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 20th century, so including
some of the 19th 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, and 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
are still living.
The assessment of the module will be a
group project. Last year we did it 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. And the second piece
of writing is an essay, a long essay,
dealing with addressing, sort of 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.
