Cambridge PhD student wins History of the Human Sciences Early Career Prize

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Congratulations to Harry Parker, History PhD student, winner of this year's History of the Human Sciences Early Career Prize for his essay 'The regional survey movement and popular autoethnography in early 20th century Britain'

This article’s subject is the theory and practice of ‘regional survey’, the method of social and environmental study devised by Patrick Geddes (1854—1932), and around which an interwar ‘movement’ formed. It argues that the practice of regional survey was conceived and promoted as a means of democratising social knowledge, and as such formed a vital strand in a broader culture of social science in the early 20th century. Operating well outside the academy, advocates of regional survey claimed that the method offered its practitioners a way of using the tools of the emergent social sciences to make sense of their immediate social world. In this sense the significance of the movement lies beyond its (admittedly limited) contributions to the development of academic social sciences.

More information on the History of the Human Sciences Early Career Prize