This paper presents and responds to On the Heels of Ignorance, a sociological study which identifies five fundamental epistemological paradigm changes in American psychiatry in the service of its survival and details several tactics that have been employed to facilitate these professional reinventions. Issues raised in this presentation include the relationship between psychiatry, society and the state, and the nature and significance of psychiatric expertise. The dynamic of these relationships and the complexities of the required expertise create their own challenges for the advancement and professional accountability of the specialty. The conclusion suggests some future imperatives.

It is widely acknowledged that the contextual study of European Community law, later European Union law, has contributed to a richer understanding of EC/EU law. This review proposes a contextual reconstruction and analysis of EC/EU law in context, or what is the same, it considers the institutions, milieus and debates which fostered the analysis and assessment of EC and EU law as ‘an intricate web of politics, economics and law’, at the same time that facilitated the development of critical self-consciousness about the underlying assumptions that scholars (including contextual scholars) bring to their study of law. This is done by engaging with the work of Francis Snyder, and in particular, with his groundbreaking collection “New Directions in European Community law”.

This paper explores the thorny mingling of law with qualitative social science methodologies through the lens of the 2010–11 Supreme Court of British Columbia Charter Reference on polygamy, which was conducted to determine whether the criminalization of polygamy was consistent with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The Reference reveals how the marginalization of qualitative research(ers) effectively controlled whose voices were to be heard and whose were to be silenced in the broader project of sovereign intervention into family formation. With specific focus on Professor Angela Campbell, who provided expert opinion testimony in the Reference, this paper reflects on two important questions: when social science is invoked in legal settings, whose knowledge is legitimized, and who benefits from this legitimization? Drawing upon the longstanding feminist project of deconstructing assumptions of value-neutrality in all science, this paper considers how qualitative, feminist research(ers) may be inherently at odds with law’s quest for (rational) “truth.”

In the past two decades, calls for International Relations (IR) to ‘turn’ have multiplied. Having reflected on Philosophy's own linguistic turn in the 1980s and 1990s, IR appears today in the midst of taking – almost simultaneously – a range of different turns, from the aesthetic to the affective, from the historical to the practice, from the new material to the queer. This paper seeks to make sense of this puzzling development. Building on Bourdieu's sociology of science, we argue that although the turns ostensibly bring about (or resuscitate) ambitious philosophical, ontological, and epistemological questions to challenge what is deemed to constitute the ‘mainstream’ of IR, their impact is more likely to be felt at the ‘margins’ of the discipline. From this perspective, claiming a turn constitutes a position-enhancing move for scholars seeking to accumulate social capital, understood as scientific authority, and become ‘established heretics’ within the intellectual subfield of critical IR. We therefore expect the proliferation of turns to reshape more substantively what it means to do critical IR, rather than turning the whole discipline on its head.

The science of ammunition lethality is a field that seeks to define the point at which military ordnance takes life and produces death. By historicising lethality's epistemology, I reveal the intellectual fissures and scientific uncertainties that have been reified and embedded into contemporary conceptions of military power. This not only tells us something about the processes by which science is subordinated to war, but also offers a new lens from which to consider the way knowledge claims about battle are co-constructed and legitimated through military practices. As a result, this article places science back into a narrative that otherwise frames the ontology of war in terms of fighting.

This article offers the first study of the Cahiers d’Histoire Mondiale, the Journal of World History published under the auspices of UNESCO from 1953 to 1972 as a by-product of the ‘History of mankind’ project. Drawing on material in the UNESCO archives, it delves into what Lucien Febvre, the first editor of the Cahiers, called his ‘kitchen’, in order to understand world history as a practice. Data on author origin and article subject matter point to the journal’s mitigated success in overcoming Eurocentrism. The article ultimately contends that the Cahiers was at once a laboratory that experimented with new forms of relational history, and a forum where the very nature of world history was discussed by scholars from around the world (mainly from the West, but also from the East and the South). It suggests that today’s epistemological discussion on global history might benefit from the reflection offered by this now largely forgotten experiment.

The ‘transnational turn’ has been one of the most widely debated historiographical directions in the past decade or so. This article explores one of its landmark publications: The Palgrave dictionary of transnational history (2009), which presents around 400 entries on transnational history written by around 350 authors from some 25 countries. Drawing on narrative theory and the sociology of knowledge, the article develops an extensive quantitative and qualitative analysis of the most prominent narrative structures that can be found across the Dictionary, thus piecing together a coherent historiographical portrait of the book's many and multifarious entries. In doing so the article wishes to demonstrate a possible methodology for analysing the growing body of reference works – in the form of dictionaries, encyclopaedias, and handbooks – that are currently mushrooming in expanding research areas across the social sciences and the humanities such as international relations, governance, and globalization studies.

The debate about knowledge-production in sociology has pitted “internalist” accounts, which pay close attention to the places, practices, and tools of knowledge, against “externalist” accounts of institutions and fields. Using psychoanalysis as a case, this paper develops an approach that integrates these traditions by comparing the differentiation of places, tools and practices of knowledge production. The paper shows that, in a context in which other areas of practice increasingly differentiate research, diagnosis and treatment in spaces, tools, and professional roles, psychoanalysis invokes that differentiation rhetorically but refuses to differentiate its practice. Psychoanalysts insist on a specific setting – the couch and the psychoanalytic relationship – as central to all aspects of their knowledge-production but they do not adapt this space to pursue any of these purposes in their own right. This analysis explains some of the problems psychoanalysis has with its environment and the specific form divisions take within psychoanalysis. As an unusual case of non-differentiation, psychoanalysis highlights the role differentiation plays in other areas of knowledge-production.

Childe withdrew from revolutionary politics after his post-university years in Australia in favour of a career in prehistoric archaeology in Britain. Though remaining a Marxist, his application of Marxist principles to prehistory developed only slowly as his interpretations became more sophisticated. He became increasingly interested in knowledge about prehistory from studying results of the interactions between material remains and their interpretation (in Marxist terms, the relationships between practice and theory). In his paper ‘Retrospect’, Childe (1958b:73) charted the development in his thinking to where he rejected ‘transcendental laws determining history and mechanical causes … automatically shaping its course’ with an understanding that a prehistoric society's knowledge of itself was ‘known or knowable … with its then existing material and conceptual equipment’. Thus the prehistory of Europe could be seen not as a product of Oriental civilization, but as an independent entity. Childe could then write a prehistory of Europe ‘that should be both historical and scientific’ (1958b:74). This book, The Prehistory of European Society (1958a), also demonstrated his use of the epistemology of knowledge to understand prehistory as a sociological phenomenon.