Poster #51 - Reasoning Backward and Forward About History: An Analysis of Students' Development of Path-Dependent and Historically Imaginative Models of Nation-States

• In Event: 75.043 - MTCC Poster Session 17
  In Poster Session: 75.043-8 - Humanities, Social Sciences, and Fine Arts: Post-Truths

Abstract

This paper examines how students come to develop models of nation-states that privilege hegemonic ideas around power and territorial expansion. Through employing what I call path-dependent reasoning–or “reasoning backward” from the eventual outcome of an event–students overwhelmingly created models of nation-states where territorial expansion was inevitable. However, I contrast the overwhelming cases with two instances where students employed a different reasoning framework–what I call “reasoning forward” as if they were reasoning from the period in question. I label this an imaginative act of historical thinking, and I speculate about the possibilities of countering hegemonic logics with this imaginative reasoning framework

Author

• Allena G. Berry, Northwestern University