Al Urdun Al Jadid Research Center
The Social History Program
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Al Urdun Al Jadid Research Center The Social History Program |
With the support of the Rockefeller Foundation, the Al-Urdun Al-Jadid Research Center (UJRC) began in early 1997 to implement a program on the social history of Jordan. The two-year program has been carried out in 1997 and 1998, and included the holding of a workshop and a scientific conference on the social history of Jordan. It has also included the publication of an annual book and three booklets (monographs) each year containing verbal narrative stories on the history of institutions or public figures who have played important roles in the development of the Jordanian society. Before the program materialized into its final form, it was preceded by group and individual sessions of dialogue throughout 1996 with historians, academics and researchers in social and political sciences. These meetings proved that the UJRC was right in sponsoring such a vital and significant program on the social history of Jordan. The UJRC was trying to fill a vacuum resulting from the few studies ever made on the social history of Jordan when compared with the relatively abundant publications on Jordan’s political history. In its efforts to do so, the UJRC sought to benefit from the democratic climate which prevailed in Jordan since 1989.
We have taken into account that this program should be supplementary to the other programs sponsored by the UJRC, particularly the program on the civil society studies. In fact, the social history program will certainly reveal, perhaps for the first time, the origins and history of the social movements in Jordan, such as the societies, trade unions, political parties and civil and educational institutions and will also encourage researchers to study the social life of cities and ethnic and cultural group in the country.
During the first year of the implementation of the program, the importance of the program became all the more evident from the good demand and willingness to participate in its activities, especially by historians, sociologists, anthropologists, academics, social activists, politicians and young researchers from Jordan and abroad.