The Historical Contexts and Contemporary Uses of Mass Observation - (Mass-Observation Critical) by Lucy D Curzon & Benjamin Jones (Hardcover)

About the Book

A multifaceted exploration of Mass-Observation as an innovative research organization, a social-movement, and an archival project.

Book Synopsis

The Historical Contexts and Contemporary Uses of Mass Observation embraces new approaches and themes that highlight Mass Observation's long history as an innovative research organization, a social movement, and an archival project. Spanning the period from Mass Observation's inception to the present day, essay authors discuss a wide range of topics including anthropology, history, popular politics, cultural studies, literature, selfhood, emotion, art and visual studies. Indeed, what emerges across this volume is confirmation that engagement with Mass Observation-whether its historical materials or those produced in the last decade-is crucial to understanding the vast array of experiences that make up British life.

Review Quotes

Curzon and Jones are to be warmly congratulated for assembling such a delicious and distinctive set of contributions. Each chapter reveals scintillating new riches from the inexhaustible fount of felt thoughts and thoughtful feelings that is Mass-Observation. This is essential, engaging and delightful reading.
Ben Highmore, Professor of Cultural Histories, University of Sussex, UK, author of Lifestyle Revolution: How Taste Changed Class in Late 20th-Century Britain

For so many years, I have observed the scholars who use the MO Archive struggling with both methodological and theoretical questions to justify their choice of source. What kind of evidence does the Archive provide? This book is their answer: a wonderful compendium of strategies, perspectives, insights and interpretations.
Dorothy Sheridan, Archivist & Director, Mass Observation Archive, 1974-2010

Mass Observation has been one of the most important social experiments in British life since the 1930s, an 'anthropology of our ourselves' in the everyday and through extraordinary times. This superb and wide-ranging collection maps the importance of M-O to understanding modern Britain and offers critical new interdisciplinary perspectives.
Stephen Brooke, Professor of History, York University, Canada

About the Author

Lucy D. Curzon is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Alabama, USA. She is the author of Visual Culture and Mass Observation: Depicting Everyday Lives (2017), which was awarded the Historians of British Art Book Prize for a single-authored book with a subject after 1800. With Ben Jones, she co-edited The Historical Contexts and Contemporary Uses of Mass Observation: 1930s to the Present (2025). She has previously published work on contemporary queer portrait painting and photography, British women war artists, the Ashington Group and Humphrey Spender.

Benjamin Jones teaches Modern British History at the University of East Anglia, UK. His research focuses on classed experiences and identities from the mid-twentieth century to the present with a particular emphasis on life histories, social research and social memory. He is the author of The Working Class in Mid-Twentieth Century England: Community, Identity and Social Memory (2012) and his latest research on football casuals, fanzines and the emotional politics of rave and acid house was published in Modern British History and Contemporary British History in 2023 and 2024. He is currently drawing on Mass Observation material for a book manuscript entitled "Middle England" and its "Enemies Within" Class, Race and Feeling in Thatcher's Britain.