Calls for submission, ECR Prize

Early Career Prize, 2023-24

HHS Contributor

History of the Human Sciences – the international journal of peer-reviewed research, which provides the leading forum for work in the social sciences, humanities, human psychology and biology that reflexively examines its own historical origins and interdisciplinary influences – is delighted to announce details of its annual prize for early career scholars. The intention of the annual award is to recognise a researcher whose work best represents the journal’s aim to critically examine traditional assumptions and preoccupations about human beings, their societies and their histories in light of developments that cut across disciplinary boundaries. In the pursuit of these goals, History of the Human Sciences publishes traditional humanistic studies as well work in the social sciences, including the fields of sociology, psychology, political science, the history and philosophy of science, anthropology, classical studies, and literary theory. Scholars working in any of these fields are encouraged to apply. Guidelines for the Award Scholars who wish to be considered for the award are

asked to submit an up-to-date two-page CV (including a statement that confirms eligibility for the award) and an essay that is a maximum of 12,000 words long (including notes and references). The essay should be unpublished and not under consideration elsewhere, based on original research, written in English, and follow History of the Human Science’s style guide. Scholars are advised to read the journal’s description of its aims and scope, as well as its submission guidelines. Entries will be judged by a panel drawn from the journal’s editorial team and board. They will identify the essay that best fits the journal’s aims and scope. Eligibility Scholars of any nationality who have either not yet been awarded a PhD or are no more than five years from its award are welcome to apply. The judging panel will use the definition of “active years”, with time away from academia for parental leave, health problems, or other relevant reasons being disregarded in…

Book Reviews

Review: Disalienation

HHS Contributor

"the idea that the social and the psychic were intimately connected and had to be transformed collectively to escape alienation was the fundamental lesson"

Review: Camille Robcis, Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2021) Janina Klement (University College London) In January 1940, the Catalan refugee psychiatrist Francesc Tosquelles who had just arrived in France, was recruited to work with the French psychiatrist Paul Balvet. Since 1937, Balvet had been the director of a dilapidated and overcrowded asylum in the village of Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole in Lozère which, situated 1000 metres above sea level in the mountains, counted itself among France’s most impoverished regions. In a giant communal effort that included the local villagers, they prepped the asylum for the war, piled food reserves and planted and harvested produce together with the patients, ultimately saving the asylum population from starvation. Next to its main function as a sanatorium, Saint-Alban became an assembly spot for persecuted intellectuals who began participating in the therapy of the mentally ill, and soon pushed for theorisation of their practice. In 1941, a manifesto

with first principles emerged but only eleven years later, in 1952, the term “institutional psychotherapy” first appeared in a journal article. With Disalienation, Camille Robcis delivers the first history of the French institutional psychotherapy movement for an anglophone readership. The book’s work is to position institutional psychotherapy as a set of ethics of everyday life and experience, and to read it as a political theory (with the ambition of contemporary applicability) of alienation, the unconscious and institutions, more so than to assess its therapeutic merits. Prior to its denomination and introduction to medical literature, institutional psychotherapy was a humanitarian and intuitive act of care during war-time. The bookcover blurb’s claim that Saint-Alban was the only asylum that ‘attempted to resist’ the Vichy regime’s “soft extermination” programme of the mentally ill through supply shortages conceals a dispute among historians (which remains unrectified by the book itself) whether many psychiatrists across France tried the same thing, but ultimately failed to rescue most…

Author Interviews, ECR Prize

Interview: Freddy Foks, History of the Human Sciences ECR Prize winner, 2023

HHS Contributor

Stephen Farthing (1999); Historians of 'Past and Present' (standing: Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm; Rodney Howard Hilton; Lawrence Stone; Sir Keith Vivian Thomas; seated: (John Edward) Christopher Hill; Sir John Huxtable Elliott; Joan Thirsk); National Portrait Gallery, London.

Freddy Foks (University of Manchester) was awarded the 2023 History of the Human Sciences Early Career Prize for his essay ‘Finding modernity in England’s past: social anthropology and the transformation of social history in Britain, 1959-1977’. The article is forthcoming in the journal. We asked him some questions about the winning text and his future research. History of the Human Sciences: First of all, why were a particular group of social historians – your article focuses on four case studies: Keith Thomas, Peter Laslett, E.P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm ­– in Britain drawn to social anthropology in the 1960s and 1970s? Freddy Foks: There are two main reasons. The first was about anthropology and its ideas and status and the second was about what the historians wanted to do with those ideas. Laslett, Thomas and Thompson all wanted to explain that social change change wasn't just determined by economic change. By the 1960s social anthropologists in Britain had been making

arguments like that for decades. Not only that but it was a pretty high-status discipline with a lot of prestige in the academy. Some big names had published big ethnographies by the 1960s: Audrey Richards, Edward Evans-Pritchard, Max Gluckman, Victor Turner etc. Those are names that might even be familiar to some historians today. So the historians saw a prestigious discipline doing something they wanted to do: they didn't want to subscribe to an economically determinist account of history (apart from Hobsbawm, who I think we’ll talk about later in the interview). Anthropologists tended to analyse religion, economy, kinship, ritual etc. as part of a whole account of a society. That's what really appealed to the historians: this focus on the small scale and moving away from political elites. HHS: Why did Keith Thomas think that engaging with social anthropology might enable historians to break with ‘vulgar Marxism’? FF: In the early 1960s Keith Thomas was frustrated with colleagues who…

Book Reviews

Review: Emily Hauptmann, Foundations and American Political Science

HHS Contributor

Review: Emily Hauptmann, Foundations and American Political Science: The Transformation of a Discipline, 1945-1970 (Lawrence: The University Press of Kansas, 2022) John Hsien-hsiang Feng, Wuhan University Money talks. Fundraising campaigns have substantial influence on American public life. Likewise, financial sponsorships have considerable impacts on American political science. Funding matters. Disciplinary development is beyond political scientists’ genealogies and debates. As archival sources become available, one might wonder how funding bodies shaped the discipline in the past. Emily Hauptmann explores such an inquiry in her latest monograph: Foundations and American Political Science: The Transformation of a Discipline, 1945-1970. Hauptmann emphasises “an important material dimension” in the history of American political science (p. 9). She looks at the timespan between 1945 and 1970, namely the heyday of behaviouralism: “[T]he mid-twentieth-century programs of the Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller philanthropies influenced academic political science in powerful, lasting ways,” argues Hauptmann (p. 169). Behaviouralism prevailed in the discipline in the 1950s and 1960s.

It wasn’t until David Easton’s 1969 call for a post-behavioural revolution that American political science shifted toward more diversified paradigms. Behaviouralism was intellectually rooted in the work of Charles Merriam during the interwar period. He was the leader of the Chicago School and helped to create the Social Science Research Council. The Chicago School and the SSRC were both vital to the rise of behaviouralism. Giving credit to Merriam, scholars are inclined to take the post-WW2 supremacy of behaviouralism for granted. Rather, Hauptmann skips Merriam’s interwar period and pays attention to the financial circumstances that contributed to the superiority of behaviouralism in the US. The National Science Foundation allocated little budget to political science before the 1970s. According to Hauptmann, the Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller foundations filled the lacuna and provided large amounts of subsidies to political scientists for their behavioural research: “From 1950 until 1957, Ford invested $24 million to develop what it called ‘the behavioural sciences’… From 1959 to 1964, Ford…

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…

Book Reviews

Review: Matthew Smith, The First Resort: The History of Social Psychiatry in the United States

HHS Contributor

"Smith insists that patients are best served by a combination of biological, psychodynamic, and environmentalist approaches."

Matthew Smith, The First Resort: The History of Social Psychiatry in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 2023) Michael N. Healey, Johns Hopkins University For many decades, the history of U.S. psychiatry was likened to a pendulum, one which repeatedly swung between a biological framework and a psychodynamic one. As Jonathan Sadowsky has argued, however, grand narratives such as these obscure more nuanced aspects of the discipline’s past (Sadowsky, 2006). There were many continuities between psychoanalysis and psychopharmacology, for example, as Jonathan Metzl demonstrates in his analysis of medical journals, popular magazines, and related sources (Metzl, 2003). Similarly, some Freudians were surprisingly receptive to somatic methods, as Sadowsky’s own research on electroconvulsive therapy has shown (Sadowsky, 2017). Works like these have broadened the historiography of psychiatry in generative ways, providing us with a richer understanding of this specialty’s development. In his latest book, The First Resort, Matthew Smith makes a similar intervention. He does so, however, not by examining

another convergence of biological and psychodynamic approaches, but by contrasting them to another paradigm entirely: social psychiatry. While the term itself has existed for well over a century, and has been used in a variety of contexts, The First Resort largely focuses on a cohort of U.S. psychiatrists that practiced after World War II, and the diverse group of allied professionals with which they collaborated. Indeed, to Smith (and many of his actors), it was this interdisciplinarity – in mental healthcare, yes, but primarily in research – that characterized social psychiatry during these “magic years” (as the title of an unpublished manuscript by APA president Daniel Blain cited by Smith characterized the era). Accordingly, the book revolves around his analysis of four classic studies: Robert Faris and H. Warren Dunham’s research on schizophrenia in Chicago, Illinois; August Hollingshead and Frederick Redlich’s research on class and mental health in New Haven, Connecticut; and the Midtown Manhattan and Stirling County projects,…

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…

Book Reviews

Review: Emily Martin’s Experiments of the Mind

HHS Contributor

"The social nature of experimental psychology, Martin emphasizes, does not only lie in the relations between researchers. The experiments that are conducted are themselves thoroughly social events."

Review of Emily Martin, Experiments of the mind: From the cognitive psychology lab to the world of Facebook and Twitter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021) Maarten Derksen (Theory & History of Psychology, University of Groningen) Experiments of the mind is the result of a ten year-long project studying experimental psychology ethnographically, as a participant-observer in four laboratories. Emily Martin sat in on lab meetings, interviewed researchers, participated in experiments, and even tried her hand at running them. It has resulted in a book that contains many insightful observations. Martin went into this study with an admirably open mind. Whereas her anthropology colleagues' thought experimental psychology is a boring topic, she realized that the project of experimental psychology -- to produce objective knowledge stripped of the subjectivity that both researchers and experimental subjects bring to the process -- is fascinating, whether or not you think it is a worthwhile thing to strive for. Her open-mindedness allowed Martin to make the

familiar strange: to alert the reader to aspects of experimental psychological practice that seem unremarkable or do not get noted at all. To her surprise, studying the individual mind is an intensely social activity. The culture of experimental psychology is one of collaboration, mutual support, and frequent informal gatherings (much more so than in anthropology, she notes). In fact, Martin seems to have found especially social and collaborative labs. Not only are the psychologists who she studied without exception presented as very nice people (as becomes clear from the 'dramatis personae' that the book opens with), there is also an almost complete absence of conflict and competition. The labs are friendly, wholesome places, and there seems to be no scarcity. The post docs do not worry about finding another position after their current contract ends. There are no complaints about reviewer two, and the researchers do not struggle to get their work published or to get funding for the next…

ECR Prize

History of the Human Sciences Early Career Prize, 2022-23

HHS Contributor

History of the Human Sciences – the international journal of peer-reviewed research, which provides the leading forum for work in the social sciences, humanities, human psychology and biology that reflexively examines its own historical origins and interdisciplinary influences – is delighted to announce details of its annual prize for early career scholars. The intention of the annual award is to recognise a researcher whose work best represents the journal’s aim to critically examine traditional assumptions and preoccupations about human beings, their societies and their histories in light of developments that cut across disciplinary boundaries. In the pursuit of these goals, History of the Human Sciences publishes traditional humanistic studies as well work in the social sciences, including the fields of sociology, psychology, political science, the history and philosophy of science, anthropology, classical studies, and literary theory. Scholars working in any of these fields are encouraged to apply. Guidelines for the Award Scholars who wish to be considered for the award are asked to

submit an up-to-date two-page CV (including a statement that confirms eligibility for the award) and an essay that is a maximum of 12,000 words long (including notes and references). The essay should be unpublished and not under consideration elsewhere, based on original research, written in English, and follow History of the Human Science’s style guide. Scholars are advised to read the journal’s description of its aims and scope, as well as its submission guidelines. Entries will be judged by a panel drawn from the journal’s editorial team and board. They will identify the essay that best fits the journal’s aims and scope. Eligibility Scholars of any nationality who have either not yet been awarded a PhD or are no more than five years from its award are welcome to apply. The judging panel will use the definition of “active years”, with time away from academia for parental leave, health problems, or other relevant reasons being disregarded in the…

Book Reviews

Review: Samuël Coghe, Population Politics in the Tropics

HHS Contributor

"Coghe’s well-documented study on health in Angola is recommended reading for medical historians, historians of Lusophone Africa, or indeed anyone interested in health strategies in Angola and former African colonies."

Samuël Coghe: Population Politics in the Tropics: Demography, Health and Transimperialism in Colonial Angola (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022) 317 pp. ISBN 978 1 10894 3 307 Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger (Giessen) In Population Politics in the Tropics, Samuël Coghe studies the population politics of the Portuguese government in colonial Angola from 1890 to 1945, instigated due to its fear of depopulation. In view of the abolition of slavery, the indigenato-system was set up in 1870, which implied a system of forced labor leading to a formerly unknown regional mobility of African people (The transatlantic slave trade was abolished in 1836 but continued along illegal routes until the end of the century. Slavery was officially abolished in 1875). In times of an increasing influx of Portuguese farmers and traders to “modernize” the colony, especially after the Berlin Conference of 1884/85, smallpox and famines increased because of the breakdown of the ecological control of the lands, based on centuries

of long-established modes of agriculture. Now, with the construction of the railway and the introduction of different agrarian cultivations for export, the organization of the land gradually changed and the traditional knowledge of ecological landscapes faded away. Consequently, a “racial disease” (p. 31) spread, known as the sleeping illness, to which native Angolans were especially vulnerable, which made the Portuguese even more convinced of their inferiority. However, the high numbers of sicknesses and deaths made intervention necessary to avoid losing the African working force. This background explains the rise of biomedical interventionism in the region, that took the form of a call for medical assistance and led to the development of the discipline of tropical medicine. In 1902, the Escola Medicina Tropical (EMT) was set up in Lisbon, specializing in sleeping sickness, later followed by the initiative of the Asistência Médica aos Indígenas (AMI) in 1926. These issues, in a nutshell, are what Coghe's book investigates, not forgetting that the relationship between Portugal and Angola…