Youth: its classification, governance and experience
In the course of the 20th century, youth came to be regarded as a generational cohort of people that share a particular lifestyle, command consumer power and harbour a political potential. Social scientists played a major role in the ‘invention’ of youth particularly after the Second World War. Their knowledge was (and still is) used by both state authorities to educate, support or police adolescents and by the young themselves, who learned to conduct themselves as members of one generation.
A bachelor thesis in this field of research may focus on youth policy since the 1950s in view to the changing perception of young people, or it may concentrate on youth milieus, subcultures or lifestyle tribes with the question how scholarly or public knowledge about youth shaped their experience. In other words, how did the young develop a generational consciousness? A thesis may be based on historiographical research literature or may involve primary sources such as youth media (magazines, broadcasting, movies) and social scientific studies on youth that were published during the research period. Recent historiography on the topic allows to define a feasible case study and to develop fruitful research questions.
For an introduction to the topic see the textbook of Melanie Tebbutt, Making Youth: A History of Youth in Modern Britain, Basingstoke: Palgrave 2016, and Bart van der Steen, Knud Andresen, eds., A European Youth Revolt: European Perspectives on Youth Protests and Social Movements in the 1980s, Basingstoke: Palgrave 2016.
Local projects making use of Norwegian sources are strongly encouraged
Visions of the city: the rise and fall of social housing/the making of the ‘creative city’
Social historians have often focused on cities to study up-close the impact of larger social processes like (de-)industrialisation or the establishment of the welfare state on ‘ordinary’ people’s social relations. Social housing, which after relatively modest beginnings in the early twentieth century was in Western countries expanded considerably after 1945 before the initial enthusiasm and state investment declined in the 1970/80s, is one possible topic to study in detail the making and experience of society, the more recent gospel of the ‘creative city’ (and the accompanying privatisation of housing) another.
Focusing on town planning and housing policy, a bachelor thesis could study the visions of society such planning entailed and assess their consequences for people’s lives. There is a rich historiography on social housing in particular which should make it relatively easy to define a feasible and fruitful project. Students may start from the introduction by Shane Ewen, What is urban history?, Cambridge: Polity Press 2016, and/or the older book by Alison Ravetz, Council housing and culture: the history of a social experiment, London: Routledge 2001. The polemical article by Jamie Peck, “Struggling with the creative class”, in: International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29, 4 (2005), 740-770, opens perspective on the ‘creative city’. Annual bibliographies published in the leading journal ‘Urban History’ offer a readily accessible overview of the field of research.
Local projects making use of Norwegian sources are strongly encouraged.
Lost in translation? Transfers of popular culture (to Norway)
Popular culture crossed national borders and was adapted to local contexts of production and consumption. One example is association football, which by the time of its global export in the late 19th century had become a working-class sport in Britain, its country of origin, while it was often adopted abroad first by middle-class cosmopolitans. Another case in point is movies that were dubbed and edited and subsequently acquired new meanings. A great number of studies on “cultural Americanisation”, among them Victoria de Grazia’s Irresistible Empire (2006), Karl Miller’s Segregating Sound (2010) or the contributions to the special issue of European Review of History, 20:5 (2013) on “Europop” may offer inspiration for a viable project. Local projects making use of Norwegian sources are strongly encouraged
Creative Labour: work in twentieth-century cultural industries
Popular content from pop music to television shows is created by people who, in some form or other, get paid for their efforts. While they may seek creative autonomy, they share with “ordinary” workers a dependency on means of production, the competition on labor markets and risks such as unemployment and poor health. Cultural workers from musicians to Hollywood screen writers have formed professional bodies and trade unions to cope with risks collectively, and they are said to have developed a particular ethos of self-actualisation and entrepreneurialism that is regarded to be heralding the future of post-industrial work more generally.
Work in the cultural industries is widely debated in the social sciences by authors like Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, Richard Florida, David Hesmondhalgh and Matt Stahl. (For an introduction to the topic, I recommend James Kraft’s From Stage to Studio (1996) and Williamson/Cloonan’s Players’ Work Time (2016).) Informed by this Anglo-American research, a closer look at deposita of the Norwegian musicians’ union (Norsk Musikerforbund) held at Arbeiderbevegelsens Arkiv in Oslo may provide insights into, for instance, the local impact of the transition from “silent” to sound film on musicians’ working lives and trade union policy from the 1920s to the 1930s.
Local projects making use of Norwegian sources are strongly encouraged
?Vanlig folk? og hverdagsliv: 1900-tallets sosialhistorie
Mange forestiller seg et samfunn som en kontainer for en gruppe av mennesker med felles trekk. Men kanskje det er bedre forst?tt som koordinasjon mellom akt?rer som har ingen innsikt i hverandres tanker. En haug av faste eller implisitte regler hjelper med den koordinasjonen: organisasjoner definerer medlemsroller; arbeidskontrakter definerer oppgaver og l?nn; kulturelle konvensjoner gir orientering for hvordan skal opptres i felleskap. Sosialhistorie er en vei ? utforske hvordan og hvorfor disse regler forandret seg over tid og hvilke sosiale relasjoner de etablerte, for eksempel mellom kvinner og menn, gamle og unge, fattige og rike eller mennesker og dyr.
I denne omfattende definisjonen faller en utrolig mengde av mulige problemstillinger for en bacheloroppgave i historie. For ? utvikle en problemstilling kan man tar utgangspunkt i ganske hverdagslige ting. Man kan, f.e., sp?rre hvordan relativt strenge h?flighetsregler ble erstatt av et mer avslappet syn p? det, hvordan og med hvilke konsekvenser reglene for fl?rting og dating endret seg, hvordan forholdene i familier har skiftet (?helikopterforeldre?, ?nye? fedre, rebelsk ungdom) eller hvordan folk oppf?rte seg p? utested (p? kino, dansested, gate, torget, pub). Man kan sette s?kelys p? en interaksjonsmodus, f.e., konkurranse (dens aksept i arbeideridrett, mellom land om prestisje ? v?re den lykkeligste/mest demokratiske/tillitsfulle osv. nasjonen), fysisk vold (f.e., sl?sskamp) eller solidaritet. Man kan ta utgangspunkt i organisasjoner (fraR?de Kors til Greenpeace) eller en jobb (musikker, salgsperson, ?tjenestepike?). Man kan ogs? begynne med en sosial kategori (klasse, race, ungdom, etnisitet). Jeg oppmuntrer studenter ? begynne med noe konkret de er selv interessert i og s?ke i det neste skritt historiske forskningslitteratur om dette mulig tema. Da man leser seg opp og ser hva andre historikere har skrevet om det, finner man ut hvilke sp?rsm?l, perspektiver og argumenter disse historikere har om det. Man deltar i en fagsamtale, og en mulig problemstilling for en bacheloroppgave formes.
Valg av et mulig tema er opp til studentene. Jeg tilbyr tipps for litteraturs?k og hjelp til formuleringen av problemstillingen. Hvis mulig, gir jeg gjerne orientering til s?k av prim?rkilder. Avhengig av hvor mange studenter har interesse ? skrive en bacheloroppgave i sosialhistorie, organiserer jeg veiledning gruppevis