You are being watched and measured. And you are not alone. For over a century, a global web of state, commercial, and individual surveillance has observed and measured an ever-widening variety of bodies, situations, and spaces. As our bodies have become legible to authorities and to ourselves, they have come to serve as identity documents, markers of kinship, and signs of entitlement or otherness. This module will explore the ways in which new ideas, knowledge and technologies have enabled states, societies and individuals to identify and assess their citizens, police their borders, and generate self-knowledge. From the invention of the ‘average man’ in the 19th century to the rise of home DNA testing kits and biometric passports, we will look at what it means to ‘measure up’ in modern society, and ask: how, when and where should our bodies be subjected to measurement, by whom, and for what purposes? Case studies will include fingerprinting, DNA profiling, and the all-too-familiar bathroom scale; others will be selected by students.
2022/23
Course image HI2H7:Measuring Society: social sciences and social problems in twentieth-century Britain
2022/23
Course image HI2H9:Surveillance States: Biometrics from the Border to the Bathroom
2022/23
Course image HI2J1:Sovereignty and Statehood in Modern History
2022/23
Course image HI2J5:United in diversity? A history of Europe since 1945 - Brussels Residential Module
2022/23
Course image HI3G5: Conquest, Conflict and Co-existence: Crusading and the Crusader Kingdoms
2022/23
Course image HI3G7:Amity, Antagonism and Appeasement: Anglo-German Encounters, 1871-1945
2022/23
Course image HI3H6:Postwar: Aftermaths of World War II
2022/23
Course image HI3H7: Foreign Bodies, Contagious Communities: Migration in the Modern World
2022/23
Course image HI3J3: Arts and Society in Early Modern Europe
2022/23
Course image HI3K2: A Global History of Travel: Odyssey to Aeroplane
2022/23
Course image HI3K4: Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Europe
2022/23
Course image HI3K6: India And The Problem of Postcolonial Democracy: A History Of Events
2022/23
Course image HI3S3: China travel: Seeing the Chinese empire through travellers¿ eyes
2022/23
Course image HI3S6: Science, Technology, and Global Politics, 1900 to Present
2022/23
Course image HI3S8: Statues must fall? Remembering and forgetting slavery in the Atlantic world
2022/23
Course image HI3S9:Space, Place and Movement in Atlantic Slave Societies: Brazil, Cuba, and the US, 1791-1888
2022/23
Course image HI3T2:Empire, environment and representations: The British and the Making of the Modern Middle East
2022/23