Rethinking Social History

The Rethinking Social History working group is a reading and writing workshop that meets weekly to discuss the various intellectual traditions and theoretical possibilities of social history. At its broadest, the group is concerned with the relationship between social theory, archival evidence, and historical practice: with the conceptualization, archival reconstruction, and narrative representation of ‘the social’ in social history. Our purpose is to collectively (though not exhaustively) account for the broad and diverse historicity of the field, while exploring the possibilities for a renewed social historical practice attuned to the political present. In line with the origins of the tradition, we are primarily concerned with the evolving historical relation of labor and production to the central categories of social theory: ‘modernity’, ‘society’, ‘subjectivity’, and ‘experience’, to name a few.