Trends in historical research - or are we in a normal mode of the current paradigm?

Decades ago, philosopher Thomas Kuhn introduced the idea of paradigm change. What Kuhn argued was that science goes through cycles: in some phases, many things change at once, while in others, science is essentially “settling in,” with few major breakthroughs taking place. A colleague of mine asked me a few days ago whether there are any tensions within the discipline of history regarding theory, and when I thought about it, my answer was basically no.

During my time as a historian, I remember people talking about the debates of the early 2000s surrounding the rise of postmodern theories. I began studying history in 2011, and at that time gender history was perhaps no longer new but still very much debated. Fifteen years later, it is clear that gender studies and the influence of women’s history made a decisive breakthrough in the late 2000s and are now an integral part of modern historical scholarship. However, I cannot think of a similarly decisive shift in the past ten years.

There have, of course, been changes in research programs. What I find most fascinating is the major trend toward cultural heritage within the historical sciences about eight to ten years ago. This was not a “program” in the sense that all scholars working on it shared a common theoretical framework, but rather that heritage became a much more prominent topic of debate than before.

I would not say that cultural heritage is dead as a research project, but rather that it has found its way into “normal science.” It was, however, a trend that one could easily identify simply by glancing through historical journals. My current belief is that we are not seeing any strong trends or groundbreaking theories at the moment. Perhaps the most popular — and controversial — topic of discussion today is posthumanism, but as a theory it has not yet gained many followers. If we were to make a prediction about the future, there will likely be a paradigm shift in historical science in the coming decade, simply because the last one occurred a couple of decades ago. But what that shift will entail, only time will tell.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Contemporary Sexual Politics: Efforts to Silence Sexuality in Politics

Image
Following up on last week’s post, we can ask ourselves where questions of sexuality are being challenged in politics. From a contemporary perspective, I would argue that we are currently witnessing global attempts—particularly from conservative actors—to banish issues of sexuality from public discourse. In Foucauldian theory, we can speak of several forms of the exercise of power. Foucault uses the concept of biopower to analyze social views on sex, capitalism, and power. One of the central aspects of biopower is that it often operates through the individual, who is expected to internalize social norms rather than be externally forced to accept them. Yet, in the case of sexuality, we have over the past decades witnessed rather forceful attempts to silence it, thereby making people unaware of important aspects of their own sexuality. In such cases, the effort seems to lie in banishing "unwanted" expressions from public discourse, thereby limiting the individual’s scope for a...
Read more

The old bucket and me - Hinke Bergegrens philosophical works

Image
(the title of this entry is a play with words, since the name "Hinke" carries resemblance to the word hink in swedish which means bucket).  For the past months I have been working on a project on Swedish politician Henrik "Hinke" Bergegren, who is often forgotten in contemporary history writing. Bergegren was born in an upperclass family in Stockholm in the year of 1861 and early in his life came into contact with rising workers movement. Within the movement he soon gained prominence and was a key person in forming the social democratic party, which would shape Sweden upuntil this day. In the scholarship on Bergegren a key concern have been the framing of him as a political terrorist, where he on the party's congress spoke openly about using violence as a mean to achieve the workers goals. In 1908 he was excluded permantly from the social-democratic party, which often have been described as a result of his agitation for violence. However, historian Åsa Linderbor...
Read more

Book review of sorts: A history of childhood by Colin Heywood

Image
One of the many perks with being a university teacher is that you get to read alot of various scientific literature. This semester I have been assigned to teach course about the history of childhood, which actually aligns rather well with my research interests on the history of families and migrant children. However, teaching also requires to read through the course literature and in this case a key-book was Colin Heywood's "a history of childhood".  As a standalone book it works rather well as an introduction to both the history of childhood and, in a wider sense, social constructionism. What I however have struggled with when incoorporating it to teaching is these three aspects: a) The structure which is divided thematically rather than chronologically  b) The books overestimation of the social; whilst also underestimating human evolution c) The approach where the past is presented as a one-way route to an enlighted, contemporary Europe or western world  Starting with m...
Read more