The Journal of the History of the Behavioural Sciences (JHBS) is currently soliciting paper submissions for a special issue on: “Going public: Mobilizing, materializing, and performing social science history.” More information about this opportunity can be found below.

Inspired by the crucial role of public history in the formation of collective memory, identity, and critical social consciousness, this special issue will feature articles that describe and analyze public history projects that draw on topics and themes from the history of social science to educate, inform, and create community engagement around social issues. Public history is variously defined, but generally includes initiatives that unfold outside of academia to connect history with various audiences. Examples include museum exhibits, oral history projects, historic sites, monuments, dramatic performances, websites, walking tours, documentaries, and community events. New forms of public history are constantly emerging.

This issue is interested in descriptions and analyses of innovative public history projects from scholars who have conceptualized and implemented such projects by drawing on the history of the social and behavioral sciences broadly defined to include topics in psychology, anthropology, sociology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis, economics, linguistics, communications, political science, medicine, health, and the neurosciences. It is also interested in scholarly analyses of existing forms of public history that communicate these and related topics.

Articles should critically engage with issues such as the politics of representation and commemoration, making the past speak to the present, mobilizing affect, materializing history, the challenge of archival silences, the roles of community collaboration and stakeholder influence, counterstorying, and the challenges of doing recent history (where appropriate).

Papers should move beyond description to examine the conceptual, analytic, historiographic, ethical, contextual, cultural, and political factors that played a role in how the project unfolded and/or what it may have accomplished or failed to accomplish.

Some overarching questions that authors may wish to consider: What can public history projects accomplish that academic histories do not, or have not? What is the relationship between the two? How do the goals of each converge, and diverge? What could this relationship look like? What role can/does public history play in narrating histories of race, gender, class, sexuality, dis/ability, health, disease? Immigration, statehood, citizenship?

Article-length submissions that explore these questions from the perspectives of project developers as well as those consuming/analyzing public history are welcomed.

Submit manuscripts of up to 10,000 words, including notes and references, by April 1, 2020 through the on-line submission portal. The submitting author will be prompted to indicate that this submission is for the special issue “Going public.” The editor, Alexandra Rutherford (alexr@yorku.ca) strongly encourages preliminary inquiries about the appropriateness of particular subject matters and lines of analysis and intentions to submit.

All submissions should follow the format outlined in the journal’s Author Guidelines. Submissions selected by the editor will be peer-reviewed per the standard procedures of the journal.

The full CFP can be found here.