The new InterDisciplines, Issue 2 of Volume 7, „Structure and Events“, has been published. Guest editors of the issue are André Meyer (Bielefeld University), Ramy Youssef (University of Konstanz) und Lili Zhu (Bielefeld University).

Structure and events, and their relations, are of essential importance in both history and sociology. As fundamental concepts in both disciplines, they have influenced the scientific discourse between structuralist and interactionist theories as well as between structural and event history.

This issue of InterDisciplines asks, where and how structure and events are entangled. The topic is discussed in five different articles:

Ramy Youssef (University of Konstanz) provides with “On the Social Constitution of Structures, Actions and Events” a comprehensive introduction to some common issues in theorizing structure and events from a primarily sociological point of view.

Ferdinand Nyberg (University of Tübingen) discusses in “Nancy Reagan in the ghetto” the role of space as a mediator between structure and events. His example is a drug raid in the USA in the late 1980’s.

Issues of global nature are in the focus of the article “Braudel and Foucault on structure and event” of the sociologist Ceyhun Gürkan (Ankara University). He analyzes the event of the financial crisis of 2008 and looks for the connection between the crisis and the structure of capitalism, and how politics deals with the structures. The theories Gürkan uses come from Fernand Braudel and Michel Foucault.

Mátyás Erdélyi (Central European University) analyzes a specific historical case: His article is called “Crucial and local events in the long-term evolution of secondary schooling in Hungary (1867–1938)”.

The interplay between event and structure is also the topic of Elena Dingersen (Technical University of Darmstadt) in her contribution “the city as an assignment”. Using case studies from recent media discourses, she discusses, how structure and events shaped the self-image of the cities Dresden and St. Petersburg.

The articles in this issue are based mainly on selected lectures from the 7th Annual Seminar of the BGHS, which took place from June 29 to July 1, 2015 at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF) at Bielefeld University. The Annual Seminar has provided a platform since 2009 for junior and senior researchers from different countries and disciplinary backgrounds to discuss their research.

The InterDisciplines, the online journal of the Bielefeld Graduate School in History and Sociology (BGHS), is published twice a year to different, the sociology or history concerning topics. Every issue is managed by different guest editors.

You could find the current issue here:
http://www.inter-disciplines.org/index.php/indi/issue/view/21