Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin: Perspectives on Actors in Social History

Workshop 2013/2014

Perspectives on Actors in Social History

26.–28. März 2014

This conference aims at re-invigorating social history by taking up a challenge that has been too easily avoided or dismissed: the problem of how social historians and their critiques conceptualize actors – understood in in the broadest sense of the word that includes the conceptions behind terms such as agents, the self, subjects, or players. Social history as it was developed during the 1960s and 1970s, has repeatedly and justly been criticized for operating with over-socialized subjects, for trivializing individuals as agents of class interests or for reducing their practices to epiphenomena of social structures. Our intention is to reflect on how we can use recent criticism to enrich the toolbox of social history rather than as a license to give up thorny questions about classes and groups, power and subordination, practices and relationships, production and the social foundations of markets.