I'm Tiago Mata, and the module code is
HPSC0063, and it's the History of the Social Sciences.
The module is, as it says, a history of the social sciences. It's a focused survey, a thematic survey,
of the history of the social sciences in and
along the twentieth century, so including
some of the nineteenth century, and the
central theme is conceptions and the
study of inequality in its various facets.
So we look at eugenics, we'll look at the birth of statistics and its relationship to eugenics. We'll look at
the origins of social psychology, the origins
of a particular kind of discourse on the
economy, which is kind of an
institutional analysis of the economy,
and we'll look at also the kind of
interventions that social scientists
have advocated in the charity sector,
in government, to ameliorate issues of
poverty and inequality, all the way up
till the 1980s and what we might call
the sort of neoliberal moment in which
we're still living.
The assessment of the module will be a
group project. Last year we did one on
eugenics, the topic will be similarly
something that deals with the history of
UCL in relation to the study of
inequality. It might be eugenics, I think
I might broaden it to include other
initiatives within the social sciences
at UCL that deal with inequality and
social difference. The second piece of
writing is an essay, a long essay picking
one of the topics of the module and
exploring it further.
There are no prerequisites, but the kind of students
I've tended to get in the last sessions
have been a fair amount of medical
students - who are interested in the
social sciences and have otherwise no
opportunity to learn about the social
sciences - and students from our program
that are kind of more sociologically
oriented, and want to understand kind of
the development of sociology, and its
relation to other social
science disciplines, which is also part
of what the module does in the background.
