ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Knowledge of Everyday Life and the Scientific Personae of Engaged Research

• In Event: Science and Activism: A Long History

English Abstract

This contribution starts from the observation that two innovative strands of twentieth-century historical research, women’s history and workers’ history, were shaped by methodological debates on how to achieve a research standpoint “from below,” going beyond official records and the archival sources that predominantly represented the view of elites onto the marginalized. It investigates two scholars who introduced new media in their work as part of their quest for that perspective: historian Natalie Zemon Davis (1928–2023), one of the pioneers of women’s history in the United States, who stated that working with actors on her motion picture Le retour de Martin Guerre (1982) had allowed her to think ethnographically about the early modern period; and Jacques Rancière (b. 1940), a French philosopher-historian who co-founded the journal Les révoltes logiques in 1975 with the aim of producing a workers’ history relying not only on institutional sources, but on a diversity of approaches to the mémoire populaire. Both scholars were concerned to gain historical knowledge about the everyday life of people who would not necessarily leave large bodies of written records, and both were crucially, if in different ways, active in social movements. By interrogating how their identities as researchers took shape in relation to social movements, I show that engaged research produced scientific personae in which the activist and the researcher could not be strictly separated.

Author

• Niki Rhyner, Humboldt University Berlin