EDITORIAL Dr. Rachael Kiddey ISRF Academic Editor
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elcome to this - the seventeenth – issue of the ISRF Bulletin. Those familiar with the Bulletin will know that it usually consists of a number of short articles produced by ISRF Fellows, often with responses from Academic Advisors. In this issue, we are also pleased to include two articles by Fellows of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, with which we have partnered this year for the annual ISRF Workshop. What happens when social scientists and historians meet and talk? This was the intellectual impetus for the theme of the sixth ISRF Annual Workshop which this year will be held in Berlin, with the title ‘Relating Pasts and Present: History of Science and Social Science’. For historians (and archaeologists), what constitutes knowledge and how (and by whom) it is produced is always specifically historically situated, while social scientists, from anthropologists to psychologists, remind us that there is always also a spatial or environmental element to knowledge. People across time and space cannot be expected to think or know in the same ways and by looking at how things change in historical perspective, we shed fresh light on global transformations more widely. For example, Edna Bonhomme (Fellow of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science) discusses this matter in relation to attitudes to health and healing in the Middle East (see her article, this issue). To the philosopher, of course, observations that ‘things change’ point to the future being different again, which leads to the conclusion that reflexivity must be a vital part of social science’s methodology. From outright racist interpretations of the bodies and cultures of ‘colonial subjects’ to the pernicious denigration of native peoples’ resistance to colonialism, Martin Thomas (this issue) is right to draw our attention to the uncomfortable truth that social science was itself deeply implicated in the Western imperial project. Not least, many
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