Talk:History of Consciousness

message: There is no single mention of what this graduate program actually does or has done. This is perhaps the single most important piece of information one might want about it. A good second would be the general standpoint they have on several issues. What is the "History of Consciousness"?
Generally the activities include talking nonsense, making up words and generally making themselves feel important via a small clique of mutual citations. Many people on campus consider HistCon to be a joke or worse an embarrassment.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.55.220.84 (talk) 07:26, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: Activities?

message: I'm new to Wikipedia and don't have the chops to fix the page, but this needs work.  
The program was actually started in the '60s by the phenomenologists Maurice Natanson and Albert Hofstadter and was one of the very few graduate programs in the humanities on the UC Santa Cruz campus for several years.  The program fell on hard times after the retirements of Natanson and Hofstadter, with allegations that academic standards had devolved to a level unacceptable even by the tolerant standards of Santa Cruz in the '70s.  
Hayden White was brought in as Chair to remake the program.  It may be true that James Clifford was the first new hire made after White became chair - it would have been either Clifford or Donna Haraway.
I don't have sources at hand that I can officially cite to; I just know all of this from having been a student of Hayden's, but I imagine that the HistCon website might have some of the ancient history.
--Pinverarity 10:20, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: History of the program

message: Anyone know how to do the IPA Pronunciation for "Hiss-Kahn?" --Dylanfly 18:44, 12 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: IPA pronunciation?

message: I have re-added the links deleted by GordonRoss to:
Critical Race Theory, Feminist Theory, Film Theory, Postmodernism, Psychoanalysis, and Visual Studies.
I have re-added them because they basically constitute or constituted much of the core of what was/is studied and taught in the HistCon program.  It is simply impossible to discuss HistCon in the 1980s, for instance, without mentioning postmodernism: Fredric Jameson's seminal article "Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" was written during the period he was in HistCon and HistCon was one of the centers of postmodernist theory in the world.
Similarly, HistCon since the 1990s has been one of the centers of critical race theory, and it is wholly appropriate to link to that subject.  The study of Lacan and Lacanian-inspired theory has been part of HistCon for many years.  Film theory has been a major part of HistCon dating back to the arrival of Teresa DeLauretis in the mid-1980s.  And so on and so on.
The deletion was puzzling and left only philosophy, science studies and social movements as "legitimate" subject linkages.  There is no reason whatsoever for leaving those and deleting the others.  Indeed, one could argue that cultural anthropology and historiography ought to be added, if anything.
--Pinverarity 22:51, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Legitimate links