Perspectives on Actors in Social History
March 27–29, 2014
This conference aims at re-invigorating social history by taking up a challenge that has been too easily avoided or dismissed: the problem of how social historians and their critiques conceptualize actors – understood in in the broadest sense of the word that includes the conceptions behind terms such as agents, the self, subjects, or players. Social history as it was developed during the 1960s and 1970s, has repeatedly and justly been criticized for operating with over-socialized subjects, for trivializing individuals as agents of class interests or for reducing their practices to epiphenomena of social structures. Our intention is to reflect on how we can use recent criticism to enrich the toolbox of social history rather than as a license to give up thorny questions about classes and groups, power and subordination, practices and relationships, production and the social foundations of markets.
Convener
Contact
Participants
Gadi
Algazi
Fellow
1999/2000
Tel Aviv University
Beshara
Doumani
Fellow
2001/2002
University of California, Berkeley
Laurence
Fontaine
École des Hautes Étude en Sciences Sociales, Paris
Prabhu
Mohapatra
University of Delhi
Ritika
Prasad
The University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Oded
Rabinovitch
Tel Aviv University
David Warren
Sabean
Fellow
2001/2002
University of California, Los Angeles
Otto
Sibum
Uppsala University
Kath
Weston
University of Virginia, Charlottesville
Stephen D.
White
Emory University, Atlanta
Dorothee
Wierling
Forschungsstelle für Zeitgeschichte in Hamburg