The ISRF Bulletin
Beginning with the November 2013 inaugural issue, the thrice-yearly ISRF Bulletin will provide information on the interdisciplinary research of its Fellows. Each issue will be themed around a topic, methodology or debate of interest within (and across) the social sciences, and will consist of a number of short articles produced by our Fellows based on their research, as well as calling on our academic advisors and others following the ISRF’s work for their views.
Queries regarding the bulletin should be directed to Dr Lars Cornelissen
Issue 18: Here & Now, Then & There
We are accustomed to thinking of time as a unidirectional phenomenon, where past, present and future are ordered in a linear way and where the boundary between the then and the now is reliably impermeable. Mapped onto our self-conception as social scientists, this view of time can easily be translated into equally impermeable disciplinary frontiers: the historian concerns herself with the past, whilst the political scientist or the sociologist is dedicated to studying the present. There are situations, however, where this neat and intuitive notion of temporality begins to falter. Indeed, there exist spaces where the pull of the past is so strong that its distinction from the present comes to fade away. Here, the division that separates the now from the then ceases to be a boundary and becomes a threshold, inviting us to remember, study or acknowledge the events and people that made us who we are today. This Bulletin asks how we are to make sense of the complex relationship between spatiality and temporality.
Featuring contributions from Athena Hadji, Paul Dobraszczyk, Giulia Rispoli, Chris Hann, and Rachael Kiddey.