.
A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors: Marianne Sommer
Abstract: History of the Human Sciences, Ahead of Print.
Between the last decades of the 18th century and the middle of the 19th century, something of paramount importance happened in the history of anthropology. This was the advent of a physical anthropology that was about the classification of ‘human races’ through comparative measurement. A central tool of the new trade was diagrams. Being inherently about relations in and between objects, diagrams became the means of defining human groups and their relations to each other – the last point being disputed between the monogenists and the polygenists. James Cowles Prichard, a proponent of the comparative historical approach, was able to do without images in his pioneering Researches Into the Physical History of Man of 1813, but the third edition, which appeared in five volumes between 1836 and 1847, was richly illustrated with ‘ethnic types’ and skulls, including diagrams. What was happening is a process I engage with in detail for Samuel George Morton, who collected and distributed human skulls as lithographs in Crania americana (1839) and Crania aegyptiaca (1844). Along with the paper skulls travelled detailed instructions of how to look at them through a set of lines and to set their individual parts in relation to each other as well as to those of other types. Drawing on Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and Peter Camper, the Crania thus played a pivotal role in establishing what I call a diagrammatics of race – a diagrammatics that became overtly political with Types of Mankind (1854), which was written in Morton's honour by Josiah Nott and George Gliddon.
Citation: History of the Human Sciences
PubDate: 2023-01-05T06:37:01Z
DOI: 10.1177/09526951221136771
-
