recent Centre Events

 

Belonging, membership, affiliation: new perspectives in social history
18 - 19 September 2023
Sciences Po, Campus de Paris

This international workshop was the second part of a project initiated in September 2023 at the Center for History and Economics at the University of Cambridge on new perspectives and current challenges in social history. This first event helped to bring to the fore an issue that is now central to much social history work: the study of 'belonging.' Rogers Brubaker's and Frederick Cooper's proposal ('Beyond Identity', 2000) to disentangle the notion of 'identity,' by distinguishing the logic of identification and forms of belonging, or categories of analysis and categories of practice, is still relevant today. But it has to be said that identification practices - particularly those of states - have been more widely studied than forms of belonging. Returning to this notion seemed to us to be all the more relevant from a scientific point of view, given that political debates remain saturated with questions of identity.

Promoting dialogue between national historiographies, this meeting aimed to bring together contributions that propose to reflect on the tools, approaches, and methods used by historians to study the question of belonging in local, national, colonial, or imperial contexts, as diverse as Peru under Spanish domination, Franco's Spain, French prisons in the 20th century, the persecution of Jews in Poland, apprentices in the 19th century, or informal towns in Brazil. What did it mean to 'belong' to a place, a neighborhood, a people, a family, a religion, or a 'race?' How did individuals prove, display, demonstrate, experience, and sometimes conceal or dissimulate their 'belongings' or 'memberships?' How should we observe, measure, interpret, and address these aspects as historians? What theoretical frameworks can historians usefully apply to these issues? What are the contributions and limits of the various methodologies used by social historians (quantitative methods, biographical studies, family history, oral history, etc.)? And what contributions can social historians bring to these debates on identities?

This event was supported by the Joint Centre for History and Economics at Paris, Harvard and Cambridge, and the ERC Lubartworld (IHMC-CNRS/EHESS) and organized by Elsa Génard (Harvard University), Renaud Morieux (University of Cambridge), and Claire Zalc (CNRS-EHESS).

 

Emotions, climate, and the environment. Historical perspectives (18th - 21st centuries)
24 May 2024
'Solastalgia', 'eco-anxiety', 'eco-grief': in the past two decades, neologisms have flourished to describe how climate change and human-induced environmental damages are giving birth to new emotional states. But the idea that climate can drive us mad or sad is not entirely new. By bringing together environmental history, medical history and the history of emotions, this workshop seeks to historicise our emotional relation to climate and the natural environment. Bringing together scholars from Australia, France, Switzerland, the UK and the US, the workshop tried to map how our emotional perceptions of climate(s), weather and the environment evolved from the 18th to the 21st century, and how climatic and natural elements were related to emotions such as fear, anxiety, or pleasure in specific historical, social, and political contexts. It offered the opportunity to study how emotions are shaped by personal experiences, collective representations, medical and lay knowledges. It also identified potential sources for an emotional history of the environment, such as private diaries, weather almanacs, medical treatises, and psychiatric archives. This workshop was organised by Anatole Le Bras. It was funded by the Centre for History and Economics in Paris and hosted by the Centre d'histoire de Sciences Po.

Book launch
22 January 2024
Introduction of Anatole Le Bras, Aliénés. Une histoire sociale de la folie au XIX^e siècle (Paris: CNRS, 2024) by Arnaud Houte (Paris 1).

 

12 December 2023 
Historical Mapping of Carbon Emissions in Paris
Roundtable discussion organised by Thomas Lauvaux (CNRS / Reims) and David Todd (Sciences Po)

 

30 June 2023
14h
A conversation on economic history, climate and the environment, with Jacob Moscona and Emma Rothschild

 

28 June 2023
Inappropriate Technology: Evidence from Global Agriculture
Jacob Moscona (Harvard)
Seminar, organised jointly with PEPES (Sciences Po /PSE)

 

27-28 June 2023
Histories of Economic Life in and Around the Ottoman World
Workshop organized by Joan Chaker, Salmaan Mirza and David Todd

 

Roundtable on Economic history, climate and the environment
11 July 2022
The Centre hosted a discussion around two papers by Emma Rothschild and Paul Warde on the emerging dialogue between the history of economic life and environmental history. The themes addressed included scales of analysis, (ir-)reversibility and the environment of the workplace.

 

24 February 2021
The Centre celebrated the publication of Pierre François and Claire Lemercier’s book, Sociologie historique du capitalisme, with comments by Mary O’Sullivan (Geneva).

 

28 January 2021
The Centre celebrated the publication of Emma Rothschild’s book, An Infinite History : the Story of a Family in France over Three Centuries, with comments by Claire Lemercier (CSO, Sciences Po) and Paul-André Rosental (CHSP, Sciences Po).

 

9 December 2020
The Centre celebrated the publication of A World of Public Debts : A Political History, edited by Nicolas Barreyre ad Nicolas Delalande, with comments by Jeremy Adelman (Princeton) and Odette Lienau (Cornell).

 

A Spatial Turn in Economic History?
5 June 2019
This CHEP workshop considered the growing interest in spatial approaches to the history of economic life. For more information, see the workshop report.