New Directions In Social And Cultural History

What does it mean to be a social and cultural historian today? In the wake of the 'cultural turn', and in an age of digital and public history, what challenges and opportunities await historians in the early 21st century? In this exciting new text, leading historians reflect on key developments in their fields and argue for a range of 'new directions' in social and cultural history. Focusing on emerging areas of historical research such as the history of the emotions and environmental history, New Directions in Social and Cultural History is an invaluable guide to the current and future state of the field. The book is divided into three clear sections, each with an editorial introduction, and covering key thematic areas: histories of the human, the material world, and challenges and provocations. Each chapter in the collection provides an introduction to the key and recent developments in its specialist field, with their authors then moving on to argue for what they see as particularly important shifts and interventions in the theory and methodology and suggest future developments. New Directions in Social and Cultural History provides a comprehensive and insightful overview of this burgeoning field which will be important reading for all students and scholars of social and cultural history and historiography.

What does it mean to be a social and cultural historian today? In the wake of the 'cultural turn', and in an age of digital and public history, what challenges and opportunities await historians in the early 21st century? In this exciting new text, leading historians reflect on key developments in their fields and argue for a range of 'new directions' in social and cultural history. Focusing on emerging areas of historical research such as the history of the emotions and environmental history, New Directions in Social and Cultural History is an invaluable guide to the current and future state of the field. The book is divided into three clear sections, each with an editorial introduction, and covering key thematic areas: histories of the human, the material world, and challenges and provocations. Each chapter in the collection provides an introduction to the key and recent developments in its specialist field, with their authors then moving on to argue for what they see as particularly important shifts and interventions in the theory and methodology and suggest future developments. New Directions in Social and Cultural History provides a comprehensive and insightful overview of this burgeoning field which will be important reading for all students and scholars of social and cultural history and historiography.

Nothing has generated more controversy in the social sciences than the turn toward culture, variously known as the linguistic turn, culturalism, or postmodernism. This book examines the impact of the cultural turn on two prominent social science disciplines, history and sociology, and proposes new directions in the theory and practice of historical research. The editors provide an introduction analyzing the origins and implications of the cultural turn and its postmodernist critiques of knowledge. Essays by leading historians and historical sociologists reflect on the uses of cultural theories and show both their promise and their limitations. The afterword by Hayden White provides an assessment of the trend toward culturalism by one its most influential proponents. Beyond the Cultural Turn offers fresh theoretical readings of the most persistent issues created by the cultural turn and provocative empirical studies focusing on diverse social practices, the uses of narrative, and the body and self as critical junctures where culture and society intersect.

The field of psychological anthropology has changed a great deal since the 1940s and 1950s, when it was often known as 'Culture and Personality Studies'. Rooted in psychoanalytic psychology, its early practitioners sought to extend that psychology through the study of cross-cultural variation in personality and child-rearing practices. Psychological anthropology has since developed in a number of new directions. Tensions between individual experience and collective meanings remain as central to the field as they were fifty years ago, but, alongside fresh versions of the psychoanalytic approach, other approaches to the study of cognition, emotion, the body, and the very nature of subjectivity have been introduced. And in the place of an earlier tendency to treat a 'culture' as an undifferentiated whole, psychological anthropology now recognizes the complex internal structure of cultures. The contributors to this state-of-the-art collection are all leading figures in contemporary psychological anthropology, and they write abour recent developments in the field. Sections of the book discuss cognition, developmental psychology, biology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis, areas that have always been integral to psychological anthropology but which are now being transformed by new perspectives on the body, meaning, agency and communicative practice.

This essential new collection of key articles from critical thinkers and practicing historians focuses on where history is now in terms of its theory and practice. For students, teachers and historians alike, this is an indispensable reader.

The central aim of "The West and Beyond" is to evaluate and appraise the state of Western Canadian history, to acknowledge and assess the contributions of historians of the past and present, to showcase the research interests of a new generation of scholars, to chart new directions for the future, and stimulate further interrogations of our past.-- The book is broken into five sections and contains articles from both established and new scholars that broadly reflect findings of the conference "The West and Beyond:-- Historians Past, Present and Future" held in Edmonton, Alberta in the summer of 2008.-- The editors hope the collection will encourage dialogue among generations of historians of the West and among practitioners of diverse approaches to the past.-- The collection also reflects a broad range of disciplinary and professional interests suggesting a number of different ways to understand the West.

This volume brings together important theoretical and methodological issues currently being debated in the field of history of education. The contributions shed insightful and critical light on the historiography of education, on issues of de-/colonization, on the historical development of the educational sciences and on the potentiality attached to the use of new and challenging source material.