Sparked by great intellectual shifts of the late 1960s and 1970s, the CSST formed to better foster cross-discipline exchange across the fields of history, anthropology, and sociology. Each discipline had begun to borrow theories and practices from the others, but the borrowing did not constitute a complete exchange. In 1987 CSST was created as a grant proposal to the Presidential Initiatives Fund. The proposal, published as Working Paper #1 states, "We believe that the fields have in fact been converging on a common problematic, which might be stated as follows: How do groups of actors constituted and constrained by social and cultural structures act so as to transform the very structures that constituted them?" (p. 7). To most effectively tackle this question, the CSST proposed a series of graduate and faculty seminars as well as a series of public lectures from visiting scholars to focus on core themes through the year. The first year update, published as working paper 21, February 1989, indicated cross-discipline exchange provoked productive discussions and the proposed agenda gradually morphed to accommodate faculty and student interests. CSST was initially housed within the Center for Research on Social Organizations.
Initially proposed as an exchange between three disciplines, the CSST by the mid-1990s, had grown to include over 150 faculty affiliates and scholars from a large cross section of disciplines. Disciplines represented included African-American and African Studies, American Culture, Anthropology, Architecture and Urban Planning, Art History, Asian Languages and Cultures, Business Administration, Chinese Studies, Communication Studies, Comparative Literature, Education, European Studies, English Studies, Film and Video, German Studies, History, Japanese Studies, Korean Studies, Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Law, Middle Eastern and North African Studies, Near Eastern Studies, Political Science, Philosophy, Psychology, Public Health, Romance Languages, Russian and Eastern European Studies, Sociology, and Women's Studies.
Throughout is history, the CSST fostered a national and international body of scholars focused on the need to develop new theoretical categories and questions around social change. A core theme was an examination of how existing forms of knowledge are socially and culturally founded and how these understandings are related to change and stability within past and present societies. Additionally, the CSST encouraged a deep consideration of the ways language shapes human interactions, particularly how sets of categories are socially produced and policed.
The CSST was dissolved in the mid-2000s and much of the program's operations were absorbed by the Department of History.
From the guide to the Program in Comparative Study of Social Transformations (University of Michigan), 1987-2001, 1987-1997, (Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan)
