Diary

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.