Introductory description

If the years 1900-2000 were ones in which ‘ordinary’ Britons were subject to greater scrutiny by researchers interested in 'social' phenomena, what did this mean for everyday life and perceptions of self and nation? How did such research techniques work to measure - but equally to construct, interact with and influence the perception of - key social 'problems' and challenges in this period? And how did sociology influence popular culture, politics and representations of what was ‘normal’ or 'ordinary'? Students taking this module will engage with these questions, and ask how the historical data generated by the social sciences (defined broadly and eclectically) can be of use to historians in trying to make sense of life in the past.

Module aims

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

The module is taught across nine themed weeks and is grouped into three sections. The first block of four weeks: introduces some of the historical scholarship produced by using primary material from earlier social-scientific research (Week 1: Who was observing whom in twentieth-century Britain?); examines from where the social sciences in Britain emerged (Week 2: Social investigation, class and race); and presents two case studies of social scientific projects/endeavours: one academically-driven sociology and social psychology (Week 3: The 'Problem Family') and the other from a more eccentric project that was - at least initially - outside the Academy (Week 4: Mass-Observation and its Afterlives). The second block of three weeks (5, 7 and 8) is an exploration of 'themes' in the social sciences. These will be chosen by students taking the module from a long list prepared by the module tutor (see supplementary details below for information on the envisaged selection process). Potential topics include: '"Policing the Crisis": race and radical British sociology', 'Sex and Permissiveness', 'Youth Cultures', 'Researching Gender', 'Health and Longitudinal Research', 'Social Planning', 'Working-Class Autobiography and Life Stories'. The final two weeks explore legacies of representation in two different ways. Week 9 examines what Stuart Hall termed the 'social eye' of fiction (from TV soap opera to social realist cinema), while Week 10 will allow students to give their own original response to some of the sources and themes discussed throughout the module in the form of an assessed contribution to a plenary 'Symposium'.

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• Demonstrate a detailed knowledge of some of the key social-scientific movements in twentieth-century Britain.
• Analyse and evaluate the contributions made by historical and interdisciplinary scholarship on social problems and social sciences in Britain.
• Analyse primary source material to generate new ideas and interpretations.
• Act with limited supervision to research topics in the social history of twentieth-century Britain.
• Communicate the findings of independent research, adapting it to the needs of diverse audiences.

Indicative reading list

Brooke, S., ‘“Slumming” in swinging London? Class, gender and the post-war city in Nell Dunn’s Up the Junction (1963)’, Cultural and Social History, 9:3 (2012), pp. 429-449 Connell, K., ‘Race, prostitution and the New Left: the postwar inner city through Janet Mendelsohn’s “Social Eye”’, History Workshop, 83 (2017), pp. 301-340 Hall, S. [edited by Morley, D.], Essential Essays, 2 vols (Durham, 2018) Hinton, J., Nine-Wartime Lives: Mass-Observation and the making of the modern self (Oxford, 2010) Hinton, J., Seven Lives from Mass Observation (Oxford, 2016) Hollow, M., ‘Governmentality on the Park Hill estate: the rationality of public housing’, Urban History, 37:1 (2010), pp. 117-135 Koven, S., Slumming: sexual and social politics in Victorian London (Princeton, 2004) Lambert, M., ‘Between “families in trouble” and “children at risk”: historicising “troubled family” policy in England since 1945’, Children and Society, 33 (2019), pp. 82-91 Lawrence, J., Me, Me, Me: the search for community in post-war England (Oxford, 2019) Lemov, R., World as Laboratory: Experiments with mice, mazes and men (New York, 2005) Lemov, R., Database of Dreams: the lost quest to calalog humanity (New Haven, 2015) MacClancy, J., Anthropology in the Public Arena: historical to contemporary contexts in Britain (2013) Madge, C. and Harrisson, T., Mass-Observation (London: Frederick Muller, 1937) Savage, M., Identities and Social Change in Britain since 1940: the politics of method (Oxford, 2010) Shapira, M., The War Inside: psychoanalysis, total war, and the making of the democratic self in postwar Britain (Cambridge, 2013) Stanley, L., Sex Surveyed, 1949-1994: from Mass-Observation's 'Little Kinsey' to the National Survey and the Hite Reports (London, 1995) Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, F., Class, Politics, and the Decline of Deference in England, 1968-2000 (Oxford, 2018) Thomson, M., Psychological Subjects: identity, culture, and health in twentieth-century Britain (Oxford, 2006) Walkowitz, J., City of Dreadful Delight: narratives of sexual danger in late-Victorian London (Chicago, 1992) Welshman, J., From Transmitted Deprivation to Social Exclusion: poverty, policy and parenting (Bristol, 2012) Welshman, J., Underclass: a history of the excluded since 1880, (London, 2013) Yeo, E.J., The Contest for Social Science: relations and representations of class and gender (London: Rivers Oram, 1996)

Subject specific skills

Primary source analysis. Research involving secondary literature. Presentation of work in essay form.

Transferable skills

See learning outcomes.