Members of the research team have been talking about Mass Observation and interdisciplinary connections between modern British history and political science over the last couple of months.

May 2025

Conference: British History Today, Queen Mary Centre for British Studies, London.

Presentation title: ‘Past Politics, Present Histories – Interdisciplinary Reflections’

Speaker: Jonathan Moss

Abstract: British political history has long been seen as in decline, although political topics flourish under other names. This panel looks outside internal dynamics within our field to consider: what does British history look like from the perspective of political studies? The four panellists are historians, currently working in Politics departments. They will draw on their own experiences to consider what political historians might learn from — and offer to — such an encounter. Modern British historians have recently explored the popular reach of sociology from the mid-twentieth century. The prominence of (flawed) categories like the ‘left-behind’ in contemporary public consciousness suggests that political science similarly shapes vernacular understandings of political events. Such explanations rely on interpretations of historical processes, such as globalisation, decolonisation, and educational expansion. But they do so in broad-brush terms, distinct from historians’ multivocal accounts of contingency and contestation. This leaves historians at a disadvantage in commanding public attention (and funding!). In 2016, Hugh Pemberton suggested that political historians had lost sight of the importance of elite actors and institutions, as well as the ‘big picture’. He argued historians should engage with political science, explore causal explanations, and tell bigger stories. Nearly a decade on, this panel will ask:

• Why have political scientists been so effective at shaping public understandings of the past?

• How might we learn from that in developing and presenting historical accounts of modern Britain?

• Would historians benefit from more explicit theorising and modelling, ‘big picture’ analyses, and focus on causal explanations, of the kind that characterise political science?

• What would be lost in doing so? Where might we want to push back? What important developments in our field have led us to be cautious of these approaches?

• What can a historian’s perspective, rather than just historical data or case studies, offer political scientists?

April 2025

Conference: Annual Conference of the British Sociological Association, Manchester.

Presentation title: Four ways of working with Mass Observation

Speaker: Nick Clarke

Abstract: I discuss four ways of working with Mass Observation. The first reads MO writing for how people receive attempts to govern their conduct. The diary form allows writers to record such attempts, the dilemmas they presented, and how they responded. The directive form works to position writers in relation to current affairs, allowing researchers to analyse directive-responses for how people receive such positioning. The second way addresses the problem of representativeness. MO writing is read for the cultural resources used by writers to make sense of their lives and the world around them. If shared by differently situated writers, these cultural resources are inferred to be circulating widely in society at that particular historical moment. The third addresses the problem of representation. Can MO be used to give voice to ordinary people, without speaking for them, in a way that aligns with recent agendas of public, participatory social science? The original MO of the late 1930s published MO writing in edited form. This way of working with MO seeks to revive such a strategy: researchers as editors, publishing the writing of MO correspondents. The fourth is captured by an image from Jennings’ Pandaemonium. He describes a rope. One option is to cut the rope and study the multiple strands where it was cut. This represents the possibility of using particular MO directives for cross-sectional analysis. Another option is to follow one strand along the length of the rope. This represents the possibility of using particular MO panellists for longitudinal analysis.