Transcript

Jonathan Hughes - Author

Welcome to Week 4. For the previous two weeks you’ve been looking at poetry and at modern art, but this week, the focus moves to social science. I'd like to make three main points.

First, what subjects are included under the broad heading of social science? Well, my personal list would include sociology, psychology, politics, economics and education. I'd include sociology because I think that’s pretty fundamental. It looks at the main divisions that underpin society, things like race and gender. Politics is also important. That focuses on how we’re governed. Economics is also really fairly significant. It affects who has a job and who doesn’t, and whether we can afford to buy the things we want to buy. The other two are much more personal for me, psychology and education; they're both subjects I've studied.

However, if you look at other lists, they're much larger than that, I found a list that included 23 different subjects, including things like history, which I think of as a humanities subject rather than a social science. That might just seem like a big muddle, but I think what it does show is that it’s quite difficult to assign individual subjects to the broad categories we’re using. But we’re going to go on using them, because it’s just a way to try and make sense for you.

The second aspect I want to talk about is that social science is always in the news. For example, recently there was a story about a new treatment for advanced skin cancer. Now that sounds like quite a scientific story, but if you start thinking about it from a social science perspective all sorts of issues start arising. For example, how’s this new treatment going to be paid for? Another example might be who’s going to get priority for this new treatment? Once you start thinking about issues like this from a social science perspective, there are very few where understanding can't be deepened and improved.

Thirdly is the issue of actually we’re all social scientists. That stems from the fact that we, none of us lives individual isolated lives, we all live in dynamic and complex societies, and we all rely on other people to be able to live our lives. Every single interaction, everything we do involves social science knowledge. So for example if I want to buy a loaf of bread, I need to know what sort of places sell bread, I need to know how money works, I need to be able to talk to the people that run the shop. It’s all using social science knowledge.

So I think social science is a fascinating area of study, but I'm going to leave you to get on with it.