Social Science History Association
01.11.2012-04.11.2012, Vancouver, Canada
Deadline: 01.03.2012
We invite you to take part in the Culture panels of the 37th annual meeting of the Social Science History Association, November 1-4, 2012, in Vancouver. For more information on the meeting as well as the call for proposals, please refer to the SSHA website: http://www.ssha.org.
The deadline for paper and/or panel submissions is March 1, 2012.
The members of the Social Science History Association share a common interest in interdisciplinary and systematic approaches to historical research, and many of us find the SSHA one of the most stimulating conferences that we attend. The thematic topic of the 2012 annual meeting is "Histories of Capitalism."
While we welcome panels and papers on any topic of interest to scholars of culture and history, we are particularly soliciting papers on the following themes, drawn from member suggestions:
1. Economic culture and the civil sphere
2. Monetarization of non-market arenas (e.g., nature, heritage, public goods)
3. Instrumentalization of culture (e.g., advertising, commodification, business methods applied to various fields)
4. Interpreting the economy (e.g., in journalism)
5. Current economic crisis and reactions to it (e.g., Occupy Wall Street)
6. Shaping of social processes through national and international funding structures
The Culture network will be able to host at least seven panels in 2012 and will also be able to place additional papers through co-sponsorship with other networks (for example, with History/Methods, Politics, Macro-Historical Change, State-Society, Historical Geography, Race, Urban, etc.).
The SSHA requests that submissions be made by means of its web conference management system. Paper title, brief abstract, and contact information should be submitted on the site http://www.ssha.org, where the general SSHA 2012 call for papers is also available. (If you haven't used the system previously you will need to create an account, which is a very simple process.) Here is the direct link for submissions:
http://conference.ssha.org/
The online system is now accepting submissions. If you have any questions, please contact any of the Culture co-chairs (Stefan Bargheer sbargheer [at] mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de; Emily Barman eabarman [at] bu.edu; or Victoria Johnson vjohnsn [at] umich.edu).
NOTE: There is an SSHA rule concerning book sessions. For a book session to proceed, the author (or at least one of multiple authors) MUST be present. Proposals for book sessions should only be submitted if there is high confidence that the author will be able to travel to the conference.
SSHA has set up a mechanism for networks to share papers, so even if you have a solo paper, send the idea along. It is possible and useful to identify a paper not only by the Culture network, but also by some other co-sponsoring networks. Co-sponsored panels and papers are encouraged by the SSHA Program Committee as a means of broadening the visibility of the various networks.
Please use the SSHA submission site - http://conference.ssha.org/
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SSHA Call for Proposals:
The 2012 Program Committee seeks panel proposals that focus on Histories of Capitalism. But it also encourages, as usual, papers and panels on all aspects of social science history.
Dramatic developments in the contemporary world - including the current world economic crisis; the rapid economic growth of China; the shocking rise of income inequality in the United States, or the looming danger of climate change - argue strongly for putting the history of capitalism at the center of our agenda in social science history. These contemporary developments point to capitalism's enduring enigma: it promises the utopian possibility of overcoming material want but creates barriers, inequalities, and dystopian disasters en route.
Features or aspects of capitalism often figure as causes or effects in studies of a wide range of topics close to the heart of social sciencehistorians: urbanization, labor struggles, cultural change, the demographic transition, gender and racial inequalities, migration, agrarian movements, or economic growth, to cite a few key examples. Yet capitalism usually figures as a context - either avowed or unavowed - of the phenomena we are attempting to grasp. Only occasionally do we reflect explicitly about the specific dynamics of capitalism as an evolving system or about how these dynamics shape possibilities for social and political action.
As the plural 'histories' in our theme's title affirms, there are various kinds of histories of capitalism: macro and micro histories; Marxian, neo-classical, Weberian, Schumpeterian, Polanyian, and neo-institutionalist histories; cultural, economic, political, and social histories; histories informed by anthropology, political science, literature, geography, economics, sociology, philosophy, and of course history itself; histories of capitalism's fundamental movements and of its manifold effects. Perhaps new histories will emerge at these meetings...
The Social Science History Association, with its rich tradition of interdisciplinary research, is an ideal forum for exploring all aspects of the history of capitalism both as an enduring intellectual problem and as a burning issue of contemporary politics and culture.
How Do I Participate in the 2012 SSHA Program?
Starting in December 2011, proposals for individual papers and complete sessions will be accepted at http://ssha.org, which provides instructions for submission. The deadline is 1 March 2012; we prefer the submission of complete sessions. If you want to organize a session, we recommend that you first contact a network representative. Network representatives - who are open to all possibilities - screen all papers and panels in their areas. (Current networks, with their representatives' e-mail and web addresses, are listed on the SSHAwebsite.) If you are not certain which network your paper proposal best fits, just ask the representatives of the networks closest to your interests.
SSHA will continue to make competitive grants for graduate student travel, now with additional help from the Charles and Louise Tilly Fund for Social Science History, which also supports a graduate student paper prize.
SSHA President for 2011-12
William H. Sewell, Jr., University of Chicago, wsewell [at] uchicago.edu
Program Committee Co-Chairs for the 2012 Conference:
Tessie Liu, Northwestern University (History), t-liu [at] northwestern.edu David Pedersen, University of California San Diego (Anthropology), dpedersen [at] ucsd.edu Dan Slater, University of Chicago (Political Science), slater [at] uchicago.edu