Social Science Research Council

2009 DPDF Research Field:
Cultures and Histories of the Human Sciences

Over the past several decades, the human sciences broadly considered and, more narrowly, the “psy” disciplines in particular—psychiatry, psychology, psychoanalysis, and psychopharmacology—have drawn the attention of scholars from across the disciplines.  The field is loosely organized around the broad question of ‘the human’ as the subject of scientific and social scientific inquiry from the eighteenth century to the present.  Anthropologists, historians, sociologists, psychologists, and historians of science have been critical to its consolidation as a specialty, defining its contours in explorations of topics as various as characterizations of human nature from the Enlightenment to the present; the relationships of the normal and the pathological; hysteria and the female body; norms and intelligence; trauma and the politics of memory; and the nature of the modern and post-modern self.  The field is irreducibly interdisciplinary, which contributes to its dynamism and appeal to ambitious graduate students seeking to do methodologically and substantively path breaking work. 

Scholarship on this field has enriched existing disciplinary traditions while at the same time pushing at well established boundaries.  For example, work on the different ways in which race has been constructed across time and place and on the workings of gender in scientific and social practice has augmented long-standing streams of argumentation within a number of disciplines.  At the same time,  scholarship on the ‘psy’ disciplines has created new sub-specialties within existing traditions; histories and ethnographies of psychology and psychiatry, for example, which would once have been relegated to the margins now figure centrally in existing disciplines.  In the workshops, we will attend in particular to how and under what conditions scientific knowledge of the human is produced. In contrast to much work in existing disciplinary practices, studies of the human sciences often collapse the common distinction between theory and practice, for example, or between ideas and a material substratum.  Instead they conceptualize theory as a form of practice and locate ideas in dense webs of quotidian interaction and exchange.  Many students of the human sciences are interested in accounting for the technologies that structure the ways the human is apprehended by science—the bell curve, the questionnaire, the hospital record, the mood diary, the table of experimental results—rather than treating such as unproblematic vehicles for the presentation and transmission of knowledge.  In this vein, scholars of the human sciences have written densely and imaginatively researched studies that existing disciplines have immediately embraced for the ways in which they shed fresh light on old issues. 

We envision this research field as a capacious rubric, and invite students throughout the humanities and social sciences.  We recognize that the field’s interdisciplinary nature poses particular difficulties for students as they embark on their research, as they must on the one hand master a wide-ranging literature and be conversant with methodologies in fields beyond those of their home disciplines and on the other aim to write dissertations that will be recognized as sufficiently mainstream within their home disciplines to make them employable.  Our aim in the workshops is to draw students into common conversation around the human sciences while giving them the tools to craft compelling and successful dissertations.