As the largest publicly funded, nonformal education system in the United States, Cooperative Extension (a.k.a. “Extension”) has played a critical role in how technologies and innovations generated through state agricultural experiment stations (AES) and land-grant universities (LGUs) in the United States have been translated and shared directly to its constituents for over a century. Extension has served as a unique and robust system to collaborate, generate, and disseminate research, as well as to engage in mission-oriented work to support communities in optimizing their current and future circumstances and through collaborative partnerships shaping the ways in which we cultivate and preserve food, how we educate and care for our children, manage our finances, work with communities, and support populations disproportionality affected by structural inequities. The current volume brings together leading scholars to discuss Extension’s contributions to the well-being of children, youth, families, and communities; and to critically reflect on Extension’s future directions in light of significant shifts in the context in which it now operates.

In this chapter, Michael McKinnie explores how methods drawn from the social sciences can help theatre scholars formulate different, and more systematic, ways to think about theatre and its place in the world. Social scientists make ‘moves’ with their material that theatre scholars are unlikely to make with theirs. When transposed to analysis of theatre, these moves suggest different, sometimes counter-intuitive, approaches. ‘Tricks’, an idea taken from sociologist Howard S. Becker, are formal procedures that help draw out theatre’s relationality at subsequent stages of the research process. Thinking about theatre’s place in the world poses a wide variety of problems that TaPS is not always equipped to tackle. Theatre scholars need to make different moves, and formulate new tricks, to begin to address them.

Chapter four analyses the period between the French Revolution and the First World War. For the first time, Europeans believed that it was possible to reorder societies to create new futures. Politics was turned towards a future that was open to human action. These ideas generated paradoxical results. The revolutionary urge to reshape societies according a rational plan sparked twenty-five years of wars and uncertainty. The turbulence of these years generated two consequences. First, at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the experience of unpredictability gave rise to an idea that international politics requires active and multilateral management. This pragmatic approach, born out of uncertainty, increased predictability in the international system. Second, it created a yearning for certainty. A number of ideologies and sciences emerged claiming that societies are governed by underlying laws that can be discovered and manipulated. In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, determinist world views dominated modern thinking and would play a key role in the outbreak and conduct of the First World War.

The Arctic is a region that has been understood very much through its environment. Issues of nature and environment have been central themes investigated by both anthropologists and geographers. Much canonical work by geographers and anthropologists has focused on investigating environmental and cultural interactions, using concepts such as landscape, site, or place. The academic disciplines of geography and anthropology have therefore contributed to the process of making Arctics. This chapter examines these contentions.

This chapter discusses cognitive social simulation, which lies at the intersection of cognitive modeling and social simulation – two forms of computational modeling. Cognitive modeling focuses on producing precise computational models of individual mental processes, while social simulation centers on models of social processes (such as interaction of individuals or collective decision making). By combining cognitive and social models, cognitive social simulation is poised to address issues concerning both individuals and society. Detailed simulation enables precise analysis of possible scenarios and outcomes (social or individual). A number of examples of cognitive social simulation are sketched in this chapter. Issues involved are discussed. Some promising directions are outlined.

This chapter has two purposes. First, to offer a vision of environmental humanities as an interdisciplinary endeavour that involves the core disciplines of the humanities, as well as their connections with other disciplines and ways of working within the academy and beyond. Second, to draw some conclusions from that vision for the kinds of issues of politics, dialogue and ethics that arise from the real-world problems on which environmental humanities bear. In other words, the chapter attempts to operationalise some of the key messages that the environmental humanities might have to propose in the real-world situation of today. This is a matter first of characterising that situation. Environmental humanities can help us make sense of the challenges that arise, albeit not in isolation. The point of the exercise is to seek appropriate forms of integration between a realm of humanities or humanistic thinking about environmental challenges with a scientific mode of thinking. Second, the chapter considers how humanities thinking can bear on action issues that arise from the situation as thus characterised. What kind of action? How can it be justified? Through which practical mechanisms can it be pursued?

Chapter 1 traces the ideological and practical origins of the inter-Allied denazification campaign and the unorthodox questionnaire program that it proposed. It surveys the wartime planning landscape in 1943 and 1944 and introduces the individuals and institutions that created the Fragebogen. Hundreds of civilian experts, including college professors, police officers, lawyers, and Jewish refugees, were employed to build denazification policy and to overhaul military civil affairs programs. This army of academics brought with them innovative social scientific approaches and instruments, as well as new perspectives and concepts regarding ideological, sociological, and political transformation. This was the rich civilian-engaged environment that permitted the adoption of an experimental political questionnaire. However, the civilian planners were continuously challenged by an inherent contradiction in all strands of occupation policy: the pursuit of both punitive and restorative goals. The result was that a practical strategy for the occupation was never produced by the Allied powers, nor was there a shared consensus on political screening.

This book explores the relationship between history and a range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Specifically, it examines the role of historical study in eight distinct subject areas: economics, political science, political theory, international relations, sociology, philosophy, law, literature and anthropology. The relevance of historical approaches withing these disciplines has shifted over the centuries. Many of them, like law and economics, originally depended on self-consciously historical procedures. These included the marshalling of evidence from past experience, philological techniques and source criticism. Between the late nineteenth and the middle of the twentieth century, this dependence was reduced under the influence of new methods of research, many indebted to models favoured by the natural sciences. Statistical, analytical and scientistic approaches secured an expanding intellectual authority while the hegemony of historical methods declined in relative terms. Functionalism, structuralism, logical positivism, formalist criticism, behaviourism and economic formalism challenged context-specific forms of inquiry. In the aftermath of this change, the essays collected in History in the Humanities and Social Sciences reflect from a variety of angles on the relevance of historical concerns to representative disciplines as they are configured today.

Part III comprises views on undergraduate research in a broad disciplinary variety of disciplines. The section is structured within five subject clusters and a list of disciplines that do not match with the clustering. In general, we find examples of undergraduate research in any discipline. In some cases, as in psychology, undergraduate research had always been a (potential) component of the undergraduate curriculum. Therefore, undergraduate research doesn’t look new. In contrast, some university teachers, for instance in mathematics or law, are convinced that their discipline is too complicated to allow for undergraduate research. In the context of our handbook, by far the most common approach to undergraduate research is: just do research. When it comes to the implementation of undergraduate research, best practice arises with pioneering initiatives of engaged teachers or students and often results in organizational solutions, as in changed curricula, new research facilities, or a rethinking of research-based student–staff relationships.

The classical definition of theology reflects fides quaerens intellectum (faith seeking understanding). This definition underscores the premier role of faith, reason, and critical thinking in the exercise of theological studies. Religious studies for its part is a social science study of religion, which also applies critical thinking and reason in its research, but does not necessarily require faith. Therefore, both theology and religious studies have thrived by the application of the tools for critical thinking and reason. For undergraduate research in theology or religious studies, the methodological approach of students depends on the focus of the course. The different sub-disciplines of theology or religious studies adopt different approaches to research. Therefore, a course on the history of the Bible would require different research method and approach than a course about social justice or comparative religion. However, regardless of the course, it is important to always bear in mind that a typical piece of research on religious studies or theology will likely adopt diverse research approaches and methods.

Chapter 4 critiques contemporary Islamic economics as a disciplinary synthesis of Western economics and basic Islamic tenets. The first part of the chapter discusses the intricate relation between Sharīʿa and the field of economics in Islam by critiquing the legal premise of contemporary Islamic economics. The second part critically examines the Islamic economic project’s epistemology and methodology, and the amalgamation of the two epistemic systems: Islamic conceptual history and Western economic tradition. This composition provided Islamic economics with a hybrid framework, consisting of Islamic ethics and a neoclassical economic outlook.