History of the Human Sciences

ISSNs: 0952-6951, 1461-720X

14 found

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  1.  1
    Seeing like an epidemiologist? Mobilising people against COVID-19.Clive Barnett & Nick Clarke - 2023 - History of the Human Sciences 36 (2):49-70.
    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 (...)
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  2.  3
    Rupture, repetition, and new rhythms for pandemic times: Mass Observation, everyday life, and COVID-19.Rebecca Coleman & Dawn Lyon - 2023 - History of the Human Sciences 36 (2):26-48.
    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 (...)
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  3.  3
    Time shifts: Place, belonging, and future orientation in pandemic everyday life.James J. Connolly & Patrick Collier - 2023 - History of the Human Sciences 36 (2):105-127.
    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 (...)
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  4.  4
    Racial anthropology in Turkey and transnational entanglements in the making of scientific knowledge: Seniha Tunakan’s academic trajectory, 1930s–1970s. [REVIEW]Nazan Maksudyan - 2023 - History of the Human Sciences 36 (2):154-177.
    This article situates the trajectory of the academic life of Seniha Tunakan (1908–2000) within the development of anthropology as a scientific discipline in Turkey and its transnational connections to Europe during the interwar period and up until the second half of the 20th century. Relying on the archives of the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, the archive of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, the Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes in Germany, and the Prime Ministry's Republican Archives in Turkey, it focuses on the doctoral studies of (...)
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  5.  9
    A genealogy of the scalable subject: Measuring health in the Cornell Study of Occupational Retirement (1950–60).Tiago Moreira - 2023 - History of the Human Sciences 36 (2):128-153.
    Increased use of scales in data-driven consumer digital platforms and the management of organisations has led to greater interest in understanding social and psychological measurement expertise and techniques as historically constituted ‘technologies of power’ in the making of what Stark has labelled the ‘scalable subject’. Taking a genealogical approach, and drawing on published and archival data, this article focuses on self-rated health, a scale widely used in population censuses, national health surveys, patient-reported outcome measurement tools, and a variety of digital (...)
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  6.  3
    ‘There is nothing less spectacular than a pestilence’: Picturing the pandemic in Mass Observation's COVID-19 collections.Annebella Pollen - 2023 - History of the Human Sciences 36 (2):71-104.
    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 (...)
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  7.  5
    I never promised you a rose garden.… When landscape architecture becomes a laboratory for the Anthropocene.Henriette Steiner - 2023 - History of the Human Sciences 36 (2):178-201.
    In the summer of 2017, wildflower seeds were spread on a large, empty open space close to a motorway flyover just outside Copenhagen, Denmark. This was an effort to use non-mechanical methods to prepare the soil for an ‘urban forest’ to be established on the site, since the flowers’ roots would penetrate the ground and enable the planned new trees to settle. As a result, the site was transformed into a gorgeous meadow, and all summer long Copenhageners were invited to (...)
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  8.  10
    Against well-being: A critique of positive psychology.Luciano E. Sewaybricker & Gustavo M. Massola - 2023 - History of the Human Sciences 36 (1):131-148.
    More than two decades after his seminal paper ‘Subjective Well-Being’, Ed Diener wrote that he substituted happiness with well-being to obtain scientific credibility. Are the arguments echoed in positive psychology rigorous enough to justify this substitution? This article focuses on the historical examination of the word happiness, covering the lexical universes of ancient Greek, Latin, and English, seeking to identify the connections between them. We found that arguments for such substitution are sustained by a fragile appreciation of the semantic depth (...)
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  9. Sin embodied: Priest-psychiatrist Asser Stenbäck and the psychosomatic approach to human problems.Eve-Riina Hyrkäs - 2023 - History of the Human Sciences 36 (1):31-55.
    Combining theological and medical perspectives is indispensable for the historical study of the interconnections between mind, body, and soul. This article explores these relations through the history of Finnish psychosomatic medicine, and uses published and archival materials to examine the intellectual biography of the Finland-Swedish theologian turned psychiatrist Asser Stenbäck (1913–2006). Stenbäck's career, which evolved from priesthood to psychiatry and politics, reveals a great deal about the tensions between religion and medicine, the spiritual and scientific groups that impinged upon psychosomatic (...)
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  10.  6
    Cybernetics in the Republic.Michele Kennerly - 2023 - History of the Human Sciences 36 (1):80-102.
    Plato's Republic lurks in cybernetics, a word popularly attributed to US American mathematician Norbert Wiener (1894–1964). In his accounts of how he came up with it, however, Wiener never mentions Plato, though he does note it was formed from the ancient Greek word kubernētēs (navigator). Among the earliest popular books about the cybernetics craze are three published in France, and their authors show a special interest in the origin of cybernetics. In something like learned rebukes to Wiener, all three books (...)
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  11.  6
    Religion and civilization in the sociology of Norbert Elias: Fantasy–reality balances in long-term perspective.Andrew Linklater - 2023 - History of the Human Sciences 36 (1):56-79.
    Many sociologists have drawn attention to the puzzling absence of a detailed discussion of religion in Elias’s investigation of the European civilizing process. Elias did not develop a sociology of religion, but he did not overlook the importance of beliefs in the ‘spirit world’ in the history of human societies. In his writings such convictions were described as fantasy images that could be contrasted with ‘reality-congruent’ knowledge claims. Elias placed fantasy–reality balances, whether religious or secular, at the centre of the (...)
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  12.  7
    For or against the molecularization of brain science?: Cybernetics, interdisciplinarity, and the unprogrammed beginning of the Neurosciences Research Program at MIT.Youjung Shin - 2023 - History of the Human Sciences 36 (1):103-130.
    It was no accident that the first neuroscience community, the Neurosciences Research Program (NRP), took shape in the 1960s at MIT, the birthplace of cybernetics. Francis O. Schmitt, known as the founding father of the NRP, was a famous biologist and an avid reader of cybernetics. Focusing on the intellectual and institutional context that Schmitt was situated in, this article unveils the way that the brain was conceptualized as a distinct object, requiring the launch of a new research community in (...)
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  13.  5
    Maps of desire: Edward Tolman's drive theory of wants.Simon Torracinta - 2023 - History of the Human Sciences 36 (1):3-30.
    Wants and desires are central to ordinary experience and to aesthetic, philosophical, and theological thought. Yet despite a burgeoning interest in the history of emotions research, their history as objects of scientific study has received little attention. This historiographical neglect mirrors a real one, with the retreat of introspection in the positivist human sciences of the early 20th century culminating in the relative marginalization of questions of psychic interiority. This article therefore seeks to explain an apparent paradox: the attempt to (...)
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  14.  75
    The Critique of Social Reason in the Popper-Adorno Debate.Iaan Reynolds - 2023 - History of the Human Sciences:1-23.
    This paper 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 (...)
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