Diary

Speaker: Peter Mandler (Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge)
Location: South School, Examination Schools

Lecture One: Foundations

This lecture lays three kinds of foundations:  it defines the project of exploring the ‘language of social science in everyday life’;  it suggests how this project can revise or challenge classic accounts in social theory of the power/knowledge complex from Foucault to Koselleck, Raymond Williams and Giddens;  and it gives an indication of the new vocabulary generated by the…

Speaker: Peter Mandler (Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge)
Location: South School, Examination Schools

Lecture Two: Media

How do people learn the language of social science?  This lecture surveys some key entry points – mass print, mass broadcast media and mass education – and illustrates some simple digital humanities tools that can be used to analyze a huge volume of material and assess its propagation and uses.

Speaker: Kévin Roger (University of Lorraine)
Discussants: Yolanda Plumley and Karl Kügle

Speaker: Peter Mandler (Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge)
Location: South School, Examination Schools

Lecture Three: Self

In the first half of the 20th century, the ‘New Psychology’ – in which Freudian psychoanalysis played only a minor role – offered people a new vocabulary for understanding the self in modern conditions, in what has been called a transition ‘from character to personality’.  Ideas about the unconscious, personality types, the developmental self, sex and intelligence reached unprecedentedly large…

Speaker: Peter Mandler (Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge)
Location: South School, Examination Schools

Lecture Four: State and Economy

Historians are familiar with the idea of the nation as an ‘imagined community’ that bound people across time and space from the late 18th century, predicated on modern communications.  This lecture extends this idea into the 20th century and to a wider range of ‘invisible structures’ that were made more palpable via languages of social science, political and especially economic…

Speaker: Peter Mandler (Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge)
Location: South School, Examination Schools

Lecture Five: Self and Society

The decades between the late 1940s and the late 1970s are widely seen as the heyday of social science (and of social democracy), though usually from the point of view of educated or cultivated elites.  This lecture seeks evidence of the ‘sociological imagination’ in everyday life, in conditions of ‘affluence’, ‘permissiveness’ and a therapeutic society.

Speaker: Andrew Kirkman (University of Birmingham)
Discussants: Thomas Schmidt and Zoe Saunders

Speaker: Peter Mandler (Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge)
Location: South School, Examination Schools

Lecture Six: Self vs. Society

Critics of neoliberalism claim that in the final decades of the 20th century ‘homo politicus’ was replaced by ‘homo economicus’. This lecture challenges the primacy of either of these imaginings of the human condition and draws attention to other burgeoning identities – the very word ‘identity’ being one of them – supported by the language of social science.