ABSTRACT:Focusing on the example of municipal interventions in defence, this article proposes to evaluate the role of cities and towns in Cold War policies. It discusses how, in the early 1980s, residents in Great Britain, New Zealand, West Germany and the USA claimed responsibility for defence and (dis)armament policies in the name of their respective city or home town. To justify this claim, protagonists not only portrayed urban settlements as probable targets of nuclear war. They also highlighted cities and towns as concrete places and drew attention to locality as a scale that might bear specific potentials for participation and empowerment. Yet a closer analysis of such initiatives in the four countries reveals that municipal activities for peace and disarmament developed in far more complex spatial relations than references to the ‘local’ as a scale of involvement might imply.
This special section evolved out of a workshop entitled ‘Minds and Brains in Everyday Life: Embedding and Negotiating Scientific Concepts in Popular Discourses’, held at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. Our discussions at the workshop and for this special section began with the observation that scientific interpretations and everyday explanations regularly meet and come together in debates about aspects of the mind and the brain. Such entanglements between science and the wider public have already been studied from multiple perspectives in history and the social sciences. Recently, however, warnings have intensified that researchers also need to take into account the limitations that certain scientific claims may encounter in everyday life, and to remain methodologically open to alternative explanations that are not derived from forms of (neuro)psychological knowledge. We suggest that focusing on contested narratives of the mind and the brain may be one approach to studying the interaction between science and the larger public, as well as investigating the ignorance, limits, counterforces, and outright rejection that scientific concepts may encounter in everyday life.
In zweifelhaften Fällen mag der Geist der Milde den Ausschlag geben" -Korrektur und Benotung des deutschen Abituraufsatzes in historischen Debatten und Praktiken .
This article explores the history of British Mensa to examine the contested status of high intelligence in Great Britain between the late 1940s and the late 1980s. Based on journals and leaflets from the association and newspaper articles about it, the article shows how protagonists from the high IQ society campaigned for intelligence and its testing among the British public. Yet scathing reactions to the group in newspapers suggest that journalists considered it socially provocative to stress one’s own brainpower as extraordinarily high. To better understand such disagreements, the article analyses communicative patterns that were used to make judgements about intelligence. This case study sheds light on how aspects of difference and the ascription of social positions are negotiated in public understandings of intelligence.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.