- Department: History
- Credit value: 20 credits
- Credit level: H
- Academic year of delivery: 2023-24
For 20 years after the Second World War – when, according to the Conservative Prime Minister, Harold MacMillan, many people in Britain had “never had it so good” – it was commonly believed that the welfare state had eradicated poverty. In the mid-1960s, however, politicians and the public were shocked by a very different picture: more than 10 million people living in either abject poverty or struggling to get by. These revelations, known as the “rediscovery of poverty”, initiated a far-reaching debate, changing the way poverty was understood and represented, as well as the ways Conservative and Labour governments alike tried to tackle it.
Utilising a wide range of primary source material, including political pamphlets, social policy documents, think tank papers, social scientists’ field notes, and television and film, this special subject explores these events and their impact on politics, society, and culture in Britain from the 1950s to the 1970s. In so doing, the module enables students to investigate questions about how poverty was studied and debated during the early years of the post-war welfare state, including controversies over how to define and measure poverty, the difficulties that different ideas about how to tackle it faced, and how new forms of campaigning transformed the way politics is done.
Students taking this module must also take the second part in Semester 2.
Occurrence | Teaching period |
---|---|
A | Semester 1 2023-24 |
The aims of this module are:
Students who complete this module successfully will:
Students will attend a 1-hour briefing in week 1 and a 3-hour seminar in weeks 2-4, 6-8 and 10-11 of semester 1. Weeks 5 & 9 are Reading and Writing Weeks (RAW). Students prepare for and participate in eight three-hour seminars in all.
Seminar topics are subject to variation, but are likely to include the following:
Task | % of module mark |
---|---|
Essay/coursework | 100 |
None
For formative assessment, students will be given the opportunity to produce text commentaries in seminar, including a written commentary.
For the summative assessment students build a portfolio of two parts, to be submitted together:
a) Two text commentaries of 500-750 words; and
b) One 1,500-word essay which reflects on the significance of the chosen texts in light of scholarship and sources from across the module.
The commentaries comprise 50% and the essay 50% of the overall mark for this module. Summative assessments will be due in the assessment period.
Task | % of module mark |
---|---|
Essay/coursework | 100 |
Formative work will be live marked in seminar and supplemented by the tutor giving oral feedback to the whole group. All students are encouraged, if they wish, to discuss the feedback on their formative work during their tutor’s student hours. For more information, see the Statement on Feedback.
For summative assessment tasks, students will receive their provisional mark and written feedback within 25 working days of the submission deadline. The tutor will then be available during student hours for follow-up guidance if required. For more information, see the Statement of Assessment.
For semester time reading, please refer to the module VLE site. Before the course starts, we encourage you to look at the following items of preliminary reading: