A brief history of SHOC
The research group SHOC has evolved out of the former group HOST - Historical Research into Urban Transformation Processes. HOST focused on the dynamics of urban social transformation in the Low Countries since the medieval period, and was led by Hugo Soly, Catharina Lis, Anne Winter and Wouter Ryckbosch.
A shift in scope and ambition
SHOC has inherited the attention for long-run social processes and bottom-up dynamics from its predecessor, and aims to apply it in a wider comparative perspective. Since its first emergence in the late medieval city, capitalism has grown to encompass the entire globe. Questions regarding its social and ecological sustainability increasingly demand insight into its uneven geographical distribution and its unequal consequences in different settings. As its geographical scope has expanded, the focus has also shifted to incorporate a stronger attention for issues of ecological and more-than-human influences.
Since 2024 the research group is led by Bart Lambert. SHOC continues to focus on the complex historical relationship between capitalism and inequality. In doing so, SHOC builds on strong empirical and methodological foundations laid during the past decade, while also embracing the rapidly growing potential of new big data and digital humanities approaches to social history from below.
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