-
The discovery of synchrony: By means of the projector as a scientific instrument History of the Human Sciences (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2024-03-04 Seth Barry Watter
This article considers the implications for film analysis of the presence or absence of a manual crank. More specifically, it looks at the 16 mm Time and Motion Study Projector as used in behavioral research in the 1960s and 1970s. The controversial concept of ‘interactional synchrony’, or the dance-like coordination of people in conversation, emerged from the use of this hand-turned projector. William
-
Two left turns to science: Gramsci and Du Bois on the emancipatory potential of the social sciences History of the Human Sciences (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2024-02-14 Charles Battaglini
This article identifies two tendencies in left-wing approaches toward the social sciences. The first expresses skepticism towards science as a kind of product of the ruling ideology that solely reproduces the status quo. The second worries about the capacity of scientific inquiry to actually change people's ingrained beliefs and prejudices. Antonio Gramsci and W.E.B. Du Bois are representative of these
-
Transformativity: The malleable foundations of social theory History of the Human Sciences (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2024-02-02 Tom Boland
A foundational assumption of social theory is that things change: structures, institutions, organisations, groups, cultures, and selves all are contingent and subject to transformation. Herein, this malleable foundation is termed transformativity, drawing attention to a specific conceptualisation of change, which predominates and displaces other accounts of change, elaborated via a typology of change
-
The moral economy of diversity: How the epistemic value of diversity transforms late modern knowledge cultures History of the Human Sciences (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2023-05-09 Nicolas Langlitz, Clemente de Althaus
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, neur...
-
The pincer movement of The Idea of a Social Science: Winch, Collingwood, and philosophy as a human science History of the Human Sciences (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2023-05-04 Jonas Ahlskog, Olli Lagerspetz
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 impo...
-
Seeing like an epidemiologist? Mobilising people against COVID-19 History of the Human Sciences (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2023-04-30 Nick Clarke, Clive Barnett
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 ord...
-
Rupture, repetition, and new rhythms for pandemic times: Mass Observation, everyday life, and COVID-19 History of the Human Sciences (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2023-04-30 Dawn Lyon, Rebecca Coleman
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 objec...
-
Time shifts: Place, belonging, and future orientation in pandemic everyday life History of the Human Sciences (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2023-04-30 Patrick Collier, James J. Connolly
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 scien...
-
‘There is nothing less spectacular than a pestilence’: Picturing the pandemic in Mass Observation's COVID-19 collections History of the Human Sciences (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2023-04-30 Annebella Pollen
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 p...
-
Archiving the COVID-19 pandemic in Mass Observation and Middletown History of the Human Sciences (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2023-04-30 Nick Clarke, Clive Barnett
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 ...
-
Mental recovery, citizenship roles, and the Mental After-Care Association, 1879–1928 History of the Human Sciences (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2023-04-20 Hannah Blythe
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 ...
-
Was Thomas Hobbes the first biopolitical thinker? History of the Human Sciences (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2023-04-19 Samuel Lindholm
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...
-
The critique of social reason in the Popper–Adorno debate History of the Human Sciences (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2023-04-19 Iaan Reynolds
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 196...
-
Contrary to reason: Documentary film-making and alternative psychotherapies History of the Human Sciences (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2023-03-29 Des O’Rawe
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 ext...
-
Yeast, coal, and straw: J. B. S. Haldane's vision for the future of science and synthetic food History of the Human Sciences (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2023-03-27 Matthew Holmes
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...
-
Arguments with fictional philosophers: Spengler's Kant and the conceptual foundations of Spengler's early philosophy of history History of the Human Sciences (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2023-03-22 Gregory Morgan Swer
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 gre...
-
Psychoanalytic practice in the light of psychiatric patient records: The elusive history of Freudian-inspired psychotherapy (Strasbourg, 1940s–1970s) History of the Human Sciences (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2023-02-16 Florent Serina
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...
-
Trauma and loss in the Adult Attachment Interview: Situating the unresolved state of mind classification in disciplinary and social context History of the Human Sciences (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2023-02-08 Lianne Bakkum, Carlo Schuengel, Sarah L. Foster, R. M. Pasco Fearon, Robbie Duschinsky
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 sta...
-
Metapsychy's border: Henri Piéron's (1881–1964) role as the gatekeeper of French psychology History of the Human Sciences (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2023-01-31 Renaud Evrard, Stéphane Gumpper, Bevis Beauvais
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 firs...
-
Verdicts on Hans Eysenck and the fluxing context of British psychology History of the Human Sciences (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2023-01-05 David Pilgrim
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 scr...
-
A diagrammatics of race: Samuel George Morton's ‘American Golgotha’ and the contest for the definition of the young field of anthropology History of the Human Sciences (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2023-01-04 Marianne Sommer
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 anthrop...
-
Cybernetics in the Republic History of the Human Sciences (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2022-12-20 Michele Kennerly
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...
-
Tracing the career arc of Joost A. M. Meerloo: Prominence, fading, and premonitions of menticide History of the Human Sciences (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2022-12-20 William Douglas Woody
This article traces the career arc of Dutch psychoanalyst Joost A. M. Meerloo by examining his biography and his psychology of interrogation and confession. His life story, particularly his experie...
-
Maps of desire: Edward Tolman's drive theory of wants* History of the Human Sciences (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2022-12-12 Simon Torracinta
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 a...
-
Tocqueville and the Ostroms History of the Human Sciences (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2022-12-01 Sarah J. Wilford
Although it is commonplace for political scientists to draw upon historical thinkers and the ‘great books’ of the past, the practice of using historical works as reference points for contemporary i...
-
The sciences of love: Intimate ‘democracy’ and the eugenic development of the Marathi couple in colonial India History of the Human Sciences (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2022-11-25 Rovel Sequeira
This article studies the eugenic theories of Marathi sexological writer and novelist Narayan Sitaram Phadke, and his attempts to domesticate the modern ideal of the adult romantic couple as a yards...
-
‘Intelligible to the mind and pleasing to the eye’: Mapping out kinship in British family directories (1660–1830) History of the Human Sciences (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2022-10-17 Stéphane Jettot
Peerages and baronetages were successful commercial directories sold by a number of prominent London booksellers from the beginning of the 18th century. They provided an account of most titled fami...
-
Introduction: The Hoffman Report in historical context History of the Human Sciences (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2022-10-06 Nadine Weidman
This brief introduction explains the historical background of the Hoffman Report, the 2015 independent counsel's investigation into the American Psychological Association's role in aiding ‘enhanced...
-
Beyond torture: Knowledge and power at the nexus of social science and national security History of the Human Sciences (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2022-10-06 Joy Rohde
In the wake of revelations about the American Psychological Association's complicity in the military's enhanced interrogation program, some psychologists have called upon the association to sever i...
-
The Hoffman Report in historical context: A study in denial History of the Human Sciences (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2022-10-06 Dan Aalbers
Using the concept of social denial, this article puts the American Psychological Association's (APA’s) pattern of willful blindness, identified by independent reviewer David Hoffman, in historical ...
-
A military/intelligence operational perspective on the American Psychological Association’s weaponization of psychology post-9/11 History of the Human Sciences (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2022-10-06 Jean Maria Arrigo, Lawrence P. Rockwood, Jack O’Brien, Dutch Franz, David DeBatto, John Kiriakou
We examine the role of the American Psychological Association (APA) in the weaponization of American psychology post-9/11. In 2004, psychologists’ involvement in the detention and interrogation of ...
-
Beyond following rules: Teaching research ethics in the age of the Hoffman Report History of the Human Sciences (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2022-10-06 Elissa N. Rodkey, Michael Buttrey, Krista L. Rodkey
The Hoffman Report scandal demonstrates that ethics is not objective and ahistorical, contradicting the comforting progressive story about ethics many students receive. This modern-day ethical fail...
-
Kinship acknowledged and denied: Collecting and publishing kinship materials in 19th-century settler-colonial states History of the Human Sciences (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2022-09-27 Helen Gardner
In the second half of the 19th century, anthropology rode the coat-tails of modernity, adopting new printing technologies, following new travel networks, and gaining increasing access to Indigenous...
-
A genealogy of the scalable subject: Measuring health in the Cornell Study of Occupational Retirement (1950–60) History of the Human Sciences (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2022-09-27 Tiago Moreira
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...
-
Against well-being: A critique of positive psychology History of the Human Sciences (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2022-09-18 Luciano E. Sewaybricker, Gustavo M. Massola
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 po...
-
For or against the molecularization of brain science?: Cybernetics, interdisciplinarity, and the unprogrammed beginning of the Neurosciences Research Program at MIT History of the Human Sciences (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2022-09-15 Youjung Shin
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 f...
-
I never promised you a rose garden.… When landscape architecture becomes a laboratory for the Anthropocene History of the Human Sciences (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2022-07-29 Henriette Steiner
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 pr...
-
How family charts became Mendelian: The changing content of pedigrees and its impact on the consolidation of genetic theory History of the Human Sciences (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2022-07-19 Amir Teicher
This article offers a close examination of a small selection of pedigrees taken from German Mendelian and eugenic scholarship of the 1920s and 1930s. It examines the procedures that became customar...
-
Religion and civilization in the sociology of Norbert Elias: Fantasy–reality balances in long-term perspective History of the Human Sciences (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2022-07-11 Andrew Linklater
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...
-
Sin embodied: Priest-psychiatrist Asser Stenbäck and the psychosomatic approach to human problems History of the Human Sciences (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2022-07-11 Eve-Riina Hyrkäs
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 hist...
-
Racial anthropology in Turkey and transnational entanglements in the making of scientific knowledge: Seniha Tunakan’s academic trajectory, 1930s–1970s History of the Human Sciences (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2022-06-26 Nazan Maksudyan
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...
-
Mind and knowledge in the early thought of Franz Boas, 1887–1904 History of the Human Sciences (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2022-04-28 Valentina Mann
Franz Boas’ articulation of a new historicist and relativistic framework for anthropology stands as the founding moment of the discipline. Accordingly, scholars have sought to trace its source and ...
-
Stressing the ‘body electric’: History and psychology of the techno-ecologies of work stress History of the Human Sciences (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2022-03-21 Jessica Pykett, Mark Paterson
This article explores histories of the science of stress and its measurement from the mid 19th century, and brings these into dialogue with critical sociological analysis of emerging responses to w...
-
Reply to my commentators – Thinking with Forrester: dreams, true crimes, and histories of change History of the Human Sciences (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2022-03-18 Laura Jean Cameron
We are working on an important case.
-
A public inquiry into Freud’s influence upon Cambridge History of the Human Sciences (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2022-03-18 Steve Pile
Undeniably, at just over 700 pages, Forrester and Cameron’s Freud in Cambridge is a big book. It is reminiscent of the kinds of reports that are produced by public inquiries: those major investigations set up by governments to provide an official review of particular events or actions, often with recommendations (that can be binding, or not). This, then, is the final report of the public inquiry into
-
Fort/Da/Freud History of the Human Sciences (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2022-03-18 Paul Kingsbury
I first met Sigmund Freud in Lexington, Kentucky early on in the spring semester of 1999. Virginia Blum introduced him to me in a graduate seminar on psychoanalysis, which counted towards the Social Theory Graduate Certificate, at the University of Kentucky. Not the 5-foot 6-inch Austrian male, of course, but what John Forrester and Laura Cameron call the ‘Absent Great Man’ (p. 2), who is activated
-
Freud in Cambridge: An institutional romance? History of the Human Sciences (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2022-03-18 Jessica Dubow
-
Quentin Skinner, contextual method and Machiavelli's understanding of liberty History of the Human Sciences (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2022-02-28 Nikola Regent
The article examines Quentin Skinner's influential interpretation of Machiavelli's views on liberty, and the sharp divergence between his methodological ideas and his actual practice. The paper explores how Skinner's political ideals directed his interpretation against his own methodological precepts, to offer a basis for a ‘revival’ of republican theory. Skinner's reinterpretation of Machiavelli as
-
Confronting the field: Tylor's Anahuac and Victorian thought on human diversity History of the Human Sciences (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2022-02-25 Chiara Lacroix
Victorian anthropologists have been nicknamed ‘armchair anthropologists’. Yet some of them did set foot in the field. Edward Burnett Tylor's first published work, Anahuac, or Mexico and the Mexicans, Ancient and Modern, described his youthful travels in Mexico. Tylor's confrontation with the ‘field’ revealed significant in tensions between the different beliefs and attitudes that Tylor held towards
-
The ultimate think tank: The rise of the Santa Fe Institute libertarian* History of the Human Sciences (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2022-02-21 Erik Baker
Why do corporations and wealthy philanthropists fund the human sciences? Examining the history of the Santa Fe Institute (SFI), a private research institute founded in the early 1980s, this article shows that funders can find as much value in the social worlds of the sciences they sponsor as in their ideas. SFI became increasingly dependent on funding from corporations and libertarian business leaders
-
Documenting insanity: Paperwork and patient narratives in psychiatric history* History of the Human Sciences (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2022-02-16 Liana Glew
Paperwork plays a key role in a how institutions accommodate, refuse, or manage disabled people. This article develops modes for reading paperwork that build on each other, beginning with (a) recognizing the institutional pressures at work in shaping bureaucratic practices, then (b) considering how a person's relationship to disability influences how they might encounter these practices, and ultimately
-
The conundrum of the psychological interface: On the problems of bridging the biological and the social History of the Human Sciences (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2022-02-08 James Rupert Fletcher, Rasmus H. Birk
In this article, we consider how certain types of contemporary biosocial psychiatric research conceptualise and explicate biology-social relations. We compare the historic biopsychosocial model to recent examples of social defeat research on schizophrenia and cultural neuroscience work on affective disorders. This comparison reveals how the contemporary turn towards the ‘biosocial’ within psychiatric
-
Lesbian and bisexual women's experiences of aversion therapy in England History of the Human Sciences (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2022-01-06 Helen Spandler, Sarah Carr
This article presents the findings of a study about the history of aversion therapy as a treatment technique in the English mental health system to convert lesbians and bisexual women into heterosexual women. We explored published psychiatric and psychological literature, as well as lesbian, gay, and bisexual archives and anthologies. We identified 10 examples of young women receiving aversion therapy
-
Alfred Vierkandt’s notion of the social group History of the Human Sciences (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2021-12-16 Sandro Segre
German sociologist Alfred Vierkandt is hardly remembered today. This may seem surprising. Several prominent sociologists from the German-speaking countries contributed to the Handwörterbuch der Soziologie (1931), which Vierkandt edited and published. However, Vierkandt did not interact with any of them significantly, and this publication brought no recognition of the importance of his sociological
-
Modern European sexological and orientalist assimilations of medieval Islamicate ‘ilm al-bah to erotology History of the Human Sciences (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2021-12-09 Alison M. Downham Moore
This article discusses the term erotology, which was applied to medieval Islamicate ‘ilm al-bah (the science of coitus), as well as other world traditions of sexual knowledge, by European sexologists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, who contrasted it with their own forms of inquiry into sexual matters in the modern field of sexual science. It argues that the homogenisation and minimisation
-
‘You never need an analyst with Bobby around’: The mid-20th-century human sciences in Sondheim and Furth's musical Company History of the Human Sciences (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2021-11-30 Jeffrey Rubel
This article offers a case study in how historians of science can use musical theater productions to understand the cultural reception of scientific ideas. In 1970, Stephen Sondheim and George Furth's musical Company opened on Broadway. The show engaged with and reflected contemporary theories and ideas from the human sciences; Company's portrayal of its 35-year-old bachelor protagonist, his married
-
The pragmatic use of metaphor in empirical psychology History of the Human Sciences (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2021-11-26 Rami Gabriel
Metaphors of mind and their elaboration into models serve a crucial explanatory role in psychology. In this article, an attempt is made to describe how biology and engineering provide the predominant metaphors for contemporary psychology. A contrast between the discursive and descriptive functions of metaphor use in theory construction serves as a platform for deliberation upon the pragmatic consequences
-
Psychoanalysis and anti-racism in mid-20th-century America: An alternative angle of vision History of the Human Sciences (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2021-10-27 Tom Fielder
The conventional historiography of psychoanalysis in America offers few opportunities for the elaboration of anti-racist themes, and instead American ‘ego psychology’ has often been regarded as the most acute exemplar of ‘racist’ psychoanalysis. In this article, consistent with the historiographical turn Burnham first identified under the heading of ‘the New Freud Studies’, I distinguish between histories
-
From the margins to the NICE guidelines: British clinical psychology and the development of cognitive behaviour therapy for psychosis, 1982–2002 History of the Human Sciences (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2021-09-28 David J. Harper, Sebastian Townsend
Although histories of cognitive behaviour therapy have begun to appear, their use with people with psychosis diagnoses has received relatively little attention. In this article, we elucidate the conditions of possibility for the emergence of cognitive behaviour therapy for psychosis (CBTp) in England between 1982 and 2002. We present an analysis of policy documents, research publications and books
-
‘A troublesome girl is pushed through’: Morality, biological determinism, resistance, resilience, and the Canadian child migration schemes, 1883–1939 History of the Human Sciences (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2021-09-14 Wendy Sims-Schouten
This article critically analyses correspondence and decisions regarding children/young people who were included in the Canadian child migration schemes that ran between 1883 and 1939, and those who were deemed ‘undeserving’ and outside the scope of the schemes. Drawing on critical realist ontology, a metatheory that centralises the causal non-linear dynamics and generative mechanisms in the individual