Module Structure
Week 1: Who was observing whom in twentieth-century Britain?
Week 2: Social Investigation, Class and Race
Week 3: The 'Problem' Family (seminar in MRC Seminar Room, not usual location!)
Week 4: Mass-Observation (and its Afterlives)
Week 5: Policing the Crisis: Race and Radical British Sociology
Week 6: reading week [no seminar]
Week 7: Youth Cultures
Week 8: Sex and Permissiveness
Week 9: Film, TV and the 'Social Eye'
Week 10: The Sociologists Talk Back! (and concluding discussions)
This module includes three weeks in which you get to select focused topics that interest you. You will work with other students on the module to negotiate these during the introductory session in week 1. A list of potential themes in the history of the social sciences in Britain can be found below.
Some of these ran last year, and a couple had aspects of other topics included within them at the request of students. This means readings and sources overlap greatly between all of them, and that some topics are more 'developed' than others. Therefore please treat this list less as a prescriptive menu and more as basic recipes, to which other topics can be mixed or added to taste!
Policing the Crisis: race and radical British sociology (as this topic ran in 2022-2023)
Health and longitudinal research
Social planning and market research (as this topic ran in 2022-2023)
Working-class autobiography and life stories (as this topic ran in 2022-2023)
Seminars will take place on a weekly basis (with the exception of reading week) on Mondays, 14:00-16:00 in FAB1.06.
Since the course will involve the exploration of digitised primary sources, the use of laptops and other electronic devices in the seminars is warmly encouraged.