The Ford Lectures - The Language of Social Science in Everyday Life
29 January 17:00
South School, Examination Schools
Peter Mandler (Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge)
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.
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.