HSPS Personal Statementfor Cambridge

The dispute over Edward Colston's statue in Bristol made me want to study HSPS because it showed me that one public object can carry several incompatible meanings at once. Watching the statue be pulled down and pushed into the harbour on 7 June 2020, then following the acquittal of the Colston Four in January 2022, I became interested in why the same event could be framed as criminal damage, historical reckoning, disorder or justice. What interested me was not only the event itself, but the struggle over who had the authority to define it. That question could not be answered by politics alone. It made me want to study how institutions claim legitimacy, how social norms shape judgement, and how communities inherit, contest or refuse public narratives. HSPS appeals to me because it would let me examine that problem through politics, sociology and anthropology together. What attracts me most is that the course does not force a false choice between institutions and everyday social meaning.

My A level subjects have given me the first tools for thinking about those questions seriously. In Sociology, Becker's labelling theory helped me see deviance not as a fixed quality but as a status produced through social reaction. That made me think more carefully about why the same protest could be described as principled, criminal or inevitable depending on who was speaking. In Politics, studying liberalism and the state sharpened a related issue: authority does not rest only on rules and sanctions, but on whether people accept institutions as legitimate. I wanted to test those ideas through sustained work, so I used my EPQ to ask, "Who gets represented in public space, and who gets to decide?" I drew on Bristol City Council material on the proposed plaque wording, reporting on the Colston Four trial and Bristol Museums material on the statue's display at M Shed. My first draft was too moralistic. I kept trying to decide what should have happened, when the more interesting question was why different groups were applying such different standards of judgement. Revising it forced me to separate explanation from endorsement. I built a spreadsheet to sort headlines by the language they used, including "disorder", "heritage" and "community", and this made me notice how often the dispute turned on who was allowed to define the public interest. The project taught me that disagreement over the statue was also disagreement over categories themselves: what counted as history, damage and the public interest.

Outside formal education, independent reading has been the main way I have pushed this interest further. Howard S. Becker's Outsiders made me think more carefully about who gets to attach labels in the first place. Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities helped me see monuments as part of the stories through which nations present themselves as coherent, while David Olusoga's Black and British shifted my attention from whether a statue should stand to how one version of history becomes ordinary enough to pass without comment. James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State then led me towards anthropology by showing how institutions rely on simplified categories that make populations more legible, even when those categories flatten lived experience. When I turned some of these ideas into a presentation at school, the discussion exposed a weakness in my thinking: I had focused heavily on institutions, but not enough on how people use, ignore or resist official categories in everyday life. Having to defend the argument aloud made me see where I had made the conflict look too neat. That made me more interested in how power works not only through laws and institutions, but through ordinary social life and the meanings people give to shared spaces.