Past Research Themes

The Scots at War Project

This project was located in the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities from 1995-1999 and was funded by the Scots at War Trust. Colonel Diana Henderson was the Research Director.

The aim of the project was to research and collate information about Scots who served in the armed and civilian services in the 20th century. It was centred on a website which quickly attracted an average of 1,000 worldwide users per month. The research and website publication was augmented by seminars involving veterans, scholars and students. Subjects included The Royal Navy, The 51st Highland Division, Prisoners of War in South East Asia, Indian Army Scots, The Secret War, The Sergeants Mess and The Women’s Land Army. The project attracted much public and academic response, especially through the patronage of HRH the Duke of Edinburgh and the support of Sir David Smith, principal of the University of Edinburgh from 1987 to 1994.

Scots at War Website (archived)

Dialogues of Enlightenment

Conversations between two or more people have historically been a key mechanism for the generation of inquiry, leading to enlightenment across many fields of human endeavour. Etymologically, meaning literally ‘flows through’ discussion and debate of this kind. In both Greco-Roman and Indian classical traditions instruction, persuasion and entertainment were accomplished through dialogue. From Sumerian dialogues and disputations, Rigvedic dialogue chants and the epic Mahabharata to the Socratic dialogues of Plato, Cicero’s De Oratore and De Re Publica, and key works of the early Christian tradition, our ways of thinking and learning have been shaped by exchanges characterized by reciprocity and openness of style and mind.

In a number of areas of human inquiry – epistemological, ontological, historical, ethical, pedagogical, political – the dialogue experienced a revival in Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Fénelon’s Dialogues des morts (Dialogues of the Dead, 1712), Malebranche’s Dialogues on Metaphysics and Religion (1688), and Berkeley’s Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (1713) all helped to shape the resurgence of the form in different areas of inquiry. Edinburgh’s residents entered fully into the formal and informal possibilities of dialogue: it was here, for example, that the sociability of David Hume, Adam Smith and their compatriots in the Scottish Enlightenment became a defining feature of social and intellectual progress. Their work and that of their successors in Europe’s Enlightenments continues to inform our understanding of individual, social and political life in the twenty-first century. Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), for example – a work considered so inflammatory that its author wished it to be published only after his death – continues to delight and instruct its readers. The Institute draws on the distinguished history of interdisciplinary discussion and publication associated both with the University and with the city of Edinburgh. Much of our current interdisciplinary research in the humanities advances through the lively exchange of ideas, and formal and informal conversations in which views are formed, evidence is tested, and conclusions are modified. At their best, these conversations become dialogues.

Dialogue allows the present to confront the past, East and West to converse, dyads and binaries of all kinds to come into communication. Practised in philosophical, literary, religious, historical and political contexts, as a genre it offers an important heuristic for interdisciplinary study in its own right.

Description

This IASH research theme will address all aspects of dialogue in its Enlightenment contexts: close study of key examples of the form; toleration, moderation and radicalism in the form and practice of dialogic exchange; the dialogues of Enlightenment with its ‘others’; pedagogy and pleasure. We shall also be concerned with such issues as

• Dialogues between forms: words and music, text and performance, art and instruction
• Dialogues between languages, and between nations; their limit-points and breakdowns
• Socratic, scholastic, egalitarian, or other: dialogue as form and content
• the emergence of character through dialogue
• ‘alternative conversations’: the dialogues, for example, between centres of sociability and established institutions during the Enlightenment
• Communication and its failures; obstacles to dialogue: confrontation, power and fear
• Modern and contemporary theories of dialogue as tools of explication and enlightenment: Buber, Bakhtin, Friere

IASH was the host for the Annual Conference of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI) in Edinburgh on 11-13 June 2009.
140 delegates from around the world met to discuss the conference theme of 'Dialogues of Enlightenment'.

Theory in Practice, Practice in Theory

Context

The past few decades have been dominated by a ‘theoretical turn’ in most if not all fields of the social sciences and literary and cultural studies. As well as the rise of social, literary, cultural theory and so forth, perhaps the most striking feature of the period was the existence of something like ‘theory’ as such, without any qualifying adjective. This involved a substantial migration of ideas from continental Europe to the English-speaking countries, as well as the reconfiguration of these ideas in local terms under categories such as ‘post-structuralism’. Derrida’s mutation from French philosopher to North American and global ‘theorist’ is emblematic of this process.

The prevalence of ‘theory’ as something transcending the existing academic disciplines in their various national configurations coincided, however, with a substantial side-product: the orientation of the leading ‘practitioners’ and their followers to ‘practical’ issues of politics or policy. Foucault’s activities in relation to prisons or Derrida’s in relation to the University as institution are again exemplary of this. More recently, philosophers have discerned a ‘practical turn’ in their subject, where this means more than just ‘applied philosophy’, philosophy applied to ethical or political dilemmas, but a broader conception of the historicity of philosophy and other forms of intellectual life. Theorizing comes to be seen as a human practice among others, and philosophy as what Jurgen Habermas has called a ‘place-holder and interpreter’. Habermas in Germany, Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe in France, Alasdair MacIntyre, Richard Rorty and Charles Taylor in North America can stand here for many of their contemporaries, as well as thinkers of the subsequent generation such as Seyla Benhabib, Axel Honneth or Judith Butler.

In other fields, such as psychoanalysis, art or architecture, a practical orientation was built in from the start. What was called in the 1970s the ‘finalization’ of science, its application to practical purposes, is exemplified by environmental science and, more recently, by biotechnologies of all kinds. The diffusion of mapping technologies in satellite imagery and global positioning systems is an example of the application of a previously hermetic technology which changes our representation of space and opens up new relationships between conceptualization and visualization. While on the one hand, researchers have grown increasingly distant from their objects of study (as a result of technology and virtual representation) there has been a counter-move towards a direct engagement with them. This can be seen in environmental writings, in which the researcher is also the walker, ‘mapping’ the landscape through the body, and, more generally, in participatory research. In a different context, neuroscience re-makes something like phrenology in the forms of modern science and technology. A theme such as memory has been a major focus of recent thought, approached from such diverse perspectives as those of neuroscience, the psychopathology of trauma, and oral history and life-writing (the subject of a recent IASH research theme).

The practical application of theory is only one aspect of this development. From the other direction, in social and political policy, ‘evidence-based’ policy and ‘practice-led’ theory and research in social work have become increasingly prominent. (‘Evidence-based’ has been cited by the THE (August 28 2008) as one of three increasingly frequent terms in recent social science.) ‘Reflexivity’ is one way which thinkers have sought to capture this feature of our modernity; the concepts of memes and viral transmission (featured in the work of a 2009 IASH fellow) represent another. Neuroscience has also been seen as increasingly relevant to literary reflection on consciousness, and environmental concerns have become increasingly prominent in literary theory.

Description

This research theme will bring together thinkers from a variety of disciplines who are exploring or exemplify this practical turn and act as a bridgehead to practitioners seeking a forum in which to theorize their practice. It should therefore also function as an innovative contribution to current initiatives in knowledge transfer. Relevant areas of research might include:

• Evidence-based practices (for example, policy research, procedures in crime and detection such as forensics and psychological profiling.)
• The transformations of theory into practice, and the dialogue between theory and practice, in therapeutic interventions such as psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.
• The relationship of theory to practice in cultural production, such as creative writing, performance and performativity, the visual arts, architecture and the built environment, media practices.
• The translations of religious beliefs into political discourse.
• The articulation of the theory/practice interface with that of the relationship between distance and proximity in, for example, anthropology, documentary media practices, environmental research and activism.

The Academic and the Civic

Context

Relations between universities and their geographical, cultural and political contexts are a source of enduring concern. The academic and the civic have been regarded as, variously, opposed, inextricable, and mutually complicit. In the New Jersey school system, the Plainfield Academy for ‘at-risk students’ recently elected to change its name to the ‘Barack Obama Academy for Academic and Civic Development.’ Across the United States education is being newly described in terms that unite learning and citizenship imperatives; in the United Kingdom, citizenship has become a statutory element in the National Curriculum for Schools. In higher education the ‘knowledge transfer’ agenda attempts to build new relationships between academics and the ‘users’ of research. Such initiatives need to be understood within a broader framework which is both historically dense and conceptually sophisticated. Long before the nineteenth-century emergence of the English civic university movement from private institutions led to the foundation of the great city universities of Bristol, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool and Sheffield, Scotland had ancient universities embedded in and supported by their city contexts. The University of Edinburgh was founded in 1582; known as the ‘tounis college,’ it was promoted by the ministers and Town Council. But, as a recent historian has put it, ‘A university could be an affliction as well as an asset’ to the community that fostered it: Throughout most of western Europe students had, since the Middle Ages, developed an unenviable reputation for drunkenness, brawling and whoring. Worse, universities were founded by bishops, and both staff and students might also enjoy legal and social privileges, granted to them by their ecclesiastical patrons, setting them apart from local society. Medieval Brussels, Barcelona and sixteenth-century Nuremberg had all turned down the prospect of a university on these grounds. Every university has its own history of ‘town and gown’ relationships: close, mutually supportive, troubled and antagonistic. At any historical moment and in any particular location, the relationship between the academic and the civic may reveal much about a society’s values, anxieties, practical requirements and larger aspirations.

Description

IASH has strong connections with some of the great European city universities, including Utrecht, Bologna, Charles University in Prague and Jagellonian University in Krakow. This research theme will address particular aspects of the dialogue between different universities and their civic contexts; comparisons between how relationships have been sustained in different national and cultural contexts and at different points in time; and more conceptual issues around the identification and constitution of learning and research as special activities, and the effect of institutionalising them in centres located in, but set apart from, other aspects of civic life. What did, and do, nations and cities want from their universities and their academics? If in the eighteenth century Edinburgh’s town council promoted reform of the University to fit it to provide a modern education for a participant in ‘civil society,’ it seems now that universities are increasingly urged to provide vocational training and practical innovation to support a business economy. The effects of civic pressures on disciplinary formation and innovation are complex and penetrate well beyond the teaching curricula of universities to re-shape the very idea of ‘research’ and its value to society. When did the image of the ‘ivory tower’ emerge to isolate what went on in universities from the life that surrounded their precincts, and to what extent does that image still remain in the minds of citizens? Do academics still retain an aura of cultural authority, and from what is it assumed to derive? In the context of government pressure to demonstrate the ‘impact’ and ‘knowledge exchange’ components of university research, we shall investigate the mechanisms by which ideas are generated, transmitted, and ‘applied’ in extra-academic environments. At its largest, this theme invokes the relationship between social existence and the generation of knowledge.

The Humanities in the Twenty-First Century University

Context

With the institution of new technological curricula and an increasingly instrumental and utilitarian attitude towards Higher education amongst politicians, the role of the Humanities in the Academy has come under intense scrutiny. Doctoral programmes turn out scholars with PhDs who cannot find jobs appropriate to their training, and funding is diverted from Humanities subjects to more obviously useful forms of education. Recent books such as Alvin Kernan’s What’s Happened to the Humanities, John Ellis’s Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities, and Monika Fludernik’s Threatening the University: the Liberal Arts and the Economization of Culture proliferate: it is easy to participate in a sense that a major sector of the modern academy feels itself misunderstood, undervalued and under siege.

Is there really a ‘Crisis’ in the Humanities, or is it a necessary and continuing aspect of the role of the Humanities to reflect critically on themselves? What are ‘the Humanities’ in the modern university and how do they relate to the old ‘Liberal Arts’? Need the Humanities justify themselves, and how might they best do it?

Description

This theme considered the history, present position and possible future roles for the Humanities in the Twenty-first Century University, in a national, European and global context. The intersection of the Humanities and the wider public sphere is a major issue, as are relationships between the academy and national and international cultural institutions. Topics for consideration include the question of what is ‘research’ in the Humanities, and how does it relate to teaching?; the inauguration of what has been called the ‘Two Humanities’: the old and new disciplines of the human sciences; the appropriation of psychoanalytic theory by Cultural Studies; what does/might Knowledge Transfer mean for the Humanities?; the relationship between human and material sciences; the Humanities and the Learned Professions; the Academy and the Public Intellectual; ‘The Idea of a University’; the Humanities and Medicine: contemporary contexts.

Institutions and Oppositions of Enlightenment

Context

Edinburgh is a great city of institutions. The Royal Bank of Scotland (founded 1727); the National Library of Scotland, whose formative collection the Advocates Library achieved Copyright library status in 1709; St. Cecilia’s Hall (1763; the oldest concert hall in Scotland); The New Club (1787); the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland (1780); the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1783 ) – many of these are either products of Enlightenment, or took their modern shape during the eighteenth century. Between 2005 and 2008 a series of key institutions will commemorate important anniversaries: these include the Quincentenary of the Royal College of Surgeons in 2005, the tercentenary of Law at the University of Edinburgh in 2007; the Act of Union in 2007, which removed a seat of national government from Scotland for nearly three hundred years.

This last reminds us that institutions may be laws or events, as well as buildings and organisations; they may be practices and processes (the Ordnance Survey was founded in 1791), regulative principles, and forms of thinking. In addition to the obvious ‘establishment, organization, or association, instituted for the promotion of some object, esp. one of public or general utility, religious, charitable, educational, etc.’, the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of ‘Institution’ includes ‘The giving of form or order to a thing; orderly arrangement; regulation…. The established order by which anything is regulated; system; constitution…. An established law, custom, usage, practice, organization, or other element in the political or social life of a people; a regulative principle or convention subservient to the needs of an organized community or the general ends of civilization…. Something having the fixity or importance of a social institution; a well-established or familiar practice or object.’

Description

This IASH research theme addressed the institution of modernity during the Enlightenment through the study of rule-governed practices. The formation of new orthodoxies across Europe and America (for example, in relation to universities, legal structures, and religious establishments), and the forces that opposed or challenged them, were a major focus of attention, as well as such issues as

• radical transformations of education and the emergence of modern disciplinary configurations
• rule-governed practices of the Enlightenment, whether institutionalised or oppositional
• changing rituals, habits and customs in the Enlightenment, and their study by contemporaries
• ‘alternative conversations’: the challenge, for example, of erudite sociability to institutions during the Enlightenment.