Interviews

Interview: Archiving the COVID-19 pandemic

HHS Contributor

London, England - May 12, 2020. Coronavirus: Blue heart shape featuring NHS on a graffiti wall, Hackney, London.

Archiving the COVID-19 pandemic in Mass Observation and Middletown, Special Section, interview with co-editor Nick Clarke (University of Southampton). History of the Human Sciences: Clive Barnett with whom your collaborated on this Special Section sadly passed away before it was published. I wonder if you might want to begin by paying tribute to Clive and reflecting on your experience of working together? Nick Clarke: In the summer of 2020, Clive and I started working on a project about popular responses to COVID-19, funded by the British Academy. A part of that project was a seminar series that we ran with the Mass Observation Archive. The Special Section emerged out of that seminar series. I was working with Clive on finalising the first draft of these articles when he died suddenly in December 2021. Clive and I had actually been working together for years, since I arrived in Bristol as a PhD student in 2000. I subsequently went on to work as a researcher for Clive as

a postdoc. I considered him a close friend and his sudden death was devastating, of course for his family, but also for many friends of his in academia, myself included. No doubt Clive would have had lots of brilliant ideas for how to develop the Special Section. Perhaps the best thing I can do for the purposes of this interview, instead of talking about Clive all day, which I could do, is to refer readers to a set of things that have been written about Clive in the last year or so. There was a blog post that I wrote soon after his death, about his generosity as a supervisor, a reader, a thinker and collaborator. This was posted on ‘Covid Responsibility’, a blog that we were both writing together specifically about popular responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Clive was an editor at the journal Progress in Human Geography at the time he died and there's an a nice…

Interviews

Interview: Nadine Weidman on the Hoffman Report

HHS Contributor

We spoke to Nadine Weidman (Harvard University) about the Special Section she edited on ‘The Hoffman Report in historical context’, published in the December 2022 issue of History of the Human Sciences. History of the Human Sciences: Could you briefly introduce the 2015 Hoffman Report and explain its historical background? Nadine Weidman: In the wake of 9/11 the Bush administration began what it called the Global War on Terror. As part of that war his administration introduced ‘enhanced interrogations’ of political detainees, who were held as prisoners of the war on terror in places like the military prison at Guantanamo Bay. The administration had a great hunger for information about the possible location of future terrorist attacks and so they detained people who they didn't charge with any specific crime and who were often held in extremely inhumane conditions in these military prisons. Many observers and international organizations said that these enhanced interrogation techniques

were actually tantamount to torture. They would involve things like waterboarding, sleep deprivation, stress positions – all kinds of really inhumane techniques. Psychologists got involved in assisting in these interrogations. The APA [American Psychological Association] got into it in 2005 by issuing high-level ethical guidelines that permitted psychologists to assist with and engage in these so-called interrogations. In 2005 the APA convened a committee and put out a report called ‘Psychological Ethics and National Security’, which gave ethical sanction to psychologists participating in these interrogations. As you might imagine, this created a huge firestorm of controversy within the profession. For 10 years – from 2005 to 2015 – the APA faced a great deal of criticism including from psychologists within the APA. Many people left the APA in response to this issue. Then towards the end of 2014 a journalist made public an email correspondence between APA authorities and national security officials showing that the APA had drawn up those high-level ethical guidelines in 2005 in…

ECR Prize, Interviews

Interview: Ohad Reiss Sorokin on Alfred Binet, ‘intelligence’ and failed experiments

HHS Contributor

"a failed experiment can teach us sometimes more than a successful one, especially if the experimenter reflects on the failure, then he can explain to us what he was looking for, he can explain what he didn’t get with the results."

Ohad Reiss Sorokin, is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia who recently completed a PhD at Princeton University. He received a commendation in this year's History of the Human Sciences Early Career Essay Prize for his essay ‘Intelligence’ before ‘Intelligence Tests’: Alfred Binet’s Experiments on his Daughters (1890-1903)’. We spoke to him about his interest in Binet and other research. History of the Human Sciences: First of all, I wonder if you could briefly introduce your broad research interests, including your PhD project “‘I [Suffer] Unfortunately from Intellectual Hunger’: The Geistkreis, Desire for Knowledge, and the Transformation of Intellectual Life in the Twentieth Century”? Ohad Reiss Sorokin: I wrote this essay a few years ago before I started working on my dissertation. The only thing that ties them together is that the dissertation is also a history of the human sciences but from a very different perspective. My dissertation deals with the

‘Geistkreis’, which was an intellectual circle that was active in Vienna between and 1921 and 1938. It was a meeting place of young philosophers, economists, lawyers, sociologists, psychologists, and art historians. What I argue in the dissertation is that they created this Geistkreis, in order to combat the reigning intellectual environment of Vienna at the time, which is known to be the “mandarin” culture. They tried to create a more open discussion culture that does the human sciences in a way that is not subjugated to the natural sciences, on the other hand, and is not completely metaphysical and out of touch with the empirical evidence, on the other. HHS: Now to move on to your essay, ‘Intelligence’ before ‘Intelligence Tests’: Alfred Binet’s Experiments on his Daughters (1890-1903)’: who was Alfred Binet, for what is he most famous and how does your article on his work depart from the existing scholarship? ORS: Binet is a very very famous figure…

Author Interviews, ECR Prize, Interviews

Interview: Erik Baker on entrepreneurs, libertarians, ‘philanthrocapitalists’ and the Santa Fe Institute

HHS Contributor

"This exodus from the established world of government labs and universities is reconceptualized as a form of entrepreneurship: the scientists are striking out for themselves and they have their own new creative ventures that they're really committed to and they're going to work hard to get them off the ground."

Erik Baker (Harvard University) received a commendation in this year's History of the Human Sciences Early Career Essay Prize. We spoke to him about his research and his commended essay ‘The Ultimate Think Tank: The Rise of the Santa Fe Institute Libertarian’. HHS: First of all, congratulations on your commendation in the History of the Human Sciences Early Career Essay Prize, for your essay ‘The Ultimate Think Tank’. To begin with, could you briefly introduce your dissertation on ‘The Entrepreneurial Work Ethic: Creativity, Leadership, and the Sciences of Labor Discipline in the United States’ and explain how this article fits into that project? Erik Baker: Thanks and thanks again to the editors of HHS for the commendation - it's a real honour and thank you for taking the time to share this work. My broader dissertation project is about the history of what I call ‘entrepreneurial management.’ That strikes some people as a contradiction in terms. Typically we think of management and managers

as faceless, gray-suited technocrat types, and we tend to think of entrepreneurs as really dynamic with innovative startups etc. But the cultural figures who typify the entrepreneur category are themselves also bosses. If you think of Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, these are people who are icons of entrepreneurship, but they're also executives who command increasingly large armies of employees. What I show is that since the early 20th century, management theorists have been interested in capturing this mystique that surrounds the entrepreneur, which seems to allow entrepreneurs to command attention, loyalty and legitimacy in a way that other kinds of managers don't. And they’ve sought to propagate that entrepreneurial spirit among the managerial ranks more broadly. The result, in the United States economy, is what I call ‘the entrepreneurial work ethic’. This comes from the claim that what makes entrepreneurs effective bosses is the fact that they themselves are committed to a creative project that energizes the…

Author Interviews, ECR Prize, Interviews

Interview: Liana Glew on psychiatric paperwork

HHS Contributor

"We can't answer the questions about how bureaucracy operates without answering questions about the effects on people's lived experiences."

Liana Glew is this year’s co-winner of the History of the Human Sciences Early Career Essay Prize. We spoke to her about her research and her winning essay ‘Documenting insanity: Paperwork and patient narratives in psychiatric history’. HHS: First of all, congratulations on winning the History of the Human Sciences Early Career Essay Prize for your essay ‘Documenting insanity: Paperwork and patient narratives in psychiatric history’. To begin I wonder if you could briefly introduce and summarise your essay and say a little about what inspired you to write it. Liana Glew: Thank you for the honour of the prize. The essay examines paperwork from US psychiatric hospitals in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. My purpose in this examination is to develop methods of reading that center patient agency and disability identity. The inspirations for piece were twofold. Firstly, it was inspired by a trip to the Oregon State Archives where they've done a really beautiful and careful job archiving this challenging history.

That's where a lot of the the material comes from. Second, it was inspired by a graduate seminar taught by Ebony Coletu, which is where I first started thinking critically about bureaucracy and paperwork. HHS: Before I ask more about the piece itself I wonder if you could briefly talk about your PhD thesis project and how this article relates to your research more broadly? LG: The article represents the third chapter of the dissertation, edited to stand on its own. Each chapter covers one genre of text about life inside asylums in the 19th and 20th century. So the first chapter is about fiction, the second about memoir-exposes which is a sort of hybrid genre that I've identified to talk about the journalistic and memoir pieces coming out around that time about life in an asylum. This third chapter covers the same paperwork material as this essay, then the fourth chapter is on archival patient writing.…

Author Interviews, ECR Prize, Interviews

Interview: What do we want? Simon Torracinta on Edward Tolman’s drive theory of wants

HHS Contributor

"Although Tolman was sincerely committed to behaviourism as an epistemological framework, he was consistently drawn to phenomena – cognition, purpose, desire – that pushed against the limits of that framework, which produces some really fascinating tensions."

Simon Torracinta, PhD candidate in the History of Science and Medicine at Yale, is this year's co-winner of the History of the Human Sciences Early Career Essay Prize. We spoke to him about his research and his winning essay ‘Maps of desire: Edward Tolman’s Drive Theory of Wants’. HHS: To begin I wonder if you could briefly introduce Edward Tolman and say a little about what inspired you to write about him?   ST: Edward Tolman was an American psychologist who worked mostly in the 1920s to 1950s, and spent most of his career at the University of Berkeley (their psychology building was named ‘Tolman Hall’ in his honour until it was demolished in 2019). He was a member of the so-called ‘neo-behaviourist’ generation, the cohort of psychologists, with figures like Clark Hull and B.F. Skinner, who took up the banner of behaviourism in the middle of the 20th century. They developed it into a robust research framework and succeeded in

making it the dominant experimental paradigm – especially in the United States –  for several decades. I was initially drawn to Tolman’s work because of his particularly explicit theorization of drives. But I was surprised to find that, although he was one of the most influential psychologists of his day and he’s still cited in neuroscience research today, he has mostly been neglected by historians, besides the excellent biography by psychologist David Carroll. But as I hope readers of the article will see, much of his work speaks to core concerns in the history of the human sciences. Although Tolman was sincerely committed to behaviourism as an epistemological framework, he was consistently drawn to phenomena – cognition, purpose, desire – that pushed against the limits of that framework, which produces some really fascinating tensions. HHS: Before I ask more about the article itself, I wonder if you could briefly talk about your PhD thesis project and how this article relates…

Interviews

Normality – interview with Peter Cryle

HHS Contributor

"In the end we realised, you can't just make the normal into the name of everything hateful and everything that's to be avoided, scorned or deconstructed. There are things about the normal that are enabling and that are functional and that we can't and shouldn't reject."

The current special issue of the History of the Human Sciences is a collection of essays on Normality, edited by Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens, which responds to their co-written book Normality: A Critical Genealogy, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2017. We discussed the genesis and contents of the special issue with its co-editor Professor Peter Cryle, University of Queensland. HHS: Before asking you more about the special issue, could you briefly introduce your jointly authored book, Normality: A Critical Genealogy, which was published by Chicago University Press in 2017? Peter Cryle: Quite often when people are doing research they start off with something that's a bit of an irritant, something that annoys them and which they wish they could resolve. For me and my friend and colleague Elizabeth Stevens ‘normality’ was a major irritant. We thought the idea was extraordinarily widespread but very poorly analyzed and that it involved all kinds of contradictions. We had

two main options: one was to stop complaining and ignore it, and the other was to try to do the kinds of things that cultural and intellectual historians can do in these circumstances, which is to have a look more closely at this rather messy thematic monster to see if we could nail some things down about it. That's a way, if you like, for intellectuals to fight back against intellectual messiness. That was our main thought and then we had to go and look for the normal wherever we could find it and make a history out of that. The two of us worked on it in parallel for about eight years, so we knew at the end we would have a book that would hold together, but we also knew that there were many places that we could have gone to and that there was much more for us to learn about those places. That was the way in…

Interviews

Histories of sexology today – interview with Katie Sutton

Hannah Proctor

'...work on the historiography of sexology has played a key role in encouraging researchers working across all sorts of fields, not just the history of sexuality, to engage more critically with ideas of the ‘normal’ and the ‘natural’ – to ask how these categories have changed over time and to recognise that they've always been historically contingent.'

‘Histories of sexology today: Reimagining the boundaries of scientia sexualis’ is the current issue of History of the Human Sciences, guest edited by Kirsten Leng and Katie Sutton. Special issue co-editor Katie Sutton spoke to the journal’s web editor Hannah Proctor about how the essays in the issue contribute to extending our understandings of histories of sexology. - HHS: First of all, could you say a little about the genesis of the Special Issue? What did you, as editors, hope to achieve with this collection of essays? KS: Kirsten Leng and I have both been working in various areas of the history of sexology for some time and with this special issue we really wanted to push some of the boundaries of the field. Michel Foucault influentially turned his attention to the history of sexual science in the History of Sexuality and since then there's been a tendency to prioritize certain kinds of analytical questions within the field – for

example, how has our understanding of homosexuality developed over time? Or, how have scientists gone about diagnosing “deviants”? This has been a history with a decidedly Western, male, white and European focus. The history of sexology has also often been limited to the “medical” and “scientific”. We were interested in opening up the historiography in more interdisciplinary directions, including by problematizing the disciplinary boundaries of the field from its very early days onwards. We were also interested in how we could use this issue to explore more of the transnational connections that have influentially shaped this field across time, as well as pushing further at questions around gender and intersectionality that historians have been turning their attention to in recent years. In these respects, this issue connects in interesting ways to a debate that was published a couple of years ago in this journal between Heike Bauer and Ivan Crozier, a back and forth about the disciplinary limits of sexology…

Interviews

Thinking in, with, across, and beyond cases with John Forrester – interview with special issue co-editor Chris Millard

HHS Contributor

"I think of cases as telling us nothing and everything. They tell us nothing at all and far too much because of the way that they can connect to everything. They can explain everything and they can be explained by everything in a way that makes you really have to make some pretty serious choices analytically before you even start. You'll never exhaust the case."

A new double special issue of History of the Human Sciences edited by Felicity Callard and Chris Millard has just been released. Chris Millard spoke to Hannah Proctor about how the special issue came about and how the contributions responded to, extended and celebrated the work of John Forrester. HP: The special issue celebrates the work of the late John Forrester and specifically his essay ‘If p, then what? Thinking in cases’, published in History of the Human Sciences in 1996. The introduction to the special issue contends that the essay transformed understandings of what a case was – could you explain what was so significant about the essay? CM: I think the essay managed to bring into focus the case, which is a particular part of the armory of the human sciences, a way of talking about a particular life or even a particular instance that has significance. Forrester ranges across disciplines looking at cases, looking at case

law and, of course, looking at the psychoanalytic case that was extremely close to all of his work. And it gave people a way into a whole host of questions about how cases do the work that they do. I don't necessarily think that Forrester, answered the questions he posed. I don't think that the essay was intended to answer questions. It was intended to to provoke. I still find the essay challenging and incredibly rich – new things come up whenever I reread it. The real power of it is that it doesn't pretend to settle any questions, but it makes you aware of questions you were only half aware of before. HP: Do you also think the essay is significant in terms of how it chimes with the overarching concerns of the journal? CM: Yes, as I said I think it was about one particular weapon in the armory of the human sciences and so absolutely it resonates with…

Author Interviews, ECR Prize, Interviews

‘Ghastly Marionettes’ – interview with Danielle Judith Zola Carr, winner of History of the Human Sciences’ Early Career Essay Prize

Hannah Proctor

"The approach that I take in the essay is part of my overarching method, which is to treat the history of science as intellectual history. The goal is not just to read the history of science alongside intellectual history, but to say we can do intellectual history within the sciences."

Experimental psychiatry team tests a protocol with a lab subject. Photo by Danielle Carr.

History of the Human Sciences is delighted to announce Danielle Judith Zola Carr (Columbia University) as the winner of the journal’s first Early Career Essay Prize for her essay ‘Ghastly Marionettes and the political metaphysics of cognitive liberalism: Anti-behaviourism, language, and The Origins of Totalitarianism’. Katie Joice (Birkbeck, University of London) was awarded a commendation for her essay ‘Mothering in the Frame: Cinematic Microanalysis and the Pathogenic Mother, 1945-67’. Congratulations to both scholars. 'Ghastly Marionettes' was included in our Special Issue on Cybernetics, published in February 2020, guest edited by Stefanos Geroulanos and Leif Weatherby. We spoke to the author about the essay, Hannah Arendt, Cold War liberalism and the place of intellectual history within the history of the human sciences. HHS: First of all, congratulations on winning the History of the Human Sciences Early Career Essay Prize for your essay ‘Ghastly Marionettes and the political metaphysics of cognitive liberalism: Anti-behaviourism, language, and The Origins of Totalitarianism’. Can you tell

us a bit about the piece? DC: Thank you so much. It was a pleasure to publish with the journal. The essay actually originated as an early 2017 post-Trump piece, when I think everyone was reading The Origins of Totalitarianism. It was my first time reading it, and I was struck by how infused the book is– especially in its last third–with a castigation of the Pavolovian imaginary of the human, and how that imaginary of a human determined by stimulus and response was equivocated with this new Cold War concept of totalitarianism. So I started looking into that realised that nobody seemed to have written about that specifically in relation to Arendt I think Arendt is a good figure to think with, because she encapsulates this emerging Cold War common sense– what many scholars now are starting to think about as Cold War liberalism. One of the questions in thinking about Cold War political ideology is this: What is…