Category Archives: Associations

Call for Nominations: FHHS Grad Student Rep

CALL FOR NOMINATIONS (AND SELF-NOMINATIONS) FOR GRADUATE STUDENT REP ON FHHS STEERING COMMITTEE

The History of Science Society’s Forum for the History of Human Science (FHHS) invites nominations for the position of Graduate Student Representative on the Forum’s Steering Committee. Nominations should include a brief 3-4 sentence statement introducing the nominee/applicant and describing why they would like to be involved in, and contribute to, the activities of the Forum. Self-nominations are welcome. 

Please submit nominations by 15 May 2019 to Nominations Committee Chair, Jeremy Blatter: jblatter@drew.edu

The Forum for the History of the Human Sciences is an interest group of the History of Science Society and brings together scholars working on the history of the mind, body, and social sciences, broadly construed, across geographies, time periods and theoretical approaches. The Forum shares information about the field and supports activities including an annual distinguished lecture, HSS session sponsorship, and prize competitions for articles and dissertations.  

Visit our website for more information on FHHS: http://fhhs.org/

The 2016 SSHM Roy Porter Student Essay Competition

The British Society for the Social History of Medicine is now welcoming submissions from students for their annual Roy Porter Prize essay competition. The deadline is February 1st 2017, and the decision will be announced in July.

Essays must be between 5-9k words, and unpublished. The winner will be awarded £500.00. The winning entry may also be published in the society’s journal, Social History of Medicine. Click here for SSHM’s prizes page, where you can download competition entry instructions.

 

Allan Branstiter: Madness & A Thousand Reconstructions

The Mississippi State Asylum, see original post on AHA Today for full image citation
The Mississippi State Asylum, see original post on AHA Today for full image citation

Another highlight from the AHA Today blog–an announcement of a three parted post series by University of Southern Mississippi PhD Student Branstiter.  Titled “Madness and a Thousand Reconstructions: Learning to Embrace the Messiness of the Past,” the series, a reflexive narrative about archival research and historiography, will be of particular interest to other graduate students and early career historians engaging in similar processes of craft development.

Branstiter’s series will explain how shifts in the reformulation of his topic (an asylum scandal in Reconstruction-era US south) from ‘event’ to ‘lens’ allowed him to investigate its contexts in a way that could more fully apprehend the complexity involved. By recounting his own historiographic processes, Branstiter expounds upon common challenges in the construction of historical knowledge, including the politics of interpretation, the benefits of allowing the data to speak, as well as negotiation of the limits of formal records and informal memory practices. We look forward to the installments!

AHA Today on Archiving the Internet

AHA logoStephanie Kingsley (over on the American Historical Association‘s blog) put up a post on the ethical and technical challenges of retaining records of the web. Summarizing the proceedings of a day symposium on the topic, Kingsley also consults with the York Psyborg lab’s good fried Ian Milligan (Waterloo) to expound on the complex topic. She also provides a compendium of resources for those historians interested in contributing to projects being undertaken to #SaveTheWeb. Find the full post here.

 

AHA Today American Humanities ‘Alliance Action Alert’

AHA logoFor our United-Statesian friends, the American Historical Association‘s blog AHA Today responds to the latest of perennial calls by the House of Representatives Budget Committee to end federal funding to the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Quote:

This is a non-binding budget recommendation, and is one of those things that representatives hostile to the NEH, etc. put out year after year…. Although urgency seems less real than apparent, now is still a good time to send a strong message to Congress that you support NEH.

Here is the action alert they created to make for easy emailing to your congress person in support of the Endowment. Please participate!

Here is the full post we’re referencing, for more information.

APA out of Guantánamo

Well it’s been a long haul, but it’s official. The Pentagon has ended their use of psychologists in the Guantánamo Bay prison.

The post-Hoffman Report AGM in Toronto this past summer saw the association executive taken to task by the membership for ongoing failure to enforce increased ethical requirements initiated in 2008’s Petition Resolution.

The media should be praised for contributing external pressure through exposure of the association’s collusion with  American governmental agencies in ways that violate international human rights agreements as established by the UN, including interrogation programs run by the CIA under the Bush administration. As reported in the NY Times,  a FBI-led High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group, founded under the Obama admin, is the only part of the current government to have expressed concern over the APA’s new adherence to their own policies. Here’s hoping that doesn’t prove to be cause for real concern moving forward.

The Times’ piece also succinctly covers the association’s internal climate re. this most recent turn of events:

Some current and former military psychologists have been critical of the A.P.A. ban, saying it is so broadly written that it could make it difficult for them to work professionally in almost any national security setting. But advocates of the ban say it had to be written in a way that would close what they believe were longstanding loopholes in the organization’s ethics guidance.

Below please find a reverse chronology of our extensive APA torture coverage from throughout the era in which these developments occurred (It is our sincere wish to be able to end the series with this post):

The Monitor on research directions @ The Kinsey Institute

2015-10-kinsey_tcm7-192230The latest edition of Monitor on Psychology includes a short piece by Rebecca Clay about the history and current status of psychological work at The Kinsey Institute, offering those in the field an opportunity to touch base with the work that is being done there.

Info from Drucker’s 2014 volume is used to establish how the institute’s inception and early work relates to, and differs from, its recent research directions and expansion of focus to include work on relationships as well as sexuality. Their research programs on condom usage, sex and immunity, and the impact of technology on communication in sexual relations are featured.

Read the article, with more details about the relevant researchers and administration of the institute, here.

AHA Online Calendar

FYI, the American Historical Association’s website includes a handy dandy calendar tool that provides a chronology of wide-ranging relevant content for those interested in the happenings of the historical discipline more broadly. Included are meetings and seminars, exhibitions and interpretive resources, as well as awards and fellowships.

Follow this link to check it out!

Round Up: Calls for Conference Papers in Allied Fields

arts-building-goals-page‘Tis the academic season and many associations have officially released the dates and locations for their 2016 annual meetings and are making their accompanied calls for papers. Find here a handy collection of some conferences from various disciplines of interest to those who work on the history of psychology and related subjects:

  • 3 Societies Meeting: 8th Joint Conference of the BSHS, CSHPS, and HSS

University of Alberta ~ Edmonton, Canada

June 22-25, 2016

Proposal Submission Deadline: December 7, 2015 

“The theme of the meeting will by ‘Transitions’.  Although presenters are not confined to this theme, the Program Committee is seeking papers or sessions that reflect this theme and encourages participants to consider the broader scientific, scholarly and social implications associated with moments of transition in the sciences.

The Programme Committee welcomes proposals for sessions or individual papers based around the conference theme from researchers at all stages of their careers. Participation is in no way limited to members of the three organising societies, but there will be a discount for members.  Intending participants should also note that the usual HSS rules concerning presenting at successive conferences do not apply to this meeting.”

Complete details on the program and conference available here.

Continue reading Round Up: Calls for Conference Papers in Allied Fields

Seminar: History of the Psychological Disciplines Series

msmicaleThe next session of the British Psychological SocietyUCL’s History of Psychology Centre‘s conjunct History of the Psychological Disciplines Seminars takes place on June 16, 6:00 pm at the Arts and Humanities Common Room (G24), Foster Court, Malet Place, University College London.

The talk is titled Toward a Global History of Trauma, by featured speaker Mark Micale out of the Dept of History, University of Illinois. Editor of the (2001) volume Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry, and Trauma in the Modern Age, 1870–1930, Micale will argue that trauma scholarship is largely derived from a small number of purely Euro-American catastrophic events which serve as historical and psychological paradigms, and scholars need now to look beyond the West toward a new, more genuinely global perspective on the history of trauma. He focuses in particular on new research being done about Asia.

Find out more about this session, as well as an archive of past sessions, here.