No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Cohen-Cole approaches some of the broadest themes in the modern history of the human sciences. This dissertation explains the sudden emergence of strikingly different notions of human nature and mentation during the Cold War, breaking with extant understandings of the rise of cognitive psychology. His study shows cybernetics and computer technologies to be less important to this development than some historians have claimed; instead, he demonstrates how the on-the-ground psychology of postwar America dynamically and substantively informed the development of cognitive models of the person. By keeping the focus on very particular intellectual communities, including the Harvard Department of Social Relations and the Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies, he traces in detail the institutional dimensions of thinking about thinking and uncovers how the ideals of scientific reflexivity and interdisciplinary introduced novel perspectives on a field that is generally held to have evolved through mechanistic theory and experimental findings. The resulting study illuminates how conceptions of mind were attached to diverse public and intellectual projects at a time of national mobilization and international ideological struggle. Dana Jean Simmons, "Minimal Frenchmen: Science and Standards of Living, 1840-1960," University of Chicago, 2004. "Minimal Frenchmen" offers a strikingly original interpretation of the historical origins of constructs often taken to be unproblematic: minimum standards of life. Simmons examines minimum standards for food, air, and wages in France over an extended period of modernization, locating their origins in research on nutrition, housing, and labor. She draws on ideas in chemistry, medicine, and architecture and illuminates the significance that the categories of ration, prison cell, and budget had for new forms of government. Her main argument-that the stories of "minimal Frenchmen" belong to the history of political economyapproaches the phenomenon of consumption from the bottom up rather than concentrating on accumulation, leisure, or the emergence and expansion of the middle class. This work suggests the centrality of human science, economically marginal populations, and regulation to consumption, one of the most defining features of Western modernity and one more typically associated with autonomy and abundance than with dependence and scarcity. "Minimal Frenchmen" shows how needs once believed to be irreducibly minimal and determined by nature actually evolved as subjects of social consensus and mobilization, a process in which the human sciences played key roles.
(The 2006 Dissertation Award committee was Ellen Herman (chair), Jill Morawski, and
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This article is a real pleasure to read. Pooley traces the history of an "invented tradition": the disciplinary origins of mass communication research. The subject of this story is a brief summary of the communication research field composed by Paul Lazarsfeld and Edward Shils in 1955. In the text e
This article is a real pleasure to read. Pooley traces the history of an "invented tradition": the disciplinary origins of mass communication research. The subject of this story is a brief summary of the communication research field composed by Paul Lazarsfeld and Edward Shils in 1955. In Personal I