I’ve just returned from the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) Convention Convention in Boston, which represented the seventh iteration of conference sessions bringing together economists, political scientists, historians, and literary scholars, among others, to discuss the economic and political history of Russia, Eastern Europe, and Eurasia. I organized the first set of such sessions in 2017, and we have organized at least two sessions each year since (skipping the 2020 Covid year).
Our efforts really got energized after some serendipitous party-crashing at the 2017 ASEEES Convention in Chicago. That year, a small group of us organized a session titled “Interdisciplinary Approaches to Imperial Russian History: Insights from Business History, Economics, and Political Science,” which took place on Saturday morning at 8:00 am. Evgeny Finkel, Paul Dower, and I spoke, Scott Gehlbach served as chair, and Martin Kragh and Steve Nafziger served as discussants. After our session, we moved en masse to a roundtable intriguingly titled “Number Trouble: Numbers and Meaning in Russian History,” which featured contributions from David Darrow, Tracy Dennison, Steven Hoch, and Yanni Kotsonis. The rigorous discussion that ensued between the “real” historians and the historical social scientists yielded some fascinating insights, for example on the way social scientists vs. historians think about measurement error, margins of error, and causality.
After this conversation, we went to lunch, and Martin Kragh suggested that we find a way to force the disciplines to reckon with each other. His idea: create two sessions, one with historian presenters and social science discussants, and another with the reverse arrangement. The sessions we organized in 2018 hewed pretty closely to this model: In the “social science” session, Steve Nafziger, Martin Kragh, and Dmitry Kofanov spoke, and Steven Hoch and Stacy Dennison provided comments on their work. Since then, we haven’t always stuck exactly to this ideal, depending on who is available, but we have always had a good mix of folks all fundamentally interested in social and political history but who use often very different methodological approaches.
Having now done this for several years, and contemplating passing the organizing torch to other members of the revolutionary vanguard, I wanted to reflect on our successes and continued challenges in having these kinds of interdisciplinary conversations. I’ll highlight a few major lessons I think we’ve learned from these efforts for those who want to see more interdisciplinary conversation and collaboration. Many of the successes are intangible: heavy doses of goodwill, deeper engagement with each other’s work, and (I think) a lot of learning from each other. The most significant barrier to tangible products remains the article vs. book divide.
- Getting in a room together helps
I really believe that academia is much more a people business than we sometimes pretend (and tell our students). It really helps to have productive dialogue if the authors involved fundamentally respect and even like each other as human beings. Our disciplines often talk past each other for reasons ranging from the superficial (e.g., small differences in vocabulary) to the profound (e.g., fundamental disagreements about the basis for establishing truth). The most revealing interactions require a large measure of interpersonal patience. Breaking bread together really helps.
- There are important structural barriers to deeper forms of interdisciplinary collaboration
I think our group has made a lot of progress in learning from each other and challenging each other, but true interdisciplinary collaboration of the kind that results in co-authored writing has not taken root. The reasons for this seem to be structural: it is particularly hard for social scientists and historians to write together in a way where both parties can get ample credit from their home departments. As a rule, historians need to produce books, and social scientists need to produce articles. I’m lucky to work in an exceptionally open-minded department, but even my colleagues would prefer that I publish articles in economics journals.
I haven’t given up hope on this, though, and still dream of writing with more historians. Recently, my article on the slave trade with Anne Ruderman from LSE has been accepted at the Journal of Economic History. I loved working on this project.
- It’s good for us economists to know a lot about the contexts we study
Many colleagues in the profession have repeated given me the perfectly reasonable advice to be careful about investing too much energy in area studies. After all, as economists, we study mechanisms and methods, not contexts. Career-wise, investing in a context is risky. Sometimes it results in prestigious publications, but sometimes your writing must be limited to description. For this and other reasons, I would not suggest my path as a good guide for a junior scholar.
But there is something lost here. We are more likely to get things right if we make investments in context-specific knowledge. And we are more likely to engender good will if we make an effort to communicate with scholars from other disciplines with similar interests. Context can provide a convenient foundation.
Amanda Gregg 