Hosted by the Department of Social Policy
This event is to launch the latest book by Professor Ann Oakley (Social Research Institute, UCL).
The Science of Housework tells an important but forgotten story behind the health improvement that took place in the UK and other countries in the early 20th century. An international movement led by women scientists and other campaigners informed the public about the science of domestic cleanliness and introduced it as a subject in higher education.
Copies of the book will be available on sale.
Speakers:
Ann Oakley is Professor of Sociology and Social Policy at the Social Research Institute, University College London. She has been researching and writing in the fields of gender, health, methodology and social policy for over 50 years. She set up two research units at the Institute of Education in the early 1990s, both of which continue to flourish today. She has also published novels, short stories and poetry. The Science of Housework is a sequel to one of her early books, The Sociology of Housework.
Helen Roberts is Professor of Child Health Research at UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health, and a long-term friend, fan and critic of Ann Oakley. A lifer in academia, she got over the wall for a decade as Head of R&D at the children’s charity Barnardo’s where, with colleagues, she set up the What Works for Children? series of studies and publications. Alongside her academic and domestic labour, she has a long-term interest in governance. She is currently a trustee of UCL, elected to UCL Council and in the past has sat on NHS and NICE audit committees and boards. She has research interests in inequalities in health (and how to stop them), research-based advocacy for children, and improving the evidence base in child public health and social care.
George Ellison is Professor of Data Science and Director of UCLan’s Policy Forum. He first met Ann quite by chance on a bracing cliff-top walk following her Cochrane Lecture (on “Social Science and the Experimenting Society”) at the 1998 Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Medicine in Cardiff. Ann’s uncompromising and critical irreverence for methodological orthodoxy became an enduring inspiration for exploring alternative perspectives and ways of knowing – including those situated in historical, professional and biographical contexts (such as those revealed in her latest monograph on The Science of Housework). They have led George a merry dance over the years, through his work on the embodiment of disadvantage and the scientific reification of racialised identities; and through a series of studies exposing evidentiary and analytical flaws in: the 'Savanna Principle', the heart failure drug 'BiDiL', and the Wilkinson, Barker and Kinlen hypotheses. They remain a key focus of his current work on ‘uncertainty’ and ‘understanding’ in an era where data-led predictive analytics offer both mesmerising insights and pernicious delusions in equal measure.
Chair:
Anne West is Professor of Education Policy in the Department of Social Policy, LSE. Anne carries out a range of different types of research, focusing in particular on education policy and early childhood education and care, in England (past and present), and in comparative perspective. Anne also has interests in health policy.