Call for Papers: relaunch of Serendipities – Journal for the Sociology and History of the Social Sciences.

 Call for Papers

Welcome to the relaunch of Serendipities – Journal for the Sociology and History of the Social Sciences. As of December 2020, the journal is hosted by the Royal Danish Library (https://tidsskrift.dk/Serendipities). To mark our move to a new host and the reconfiguration of the editorial team, we welcome contributions to the journal, particularly those articles and book reviews that address the sociology and history of the social sciences in the broadest meaning of the description.

While its title pays homage to Robert K. Merton and his insistence that the development of any scholarly activity is influenced by unanticipated and anomalous instances, the journal does not expect contributors to follow a narrowly defined program. Rather it seeks to encourage the use of a variety of concepts, methodologies and theories to study the trajectories of the social sciences. The pertinent time span ranges from the pre-history of the several disciplines, through to the period of their formation and their consolidation (or their decline). Papers are welcome from any theoretical or methodological perspective that covers any of these periods. Case studies or investigations of longer lasting developments, papers focusing on a single scholar or on groups, schools, and research trends are equally appreciated by the journal so long as they conclude with more or less generalizing insights.

What we expect ideally would be a combination of the best of what can be called “sociology/history of” perspective, i.e. inquiries which belong to what Wolf Lepenies has called third culture – a field that occupies a unique space between science and literature, marked by both but also carving out a space of its own. Papers are free to look at social science disciplines from a historical point of view or challenge present day practices.

Beyond that we would like to see contributions that cover the development of methodologies and research techniques, the institutionalization processes of disciplines and research directions, “traveling ideas” from one scholarly culture or country to another, the question of drawing “boundaries” between the various social sciences, the role of funding agencies, and papers that discuss relations between the social sciences, the state, and social movements.

Interaction(s) of the social science with publics are a matter of great concern too. We particularly invite submissions that engage with the still underdeveloped field of sociological semantics, prosopography, and advanced quantitative and qualitative methods.

 

Serendipities publishes three kinds of texts:

Articles report and discuss research results, develop theoretical arguments, or offer a combination of both. An article has to be concerned with the sociology and history of the social sciences and should demonstrate how it adds to our understanding by relating to and positioning itself vis-à-vis the relevant literature.

Book reviews are intended to present and assess new publications in the field. There are no re­strictions with regard to the language of the reviewed publication. It is the explicit aim of the edi­tors that this section will function as a forum for critical evaluation of new publications and as a platform for those who are not able to read them in the original. In addition to standard-length book reviews, we therefore encourage longer reviews that present a book’s organization, argumen­tation and construction in greater detail and from a critical perspective. In addition, we welcome bulk reviews of two or more books. These could be organized around the methodologies used, disciplines, periods, countries, or scholars, etc. If you would like to review books, please address or Kristoffer Kropp (kkropp@ruc.dk) or Stéphane Dufoix (stephane.dufoix@parisnanterre.fr).

A third section is the Forum, where different kinds of texts and materials can be published. These can be archival materials, i.e. items from the past that are deemed valuable enough to be made more visible (e.g. letters, unpublished manuscripts, administrative documents, etc.), together with short commentaries on the significance of the documents. Second, the “Forum” section also functions as a platform for debate, inviting authors to reflect on distinct features related to the past and present of the social sciences, articulating criticism, or voicing one’s opinion. We also welcome interviews with social scientists from different countries.

For submissions please visit https://tidsskrift.dk/Serendipities/about/submissions. Alternatively, authors are encouraged to write to the managing editors Matthias Duller (DullerM@ceu.edu) or Andreas Kranebitter (andreas.kranebitter@uni-graz.at).

 

Editorial team:

Ivan Boldyrev (Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands)

Thibaud Boncourt (Université Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne, France)

Matteo Bortolini (University of Padua, Italy)

Chen Hon-fai (Lingnan University, Tuen Mun, Hong Kong)

Marcia Consolim (Universidade Federal de São Paulo, Brazil)

Christian Dayé (Graz University of Technology, Austria)

Stéphane Dufoix (Université Paris-Nanterre, France, and Institut universitaire de France)

Matthias Duller (Central European University, Vienna, Austria) 

Christian Fleck (University of Graz, Austria)

Andreas Hess (University College Dublin, Ireland)

Olessia Kirtchik (National Research University, Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia)

Thomas König (Institute for Advanced Studies, Vienna, Austria)

Andreas Kranebitter (University of Graz, Austria) 

Kristoffer Kropp (Roskilde University, Denmark)​

E. Stina Lyon (London South Bank University, United Kingdom)

Diego Pereyra (Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina)

Elisabeth Simbürger (Universidad de Valparaíso, Chile)