XIX ISA World Congress of Sociology (July 15-21, 2018)

174

Cold War Social and Behavioral Sciences: International and Transnational Entanglements I

RC08 History of Sociology (host committee)

Language: English

The history of the Social and Behavioral Sciences (SBS) during the Cold War era has seen increasing interest throughout the last decade. While important progress has been made toward a more balanced assessment of the interrelations between the Cold War era and the SBS, the literature still shows some deficits. Chief among these deficits are the dominance of US-centered accounts and the lack of comparative studies. To some sociological observers, whether justified or not, another deficit is the alleged lack of sensibility towards the theoretical or methodological content of SBS ideas, since the literature has been mainly written by historians. Historians, in turn, tend to criticize the sociologists’ lack for details and, sometimes, a mild form of political naiveté.

We seek papers that address the aforementioned deficits by historians (i.e., intellectual historians, diplomatic historians, etc.), historians of the social and behavioral sciences (including but not limited to historians of the particular disciplines such as sociology or political science), and sociologists (i.e., sociologists of science, sociologists of higher education, etc.). By bringing into conversation works from these various vantage points, this session seeks to investigate and illuminate the international and transnational dimensions of Cold War social and behavioral science more fully than has been the case so far.