Location: Old Library, All Souls

This is an event celebrating the 12th and 13th century Georgian national poet, Shota Rustaveli, as part of a series of events to commemorate the 65th anniversary of the recovery of a fresco of Shota Rustaveli in the Monastery of the Holy Cross in Jerusalem, the only known visual depiction of the poet from the medieval period. This event will feature multilingual readings of excerpts from Rustaveli's poetic epic Vefkhistqaosani 'Dressed in a Tiger's Fur' in order to introduce his work and its significance beyond Georgia, across the many diverse cultures in which translations of the text are now available. 

More details can be found at this link, where you can also register to the event as spaces are limited: https://oxfordinterfaithforum.org/blog/the-65th-anniversary-of-the-recovery-of-the-iconic-interculturalist-poet-shota-rustavelis-medieval-fresco/ 

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.

These lectures chart the spread and use of the language of social science into everyday life in twentieth-century Britain.  As a religious language for orienting the self and its relations to others went into decline, and as modern life became more mobile and complex, new tools were taken up to meet the challenges of everyday life:  to anatomize and characterize the self, to chart its progress across the life-course, to make palpable modernity's many ‘invisible structures’ and ‘imagined communities’, to compare personal experiences to the experiences of others, and to address private problems with new concepts, new devices, new therapies.  Psychology, Sociology, Economics and Politics will feature prominently, alongside consideration of Anthropology, Social Medicine, Literature, History and Philosophy. 

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.

These lectures chart the spread and use of the language of social science into everyday life in twentieth-century Britain.  As a religious language for orienting the self and its relations to others went into decline, and as modern life became more mobile and complex, new tools were taken up to meet the challenges of everyday life:  to anatomize and characterize the self, to chart its progress across the life-course, to make palpable modernity's many ‘invisible structures’ and ‘imagined communities’, to compare personal experiences to the experiences of others, and to address private problems with new concepts, new devices, new therapies.  Psychology, Sociology, Economics and Politics will feature prominently, alongside consideration of Anthropology, Social Medicine, Literature, History and Philosophy. 

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 structures.

These lectures chart the spread and use of the language of social science into everyday life in twentieth-century Britain.  As a religious language for orienting the self and its relations to others went into decline, and as modern life became more mobile and complex, new tools were taken up to meet the challenges of everyday life:  to anatomize and characterize the self, to chart its progress across the life-course, to make palpable modernity's many ‘invisible structures’ and ‘imagined communities’, to compare personal experiences to the experiences of others, and to address private problems with new concepts, new devices, new therapies.  Psychology, Sociology, Economics and Politics will feature prominently, alongside consideration of Anthropology, Social Medicine, Literature, History and Philosophy. 

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 audiences.

These lectures chart the spread and use of the language of social science into everyday life in twentieth-century Britain.  As a religious language for orienting the self and its relations to others went into decline, and as modern life became more mobile and complex, new tools were taken up to meet the challenges of everyday life:  to anatomize and characterize the self, to chart its progress across the life-course, to make palpable modernity's many ‘invisible structures’ and ‘imagined communities’, to compare personal experiences to the experiences of others, and to address private problems with new concepts, new devices, new therapies.  Psychology, Sociology, Economics and Politics will feature prominently, alongside consideration of Anthropology, Social Medicine, Literature, History and Philosophy.