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Offers a collaborative exploration of the role of historical understanding in leading disciplines across the humanities and social sciences.
This interdisciplinary volume explores the relationship between history and a range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences: economics, political science, political theory, international relations, sociology, philosophy, law, literature and anthropology. The relevance of historical approaches within these disciplines has shifted over the centuries. Many of them, like law and economics, originally depended on self-consciously historical procedures. These included the marshalling of evidence from past experience, philological techniques and source criticism. Between the late nineteenth and the middle of the twentieth century, the influence of new methods of research, many indebted to models favoured by the natural sciences, such as statistical, analytical or empirical approaches, secured an expanding intellectual authority while the hegemony of historical methods declined in relative terms. In the aftermath of this change, the essays collected in History in the Humanities and Social Sciences reflect from a variety of angles on the relevance of historical concerns to representative disciplines as they are configured today.
The behind-the-scenes stories of the history and development of the fields of art, psychology, and philosophy are told in these fascinating volumes. Featuring all the most important discoveries and breakthroughs, the landmark works, the giant personalities, and the conflicts and controversies associated with each field, readers are treated to a highly detailed panorama that offers a thorough grounding in each profiled discipline. Each title examines the impact upon global culture and society that the innovative works of these fields have had, as well as their influence upon the individual, his or her consciousness, and his or her experience of everyday life. Revealing how the social sciences and humanities not only reflect but also shape human civilization, this series is essential reading for anyone interested in better understanding the development of culture, humanity, and the individual consciousness.
History and Philosophy of the Humanities: An Introduction presents a reasoned overview of the conceptual and historical backgrounds of the humanities.
Recent trends in the humanities and social sciences have forced on academia what many might call a crisis of history. Conventional assumptions about coherence and meaning in history are being challenged by questions concerning the relevance of history and attempts to refigure its content and mode of representation. The publication of History and... appears at a critical moment in our efforts to understand the importance of history as it relates to a wide range of scholarly disciplines. History and... brings together some of its most thoughtful scholars to better understand not only how our disciplines are connected to professional historiography but how our attempts to understand cultures are connected to our pasts.
The Humanities, the Social Sciences and the University is an intellectual history of research in the humanities and social sciences. It scrutinizes the priorities, values, objectives and publishing agendas of the modern university in order to assess the institutional pressures on research in major disciplines such as literature, history, sociology and economics. It argues that all these disciplines are currently experiencing a deep malaise – though to different degrees – due to loss of faith in the Enlightenment project, which entailed the pursuit of knowledge through reason. Extreme scepticism, promoted since the 1970s by French Theory, which regards knowledge as an instrument of power, is a major factor in this disorientation. Overall, the book concludes that though universities have grown stronger, wealthier and more powerful in the last century, the quality and seriousness of the research they typically produce are weaker and intellectually less important and the institution is in danger of losing its way. An accessible and compelling read, this book will appeal to scholars of sociology, education and intellectual history with interests in higher education policy and academic life.
Hands on Media History explores the whole range of hands on media history techniques for the first time, offering both practical guides and general perspectives. It covers both analogue and digital media; film, television, video, gaming, photography and recorded sound. Understanding media means understanding the technologies involved. The hands on history approach can open our minds to new perceptions of how media technologies work and how we work with them. Essays in this collection explore the difficult questions of reconstruction and historical memory, and the issues of equipment degradation and loss. Hands on Media History is concerned with both the professional and the amateur, the producers and the users, providing a new perspective on one of the modern era’s most urgent questions: what is the relationship between people and the technologies they use every day? Engaging and enlightening, this collection is a key reference for students and scholars of media studies, digital humanities, and for those interested in models of museum and research practice.
Challenging Ideas is a selection of articles which address the intersections between theory and empirical research. In general, the contributions to the volume focus on how imaginations of the temporal relationship between past and present might inform theory as well as empirical research. It is divided into two parts, the first of which, Memory, looks at the memory turn in the discipline of history, and includes investigations into the relationship between past and present in the working through of trauma and reflections on the relationship between media memory, collective memory and trauma. The second part of the volume, History looks at the intersections between social science, political theory and the writing of history. This section includes reflections on how the historian’s archival work might inform the construction of social and political theory and explorations of the temporal relationship between past and present at work in the archives. The contributions to this volume encourage historically oriented scholars to approach their work with an active interest in disciplines close to their topic and a reflexive attentiveness to the broader power relations within which they work. They offer different perspectives on the intrinsic relationship between past and present at work in the interactions between theory and empirical research, and thereby give impetus to challenging ideas and to the challenging of ideas in the social sciences and in the humanities.
With postmodernism has come the questioning of the very idea of 'the social'. Thinkers form across the social sciences and humanities now agree that this one foundational concept can no longer be taken for granted as an objective or real characteristic of the world. However, their uncertainty has taken on many guises and the social in Question represents an attempt to pull these diverse forms of questioning together.Drawn form sociology, cultural studies, history and theology, an international and eminent cast of contributors look at how the idea of 'the social' developed from its mediaeval foundations to its consolidation in the early twentieth century. The book then charts how the concept has been brought into the question by critiques from science studies, cultural studies and postcolonial studies before going on to look at how new framework are being proposed for the exploration of issues formerly seen as 'the social'. This book makes a fascinating contribution to the rethinking of contemporary academic activity.
