Historical Social Research / Historische Sozialforschung (HSR) 4/2014

FOCUS I – Cultural Life Scripts
FOCUS II – Global Anti-Nuclear Protest
MIXED ISSUE

FOCUS I – Onno Boonstra, Hilde Bras & Marjet Derks (Eds.): Historical Research on Cultural Life Scripts. An Exploration of Opportunities and Future Prospects

People live their lives guided by a cultural life script: a set of images and assumptions based on dominant representations of an idealized life that are shared with others in the community. Cultural life scripts provide a conceptual link between individual and society. They are not fixed but change in the face of new ideas and in response to changing social en economic structures and conditions. For that reason, research based on cultural life scripts is a challenge for cultural historians, social historians and historical demographers. This HSR Focus contains seven contributions of the Nijmegen based research group “Self, Script and Society”. They have been selected to show the wide variety of research possibilities of cultural life scripts within the domain of historical research and to place cultural life scripts more firmly on the future agenda of historians.

FOCUS II – Astrid Mignon Kirchhof, Jan-Henrik Meyer (Eds.): Global Protest against Nuclear Power. Transfer and Transnational Exchange in the 1970s and 1980s

Protest against nuclear power plants, uranium mining and nuclear testing was a major mobilizing force in the rise of mass environmental movements in the 1970s and 1980s around the globe. Nevertheless, the historiography of anti-nuclear protest remains largely limited to national stories about heroic conflict and the rise of movements. The contributions to this focus issue explore the so far under-researched transnational dimension of the conflict in a global perspective. They make visible for the first time relevant transfers of scientific knowledge and protest practices as well as transnational exchange between activists and experts from Western Europe, the United States and Australia. Rather than taking transnational interaction for granted, the authors explore the conditions facilitating and hampering the transfer of ideas. They analyse why only certain activists were committed and able to cross borders, as well as the obstacles they were facing. Thus, this HSR Focus contributes to current academic debates in environmental history, the history of social movements as well as global and transnational history.

Furthermore this HSR issue contains a Mixed Issue with three articles.

Abstracts of all contributions are available on our website <http://www.gesis.org/hsr/>.

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