Publicado el 25-01-10
The Economics Network of the Social Science History Association calls for
papers for the 2010 Social Science History Association conference. Please
forward this message to anyone you know who may be interested. Our
apologies for the inevitable multiple receipt of this message for many of
you.
The Social Science History Association conference for 2010 will be held in
Chicago (IL) in the historic Palmer House Hilton, from November 18-21. The
conference theme is "Power and Politics."
SSHA draws submissions of papers and panels through networks organized by
topic or field. The Economics network chairs are Anne McCants
(amccants mit.edu), Evan Roberts (evan.robertsvuw.ac.nz), and Peter B
Meyer (pbmeyereconterms.net)
We invite submissions of papers or (preferably) full panels by February
15, 2010. We are also interested to hear from specialists who are willing
to volunteer to be chairs or discussants, and on what topics. For more information including the conference-wide call for papers, and the other
networks please see the SSHA website at http://www.ssha.org.
The economics network meeting at the November 2009 meetings generated
numerous ideas for panel sessions, many of which are related to the
conference theme of "Power and Politics," or the local surroundings. Other
submissions related to social science history that can be incorporated
into interdisciplinary panels are welcome. Please contact the network
chairs with any questions.
Submissions of either individual papers or whole sessions are welcome.
Please submit paper and session proposals at http://conference.ssha.org.
You will need to provide an abstract, title and contact information, and
designate a network (or networks) where your paper is likely to fit. You
are free to email us with questions, ideas, etc. but the actual submission
is all self-serve.
Topic areas identified at our 2009 network meeting include those listed
below. Where an email is listed, please contact that person directly to
discuss paper and panel proposals. Other enquiries should be sent to any
of the network representatives listed above.
1. Roundtable on new research methods in economic history
2. Research using individual longitudinal data in economic history
3. Anthropometric measures of well-being
4. Economics of population aging
5. Political economy of trade
6. Imperialism
7. Living and working in Chicago (evan.robertsvuw.ac.nz)
8. Research with the Union Army data
9. Households, work and migration in the North Atlantic: Research
with NAPP data (evan.robertsvuw.ac.nz)
10. Long term change in shopping: North American papers especially
welcome. Please see session-specific CFP below. (ilya.vandamme@ua.ac.be)
__________________________________________
From the mall to the market: continuities and change in the urband
landscape of shopping, ca. 1800- ca. 2000
Jon Stobart and Ilja Van Damme
Once upon a time, reasoning went, it was only with the advent of arcades,
department stores and retail chains around 1850 that shopping experience
was altered in a significant way. Only then did consumers go from casual
buyers to pleasurable shoppers, ever more attuned and sensible for the
trappings of mass consumerism. However, recent research for medieval and
early modern times especially, has thrown open the shutters of supposedly
dark, drab and traditional commercial spaces, and revaluated the
apparently conservative shopping practices which pertained before the
nineteenth-century.
With this research comes the need to radically re-historicise the idea
that it was the advent of large scale and cost efficient commercial
infrastructure that turned public space into a 'sphere of consumption'.
Even the clever pun that department stores or shopping malls are 'holy
places' ?
cathedrals to celebrate the religion of mass onsumerism? is
not half as smart given the fact that arcaded urtyards of medieval
cloisters were used as upmarket shopping premises during yearly fairs.
Walter Benjamin may have been right to search in the 'detritus' of daily
shopping practices for the binding cultural traits of an era and for the
ways in which culture was constructed and reproduced. But we should not
presume, as he and others have done, that the rituals surrounding the
Paris passages were new and innovative in themselves. The everydayness'
of the practices and material culture of shopping is also to be found in
earlier periods.
This ties into two more general ideas. The first is that of 'urban
renaissance' which highlights the role of changing urban practices and
discourses, and the advent of commercialized leisure and culture in
shaping the physicality of towns in the past. Second, this research,
among others, has led to a questioning of the concepts of 'tradition' and
'modernity' itself. Retail outlets have to be judged on their own merits,
fulfilling historical contingent needs and desires, without necessary
being seen as residual or backward. A linear, or even teleological story
of primitive markets being eclipsed by ever more efficient and
sophisticated commercial spaces (shops, arcades, epartment stores, malls)
is as inconclusive as the supposed sudden disappearance of long
established customs and manners in handling consumers. Similarly,
continuities have to be defined in terms of path dependent choices of a
causal nature.
This call for papers welcomes studies of the urban consumer geography of
the last two hundred years. It seeks to engage researchers questioning:
HOW the commercial physicality of the city both reflected and gradually
altered shopping experiences. WHERE did this evolution take place? WHICH
actors from both the supply and demand side of the equation did it
involve? And HOW and WHY were urban consumer geographies constructed and
reproduced through economic practices and socio-cultural discourses and
decisions? The urban landscape of shopping is best understood as being as
inclusive as possible, not only taking into account its many and changing
commercial spaces (from markets, over shops, supermarkets, shopping
centres, malls, etc.), but also its interconnecting of shopping streets
and leisure zones within a broader public consumer geography. Already in
1989 Edward Soja made a passionate call for a critical 'spatialisation' of
urban history, and a recognition of the divergent and fractured, but also
fundamentally interconnected nature of space. Yet, so far, there has been
little attempt to explore the long-term evolution of and
inter-relationship between changing consumption practices and the social
and material surroundings in which they took place ? at least for the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries.
Both from an empirical and theoretical perspective new research on the
landscape of shopping and the construction of commercial space awaits
future analysis. For urban historians studying the nineteenth- andtwentieth-centuries, the challenge resides in going beyond cliches and
worn-out narratives on the revolutionary character of this age. From a
theoretical viewpoint, new insights on consumer behaviour and the
'spatiality of consumption' have to be incorporated in historical study.
This will give rise to a better and fuller understanding of the past,
while simultaneously placing our present day consumer geographies in a
genuine historical perspective.
__________________________________________
Evan Roberts
Minnesota Population Center
University of Minnesota
erobertsumn.edu
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