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The latest IPCC report estimates that approximately 1 billion people will be at risk from coastal hazards in the near term due to coastal population increase, sea-level rise and other coastal changes. This will occur in a world that is changing rapidly due to climate change, ecosystem decline, human development and the projected transformations of the economy to meet the objectives of the Paris Agreement. In this context, social sciences provide a pivotal perspective to coastal adaptation, for example, while assessing barriers and opportunities across scales, from local to global. This scoping review explores how social sciences support coastal adaptation. We show that Political Sciences, Economics, Sociology and Geography are already supporting coastal adaptation. Yet, scientific fields such as legal sciences, psychology, history and archaeology as well as anthropology and ethnography are less developed in the context of coastal adaptation to sea-level rise. New research avenues could also integrate education, media and communication research and aim at truly interdisciplinary studies linking different branches of social sciences with coastal science and climate services. This effort could help moving from a coastal adaptation often focused on coastal engineering protection to a broader vision of coastal resilient development, also addressing the challenges of mitigation, sustainable development and coastal ecosystem decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A sign of anthropology's Greek coming-of-age is the inevitability of omitting significant contributions from this account. In the 1970s, omission would have been perceived as an insult. Today it is the happy effect of a proliferation that makes it impossible to represent the entire spectrum in one short overview. Anthropology's most substantive contributions to Greek studies, then as now, were detailed ethnographies, providing a counterweight to the generalizations of more top-down, model-building social sciences while constituting an important bridge between social-science and humanities disciplines. There has been less interest in meeting the challenge of the discipline's own commitment to cross-cultural comparison, although Danforth's comparison of firewalking rituals in Greece and the United States1 was an early exception – subverted, as Bakalaki points out, by his Greek publisher's omission of the American material.2 Internal comparison was present as soon as anthropologists themselves began to proliferate,3 but few initially questioned the presupposition of a reified common national culture. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper is written by a geographer and discusses the importance of 'thinking space relationally' in, and for, the social sciences. According to its advocates, relational thinking insists on an open-ended, mobile, networked and actor-centred geographic becoming. I position relational space within the lineage of philosophical approaches to space, drawing on examples taken mainly from human geography. Following this, the paper highlights some silences and limits, namely factors that constrain, structure and connect space. I acknowledge relationality but insist on the connected, sometimes inertial, and always context-specific nature of spatiality. The paper then considers the normative implications of this for politics, thinking first about regions, and then about policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The impending fiftieth anniversary of the African Studies Association offers the occasion for a historian to reflect on the maturation of the field as a historical process. The essay employs metaphors from human development to highlight the inevitably incremental, always partial, steps by which people—including professional Africanists—accomplish significant change. For African studies these steps have moved from an initial social-science orientation and reliance on the abstractions of the high modernity of the mid-twentieth century to more experiential ways of understanding that have opened the door to new epistemologically African sensibilities. Africanists based in the United States are already moving beyond the limits of the external and objectifying tendencies inherent in ‘studying’ anything and instead are listening to and learning from their full partners and collaborators in and from Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mathematical models are potentially as useful for culture as for evolution, but cultural models must have different designs from genetic models. Social sciences must borrow from biology the idea of modeling, rather than the structure of models, because copying the product is fundamentally different from copying the design. Transfer of most cultural information from brains to artificial media increases the differences between cultural and biological information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An effective restructuring of the social sciences around the evolutionary model requires that evolutionary theory has explanatory power with respect to the spread of cultural traits: The causal mechanisms involved should be structurally analogous to those of biological evolution. I argue that this is implausible because phenotypical consequences of cultural traits are not causally relevant to their chances of ‘survival.‘ [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]