This issue explores the history and the cultural politics of Mass-Observation, the movement, founded in 1937, which brought ethnographic fieldwork and observation to bear on everyday life in Britain. Contributors explore Mass-Observation as a project and experiment of modernity, and assess the legacies of its extraordinary archive. The issue also examines the work of Charles Madge, one of the founders of Mass-Observation, whose identity as both poet and sociologist was central not only to Mass-Observation but to the culture of the 1930s and beyond.