By examining the 5,413 illustrations provided in 33 introductory sociology textbooks published between 1982 and 1988, we explored the way textbook publishers in sociology pictorially construct images of gender and race. Individuals in a picture are coded for race and gender identity; each picture is coded for location in or outside the United States and for placement in 1 of 26 substantive topics. Although people of color were shown in numerically “fair” proportions, including Blacks seemed to be a (...) way of “staging” equality in the United States, while including other minorities appeared to offer “cross-cultural” comparisons to American society. Women accounted for only 36 percent of the individuals portrayed in these books, regardless of racial and ethnic category. Race and gender seemed to be conceptualized as nonoverlapping categories; White women “have” gender, while women of color apparently “have” only race. White men and boys occupied the center stage in these images of society; not only were more White men and boys presented than any other gender or race category, but they also received more exclusive attention and visually dominated the crucial institutions of politics and the economy. Although authors and publishers may strive to be fair, the way that race and gender representation is constructed in introductory sociology textbooks tends to reflect rather than critique popular American stereotypes. (shrink)

The oral eye is a metaphor for the dominance of global designer capitalism. It refers to the consumerism of a designer aesthetic by the 'I' of the neoliberalist subject, as well as the aural soundscapes that accompany the hegemony of the capturing attention through screen cultures. An attempt is made to articulate the historical emergence of such a synoptic machinic regime drawing on Badiou, Bellmer, Deleuze, Guattari, Lacan, Rancir̈e, Virilio, Ziarek, and Zizek to explore contemporary art (post-Situationism) and visual (...) cultural education. Jagodzinski develops the concept of an 'avant-garde without authority,' 'self-refleXion' and 'in(design)' to further the questions surrounding the posthuman as advanced by theorists such as Hansen, Stiegler and Ziarek's 'force' of art. (shrink)

The article explores the relationship between visual culture and the fight for visibility and attention in contemporary society. It draws on a concept of visual culture which not only sees the rising significance of the visual and the proliferation of images as its defining traits, but also the fact that, today, people are—to a much higher degree—both consumers as well as producers of images. Based on this definition, it is argued that in visually oriented communication and media (...) societies, the anthropologically fundamental need for attention manifests itself as a fight for visibility which takes on the form of ever more extreme forms of public self-display. Furthermore, a portrait of two social figures—the star and the voyeur—will serve as further analysis and description of the social trends which can be tied to the emergence of today's visual culture. The article will close by discussing attention and visibility in terms of inclusion and exclusion and by proposing an analytical model for differentiating four modes of existence in a visual culture. (shrink)

Visual academies were unique social formations in the ancien régime, so distinctive that they are best studied as prototype professions. Alone among academies, they were responsible for offering instruction. Alone among educational institutions, they linked liberal instruction to occupational practice. Alone among ‘learned’ occupations, they accommodated an irreducible manual component. The visual Académie in Paris in particular established literally the first ‘graduate school’ in any field of activity and admitted students on the basis of anonymously scored student competitions. (...) Equivalent activities will not begin to emerge in medicine or law until the mid-19th century. Our historical case, in short, calls into question the received orthodoxy regarding the time and place of the first professionalism projects. Instead of focusing on 19th-century Britain, we are now considering mid-17th-century France and thereby preparing the way for a new start in the sociology of professions. (shrink)

This article argues that the descriptive turn evident in contemporary capitalism challenges orthodox sociological emphases on the central importance of causality and the denigration of descriptive methods. The article reviews the different evocations of descriptive sociology pronounced by three very different contemporary sociologists: Andrew Abbott, John Goldthorpe, and Bruno Latour, and lays out their different approaches to the role of the `sociological descriptive'. It is argued that their apparent differences need to be placed in a broader re-orientation of (...) class='Hi'>sociology away from its historical interface with the humanities and towards the natural sciences. How this reorientation involves a new role for visual methods which have traditionally been decried in orthodox sociology is examined, and the article concludes with suggestions for how sociology might best orient itself to the descriptive turn. (shrink)

The Archive is a central but paradoxical image in the work of the con temporary French artist Christian Boltanski (born 1944). Because Boltanski is obsessively concerned with the death-like rupture and loss by which experience is continuously reduced to fragmentary and inac curate memories of the past, especially regarding the adult's perception of childhood, archives represent for him a potential means of regaining access to what has been lost and is being mourned. However, Boltan ski's installation and performance works that (...) investigate the powers of archives set out ironically the absurdly limited and misleading processes of an archive. Photography in particular is shown to be unreliable, more icon than document, challenging rather than asserting notions of cat egory and coherence. The notion of the icon, moreover, underlines the spiritual dimension that accompanies this absurdist relationship with the past. Our faulty but much-desired awareness of a past gives complex value to our present, often in a touching, pathetic way, however arbitrary the means involved. The trail of the archive leads to an uncertainty that is nonetheless precious. The many subjects that Boltanski treats in this light vary disarmingly and controversially from the trivia and detritus of everyday living to the supreme seriousness of the Holocaust. He also transforms himself and his family into a labyrinthine and playful archive. Here a curious relationship emerges with the reputation and books of his brother, the sociologist Luc Boltanski. Christian borrows with no explicit acknowledgement the archive resources of Luc's sociological research as a sub-text in his visual works. Even more surprisingly, Luc Boltanski published in 1993 HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES Vol. 11 No. 4 © 1998 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi) [0952-6951(199811)11:4;121-140; 006612]Poème, a collection of highly emotive and personal poetry about the past and the Holocaust. The problems raised by Christian Boltanski and by Luc conflate the personal and historical dimensions of the Archive. (shrink)

Interpreting Visual Culture brings together the writings of some of the leading experts in art history, philosophy, sociology and cultural studies to look at the role of perception and the "visual" in our understanding of the contemporary human condition. Ranging from an analysis of the role of vision in current critical discourse to a discussion of specific examples taken from the visual arts, ethics and sociology, this collection presents the latest material on the interpretation of (...) the visual in modern culture. Topics covered include: the hermeneutics of seeing, the visual rhetoric of modernity, the drawings of Bonnard, recent feminist art, practices and perceptions in art and ethics. Divided into three main sections, each beginning with an introductory chapter outlining the main topics under discussion, comprehensive and engaging, Interpreting Visual Culture will be essential reading for students of sociology, cultural studies and art history. (shrink)

Given their salience in many sports and physical cultures, it is surprising that the practices, processes and production of intercorporeality and ‘doing together’ remain under-explored from a sociological perspective. The ongoing achievement of ‘togethering’ can be particularly important for the embodied partnership between a visually impaired (VI) runner and a sighted guide (SG) runner: a specific sporting dyad whose experiences are currently under-researched. To address this lacuna and contribute original insights to sensory sociological studies, here we explore the accomplishment of (...) running-together by VI runners and sighted guides, focusing on the auditory dimension. To illustrate how these runners put the sense of hearing ‘to work’ in achieving finely attuned intercorporeality, often at considerable speed, we draw on qualitative data from a research project on VI running in the UK, involving five VI runners and five SGs. Here, we focus on auditory attunement in two domains identified as highly salient in the running-partners’ intercorporeal experiences: (1) Listening out – auditory attention to non-linguistic sounds; and (2) Tuning in – the importance of attending to team-talk between VI runners and SG runners. (shrink)

Die im Reader versammelten Beiträge verstehen sich als Versuche zu einer Soziologie des Visuellen. Sie untersuchen am Beispiel des Mediums Stadtfilm, welche Rolle die dorterzeugten Bilder großer Städte bei der Produktion urbanistischer Repräsentanten spielen. Aus diesem Grund werden insbesondere Übergänge analysiert, die Spielfilme einerseits und urbanistische Diskurse andererseits miteinander verknüpfen. Gemeinsamer Ausgangspunkt ist die These, daß es vor allem Bilder sind, die solche Verknüpfungen gewährleisten. Es wird unterstellt, daß es das Medium Film erlaubt, gerade über den Einsatz von Bildern "näher" (...) an soziale Wirklichkeiten heranzukommen, als dies textzentrierter Praxis empirischer Sozialforschung möglich ist. Stadtfilme erzeugen wirkmächtige Bilder, auf die dann unter bestimmten Bedingungen in urbanistischen Kontexten zurückgegriffen wird. Die Autoren präsentieren konzeptionelle Überlegungen und Filminterpretationen zu Moebius (1991, Regie: Matti Geschonneck), Der Himmel über Berlin (1987, Regie: Wim Wenders), In weiter Ferne, so nah! (1993, Regie: Wim Wenders), Der Bauch des Architekten (1987, Regie: Peter Greenaway) und Hass (1995, Regie: Mathieu Kassovitz). Sie bedienen sich dabei sehr unterschiedlicher Verfahren. Gemeinsam sind ihnen allerdings die Anliegen, die größere Nähe der Filme zu sozialen Welten hervorzuheben und die Übergänge zwischen Stadtfilmen und Urbanistik herauszuarbeiten. -/- City and Film. Attempts at a 'Visual Sociology' Summary The contributions collected in this reader present attempts at a Visual sociology'. Based on a study on the medium 'city film' the author s determine which role the images of big cities evoked in such films can play for urbanistic representations. Therefore the analysis is, in particular, focussed on points of transition marking a connection of movies, on the one hand, and urbanistic discourse, on the othe r. The common point of departure is the hypothesis that images, more than anything else, do guarantee such connections. The authors assume that the medium film may lead 'closer' to social realities than the text- centered practices of empirical social research. City films produce powerful images which, under certain cond itions, can be utilized in urbanistic contexts. The authors present conceptual considerations and interpretations of the following films: Moebius (1991, director: Matti Geschonneck); Der Himmel über Berlin (1987, director: Wim Wenders); In weiter Ferne, so nah! (1993, director: Wim Wenders); The Belly of the Architect (1987, director: Peter Greenaway); and quite different methods they aim at the same goals: emphasizing the greater closeness of films to social worlds and bringing out the points of transition between city films and urbanistics. (shrink)

This paper builds upon ethnomethodological and social constructivist studies of representation in the natural sciences to examine sociological theory, a field that is much closer to home. An analysis of diagrams and related illustrations in theory texts shows that labels, geometric boundaries, vectors, and symmetries often are used to convey a sense of orderly flows of causal influences in a homogeneous field. These graphic elements make up what I call a "rhetorical mathematics" that conveys an impression of rationality. Although theory (...) pictures rarely show much beyond what a text already says in its writing, they simulate a hermeneutic passage from written ideas to an independent representational or mathematical space. The paper discusses two modes of textual disruption of the rhetorical mathematics of theory pictures: parody and deconstruction. Parody makes ironic use of graphic devices in order to expose the rationalistic associations that come with the territory. Deconstruction displaces (and, if taken far enough, dissolves entirely) the Flatland of pictorial rationality. These negative maneuvers raise the possibility of using figural space for alternative modes of sociological inquiry. (shrink)

An original sociology of art and artistic practice, based on the theories of Emile Durkheim and contemporary models of complex social systems. The book offers a critique of current history, philosophy and sociology of art and stands in a constructive and informative relation to much contemporary art historical theory.

This paper has already been published in Sociological Research Online, 21/3, August 2016. All rights reserved. © SOCIOLOGICAL RESEARCH ONLINE. It is available from Kent Academic Repository. We thank Dawn Lyon for the permission to republish it here.: This article documents, shows and analyses the everyday rhythms of Billingsgate, London's wholesale fish market. It takes the form of a short film based an audiovisual montage of time-lapse photography and sound recordings, and a - Sociologie – Nouvel article.

Cities are sites and crucibles of creativity and destruction. How we order and imagine ourselves is revealed by the visible forms of our built environments. Cities are the ultimate material expression of human desire and design. They are also forces of energy and fields of tension that structure our everyday imaginings and activities. How we move, think, act, interact, create and maintain our lives is bounded by what cities provide us. How we make common-wealth and differentiate ourselves from others also (...) determines what cities are and might be for us. This issue explores the urbanism that is Manila in all its vital contradictions. A mega-urban region of over 20 million souls, it is both dynamic and discordant, creative and destructive. Like most global mega-cities, Manila is dangerous to its own citizens – polluted, dense, violent, and poor, with inadequate and badly maintained infrastructure and public utilities, but it is also a fecund incubator of cultural ideas, projects and networks. This issue explore both sides of this Janus-faced city – its urbanism and its visual cultures. Two common threads run through the articles in this issue: first is the dialectic of private and public, and second is the cultural traffic that informs place-making across time through the constant movement of peoples around the world-system and in the ever-pragmatic syncretic and local appropriations of cultural ideas, traditions and artefacts into new configurations, stories and views. As these contributions take issue with visual culture, we have given pride of place to photos, images and artworks themselves. For, as our colleague, Eduardo de la Fuente, has observed in this journal’s pages (2010), the sociology of art is more than a socio-aesthetics. It is also a chronicle of the experience, performance and movement of aesthetic objects lodged in and across institutions, traditions and collective consciousness. (shrink)

Every doctoral thesis requires contextualization within its specific discipline's theoretical bases. For a visual arts practice-based thesis, the relevant bases include those of aesthetics and visual perception. This article reviews a Western history of the domain of visual aesthetic theory, addressing both the _analytical_ philosophical efforts to define art and the _continental_ approaches, which construe art as social construction. It then reviews a third, normative stance that foregrounds cognitive value before definition or sociological context—an _aesthetic cognitivist_ position, (...) art practice as a means of acquiring and sharing experiential knowledge and understanding. Contemporary concerns about environmental aesthetics and somaesthetics are also addressed in the Introduction. Aesthetic theories are related to visual perception theories as an aid to fulfilling the scholarly requirements for a practice-based thesis. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Understanding Musical Understanding: The Philosophy, Psychology and Sociology of the Musical ExperienceDavid BakerHarold E. Fiske, Understanding Musical Understanding: The Philosophy, Psychology and Sociology of the Musical Experience. (Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2008).Building on several earlier publications on music and the mind (1990, 1993, 1996, 2004), Harold Fiske offers Understanding Musical Understanding. This is a well-referenced piece that outlines the thinking of various authors (for (...) example, Crowder, 19931; Huron, 2006;2 Snyder, 20073). Furthermore, as Fiske meticulously constructs his case, it draws in psychologists such as Carl Seashore and philosophers like Aristotle, Hegel, Kant, and Schopenhauer. All this suggests an author of great expertise and wide appeal.Fiske begins to build his argument by discussing musical cognition in terms of ‘time’ (Chapter 2) and ‘shape’ (Chapter 3) returning to these themes in greater detail in Chapter 6. It may seem axiomatic that music is perceived structurally and through time. Yet, as the author mentions, the capacity for someone to designate musical form is no way in which to illustrate systematically the workings of musical understanding. This happens swiftly and unceasingly in the course of a person’s musical encounter. It is commonplace, too, for musicians and listeners to allude to visual imagery and shape when describing music (for example, ‘high [End Page 204] and low pitches,’ ‘a texture that is dense or thin,’ or ‘an angular melody’). Fiske contributes a plausible explanation of musical shape:... the perceived shape of music can only be the outcome of a construction (not reconstruction or ‘copy’) calculated on the part of the neural network mechanisms… The ‘reality’ of a musical-auditory image is likely a result of imposing a three-dimensioned visual perspective on an inherently unstructured (invisible, tasteless, intangible, and otherwise unknowable) transitory experience. This is the only means the brain has for making sense of a sound event. What it seems to do is: identify relevant cues, piece the cues together into patterns that can be retained (in the echoic memory) long enough for brain mechanisms to examine and create the sense that we can ‘look’ at music by invoking principles borrowed from vision, and then creating the impression of an auditory ‘object.’ The ‘object’ seems complete and multidimensioned but is, however, only remotely related to what we hear during the slit-like limitations of the perceptual ‘now.’(p. 56).Nonetheless, the manner in which we communicate musical perception with terms borrowed from vision does not inconclusively evidence the same mechanisms of human thought on receiving visual or, on the other hand, musical stimuli. Use of such language may only represent an opportune mode of expressing phenomena to which we have no dedicated vocabulary. Fiske argues that musical understanding is part of the human organism’s genetically-inherited capacity to construe (rapidly invent) patterns from sonic stimuli thus making sense of temporal experience. This process, he argues, is part of the brain’s facility to determine quickly the source, kind and meaning of stimuli for the organism’s immediate safety and survival; the mental processes involved are regulated by ‘brain time’ as opposed to ‘clock time.’ Brain time is “... a rapid, micro-temporal, flexible-variable scheme...” (p. 8) in contrast to pre- and externally-determined ‘clock time.’Musical memory is addressed in Chapter 4 in tandem with ‘pattern constructs.’ Pattern constructs, Fiske explains, are ‘chunks’ of learned musical experience encoded in ‘brain time’ as multi-dimensional, unidirectional entities (p. 63). There is evidence of the ‘inner replay’ of learned events such as these.4 Incoming musical information is perceived, though, according to the listener’s cognitive context, and perhaps retroactively linked for ‘best fit’ rather than being ‘measured’ against fixed expectations and pre-established contextual information, say, about genre. The degree of ‘best fit’ either confirms or modifies assumed context. An important point Fiske makes, then, is that “... a misfit... between incoming information and the presumed context” evidences learning (p. 84).5 Since a ‘misfit’ triggers modifications to the cognitive context by which a person discerns music, it enriches his or her musical knowledge and understanding. [End Page 205] Consequently, Fiske sets a challenge for music education: “... how [do we] design teaching... (shrink)

Notions of human rights as enshrined in international law have become the “idea of our time”; a “dominant moral narrative by which world politics” is organized; and a powerful “discourse of public persuasion.”1 With the rise of human rights discourse, we need to ask, how do protagonists make human rights claims? What sort of resources, techniques, and strategies do they use in order to publicize information about human rights abuses and stipulations set out in international law? With the democratization of (...) mapping practices, various individuals, organizations, and governments are increasingly using maps in order to put forth certain social and political claims. This article draws on the sociology of knowledge, science studies, critical cartography, cultural studies, and anthropological studies of law in order to analyze how various international, Palestinian, and Israeli organizations design maps of the West Bank Barrier in accord with assumptions embedded within international law as part of their political and new media activism. Qualitative sociological methods, such as in-depth interviewing, ethnography, and the collection of cartographic material pertaining to the West Bank Barrier, provide the empirical tools to do so. The maps examined here exemplify how universalistic notions of international law and human rights become a powerful rhetorical tool to make various and often incommensurable social and political claims across different maps. At the same time, international human rights law, rather than dictating local mapping practices, becomes inevitably “vernacularized” and combined with local understandings, cultural preferences, and political concerns. (shrink)

This article discusses the [development and] use of a video life-world schema to explore alternative orientations to the shared health consultation. It is anticipated that this schema can be used by practitioners and consumers alike to understand the dynamics of videoed health consultations, the role of the participants within it and the potential to consciously alter the outcome by altering behaviour during the process of interaction. The study examines health consultation participation and develops an interpretative method of analysis that includes (...) image elicitation (via videos), phenomenology (to identify the components of the analytic framework), narrative (to depict the stories of interactions) and a reflexive mode (to develop shared meaning through a conceptual framework for analysis). The analytic framework is derived from a life-world conception of human mutual shared interaction which is presented here as a novel approach to understanding patient-centred care. The video materials used in this study were derived from consultations in a Walk-in Centre (WiC) in East London. The conceptual framework produced through the process of video analysis is comprised of different combinations of movement, knowledge and emotional conversations that are used to classify objective or engaged WiC health care interactions. The videoed interactions organise along an active or passive, facilitative or directive typical situation continuum illustrating different kinds of textual approaches to practice that are in tension or harmony. The schema demonstrates how practitioners and consumers interact to produce these outcomes and indicates the potential for both consumers and practitioners to be educated to develop practice dynamics that support patient-centred care and impact on health outcomes. (shrink)

The approach to images as cultural documents of collective memory and instruments of social shaping builds a central theoretical component of cultural theories since its establishment as a critical discipline. Prominent thinkers of cultural studies and art history defined images as symbolic representations and as carriers and storages of affective, cultural expression. The anthology covers this broad understanding of images as carriers of archival value, texts, and complex language; it elaborates on the fundamental role of images as a driving force (...) of ideologies and cultural evolution. The book also includes Charles S. Peirce's full manuscript On the Logic of drawing History from Ancient Documents especially from Testimonies, a genuine treatise on applied science as a universal method of incorporating knowledge across disciplines. (shrink)

Dans ces conditions, n'est-il pas urgent de s'interroger à nouveau sur ce qui fait la ligne de partage entre des images maîtresses d'erreur et d'errance et des images susceptibles d'éclairer le monde et donc de participer au mieux à l ...

The book focuses on three interrelated issues: the relationship between modernism and postmodernism; visuality and visual culture; and the relation between the East (former European socialist countries) and the West as regards aesthetics, globalization, culture, and the mechanisms of the presentation and representation of contemporary visual art. In the first part the author reflects upon some of the less noticed issues of modernism and its dominant theoretical narratives regarding art: its privileging of truth and its obfuscation of some (...) segments of European art. One of his central tenets is that recent postsocialist politicized postmodern visual art contradicts Peter Bürger's canonical theory about the avant-garde art of the previous century. The art and culture discussed throughout this volume predominantly concern the visual. For this reason, in the second part visual culture and its uneasy relationship with art and art history are an object of reflection, a topic which is then complemented with that of the embodied eye in the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty. Photography, its relation to truth, and the problematic expectation that an ontology of photography is possible or necessary is the theme of the closing chapter of this part of the book. In the third part the author offers a global view on philosophy of art, visual culture, and the institutions that disseminate them. (shrink)

A VISUAL GUIDE TO THE WORKS OF THE ULRICH DE BALBIAN FINE ART FOUNDATION au natural I am/was hardly known in my life time, apart from a few thousand on Linkedin, my 2 blogs, Facebook, Instagram - because I live as a hermit, removed from all social life, so that I can just paint, paint and paint - and reflect and write (philosophy and sociology of life, existence, culture, art). I create, as I live, as if there is (...) no human being who interferes, intervenes, creates (paints) - as if every- thing just happens, ‘just is’ - like water flows, the ocean, a tree grows (or dies) in the forest, like light creates colours, gravity and other natural forces. Like Zen Buddhists, Christian and other mystics, Jains, Sufis - we just leave everything as we find it. This is what all arts have ever attempted to do. But, especially and more specifically so-called modern, contemporary and (post-) post-modern art, Critical Theory, (post) deconstruction attempt to, and all philosophy tried to depict by means of reflection on first order existence - as if, it merely mirrors and reflects what it comes across. Nowadays many artist are aware of this, previously few reflected on this. All creatives are/were aware of this attitude, the state of mind, this style of conscious awareness, this way of 'just being', all mystics knew that - realizing the Buddha mind, being oned with Eckhart's Godhead, the one real self of Vedan- ta, the Father of Jesus, etc, etc. The human mind treats smaller paintings as if it is looking AT an object or a thing such as a table or chair , but larger works are experienced (like installations) as if one is part of them and participate in them. Now that you know this please do not treat these images as if they are just more objects or things you look AT, but experience and participate in them. (shrink)

Actualmente vivimos en una sociedad intensamente visual, sin embargo, desde las Ciencias Sociales se desprecia la imagen como herramienta didáctica y de investigación, quedando la misma relegada al mundo de las artes. Con esta cuestión de fondo, se quiere mostrar la experiencia del estudiantado de las asignaturas: Sociedad, Familia y Educación, y, Sociología de la Educación (de la Universidad de Almería), tras la utilización de la fotografía y el cortometraje social como instrumentos didácticos complementarios a la investigación. Así, se (...) mostraran las experiencias formativas de estos alumnos tras la utilización de estos recursos en sus proyectos. (shrink)

`The Clothes Have No Emperor' means to say that Bourdieu's criticism of American imperialism is an understandable slip of his brilliant visual sociology. He writes to those of a disposition to agree completely because they know the facts all the better. Bourdieu may well be the only person alive today who has so perfectly combined theoretical, empirical and political work. Why then has he allowed this critique to be published for all the world to see? Not, I think, (...) because he is wrong, but because the entailments of his own visual sociology do not translate well from place to place. Bourdieu has taught us that the sociology of social space is the next necessary step for those who would become public intellectuals. The question is how to think and speak of the world as such. Bourdieu has given us the outlines of a beginning, but this little essay in question shows that there is more work yet to be done. (shrink)

Referat wygłoszony w ramach Koła Antropologii Obrazu przy Instytucie Socjologii Uniwersytetu w Białymstoku, Białystok, 03.2007. // Paper presented at the Koło Antropologii Obrazu at the Institute of Sociology, University of Bialystok, Bialystok, 03.2007.

Negli ultimi decenni i sociologi ed economisti hanno sottolineato come il mondo del consumo sia sempre più caratterizzato dalle componenti culturali, sociali ed emotive. La marca cessa di essere semplice depositaria di benefit tangibili e performance oggettive ed estende il dominio all’area dei valori, delle relazioni e dei sentimenti. Adattandosi ai cambiamenti comunicativi il marketing si è arricchito di nuove strategie che la letteratura identifica con il temine “non convenzionali”: il market environment, il market niche, la client relationship, le competences (...) of the customer, il guerrilla marketing e le subjective experiences dei consumatori. E tra queste particolare rilievo ha assunto il “marketing esperienziale” finaliz-zato a coinvolgere la clientela offrendogli un’esperienza memorabile della marca. Il marketing include, certo, le tradizionali campagne pubblicitarie, le promozioni, le sponsorizzazioni, ma anche l’attrazione dei clienti negli ambienti dell’impresa, mettendo in mostra i luoghi, gli attori e i mezzi della produzione. Da questo punto di vista, i musei aziendali sono un medium straordinario che crea o consolida il rapporto tra l’impresa e il pubblico ma anche il legami interni e quelli con il territorio. Ne sono prova i due casi di studio sull'Heritage Marketing presentati nel volume: l’Heineken Experience e il Guinness Storehouse, i celebri musei dei due colossi dell’industria birraria. -/- Introduzione -/- Capitolo primo IL MARKETING NON CONVENZIONALE 1.1. Le leve decisionali del marketing 1.2. Dal Old School marketing al Societing 1.3. I dieci principi del marketing non-convenzionale -/- Capitolo secondo LE PANACEE DEL MARKETING 2.1. Un quadro d’insieme 2.2. Client Relationship 2.3. Market Environment 2.4. Market Niche 2.5. Guerrilla Marketing 2.6. Subjective Experiences -/- Capitolo terzo I MUSEI AZIENDALI 3.1. Una definizione provvisoria e alcune classificazioni 3.2. L’origine e la diffusione dei musei d’impresa 3.3. Il museo come mezzo di promozione aziendale e socio-culturale 3.4. Musei aziendali e comunicazione visuale: note semiotiche -/- Capitolo quarto L’HEINEKEN EXPERIENCE DI AMSTERDAM di Marta Scalzotto 4.1. Breve storia della Heineken 4.2. Le strategie di comunicazione 4.3. La responsabilità sociale e ambientale 4.4. La storia e la sede del museo 4.5. La visita del museo -/- Capitolo quinto LA GUINNESS STOREHOUSE DI DUBLINO di Marta Scalzotto 5.1. Breve storia e i prodotti della Guinness 5.2. Le strategie di comunicazione 5.3. Le sponsorizzazioni e le promozioni 5.4. La storia e la sede del museo 5.5. La visita del museo -/- Conclusioni -/- Riferimenti bibliografici. (shrink)

Based on archival and ethnographic data, this article analyzes the iconic-making, iconoclastic unmaking, and iconographic remaking of national identifications. The window into these processes is the career of Saint John the Baptist, patron saint of French Canadians and national icon from the mid-nineteenth century until 1969, when his statue was destroyed by protesters during the annual parade in his honor in Montréal. Relying on literatures on visuality and materiality, I analyze how the saint and his attending symbols were deployed in (...) processions, parades, and protests. From this analysis, I develop the sociological concept of aesthetic revolt, a process whereby social actors rework iconic symbols, redefining national identity in the process. The article offers a theoretical articulation and an empirical demonstration of how the context, content, and the form of specific cultural objects and symbols—national icons—are intertwined in public performance to produce eventful change, and shows why and how the internal material logic and the social life of these icons shape the articulation of new national identities. (shrink)

Seen through the quest for a new metaphysics, the visual arts were interpreted in the framework of the particular sense of progress that the generation of György Lukács developed in the first decade of the twentieth century. They saw Impressionism as the veritable symptom of the deficiencies of their age and dreamed of a great, solid, lasting new Hungarian culture which would transcend the fragmentariness, sociological interests, and ethereality of Impressionism. Although exhibitions of contemporary modernist art were organized in (...) Budapest and the Nagybánya artists' colony was in contact with the living French art, the nascent aesthetic theory, first of all that of Lukács, based the appreciation of Post-Impressionism on ideological considerations rather than the artistic particularities of the artists. Central to this aesthetic was the notion of greatness and a sense of metaphysics derived from German idealist philosophy and applied to the art of Cézanne, Gauguin, and the Budapest group The Seekers (founded in 1909, renamed, in 1911, as The Eight), all of whom were appreciated for features pointing in the direction of a new Classicism. (shrink)

The paper presents a teaching experience implemented in two Sociology of Work courses at two Spanish universities. The teaching practice consists of the leisurely, reflective and critical reading of a classic text of the Sociology of Work, after which the students must prepare a mind map, that is, a graphic representation in which ideas are schematically organized and associated. The analysis of the students’ responses to a questionnaire allows us to affirm that the practice of mind maps is (...) a creative, visual and useful method of synthesizing and memorizing a classic sociological text. (shrink)

Everyday life as a sociological/philosophical concept is widely considered to be both a familiar and yet taken-for-granted subject matter for analytic investigation. In considering the works of three leading scholars, Michel de Certeau, Harold Garfinkel, and John Fiske, one can look toward possible referents to this term. Starting with Certeau’s critical semiotics of the everyday, with its emphasis on such distinctions as place and space as well as strategies and tactics, the everyday can be theorized in terms of contrasts between (...) discourse and practice. Similarly, with Garfinkel’s ethnomethodological emphasis on the practical actor and Fiske’s ethnographic and cultural studies emphasis on local meaning, the everyday can be conceptualized in terms of distinctions between lived order and a theorized version of the everyday. By examining the approaches of these three scholars as well as drawing upon a visual examination of everyday urban scenes, the article concludes with an affirmation of a multi-conceptual and methodological approach to the everyday and with recognition of the everyday as a signifier loaded with a multitude of possibly overlapping meanings. (shrink)

Despite the growing sociological interest in the object, and the long-standing tradition in the humanities and social sciences concerned with the creation of art and artefacts, there is relatively little research about how people in ordinary day-to-day circumstances explore and respond to exhibits in museums and galleries. In this article, we address the conduct and interaction of visitors to museums and galleries and consider how they examine and experience objects and artefacts in collaboration with each other. In particular, we address (...) the ways in which one participant shapes, through gesture and talk, how those they are with look at and respond to exhibits. The article is based on the analysis of audio-visual recordings gathered in museums and galleries both in the UK and abroad. (shrink)

Feminism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, and Marxism, among other critical approaches, have undermined traditional notions of aesthetics in recent decades. But questions of aesthetic judgment and pleasure persist, and many critics now seek a "return to aesthetics" or a "return to beauty." Janet Wolff advances a "postcritical" aesthetics grounded in shared values that are negotiated in the context of community. She relates this approach to contemporary debates about a committed politics similarly founded on the abandonment of certainty. Neither universalist nor relativist, the (...) "aesthetics of uncertainty" provides a discourse on beauty that contemporary critics can engage with and offers a basis for judgment that is committed to assigning value to works of art. Wolff explores her position through a range of topics: the question of beauty in relation to feminist critique; the problematic status of twentieth-century English art, visual representations of the Holocaust, Jewish identity as portrayed by the artist R. B. Kitaj, refugee artists and modernism in 1940s Britain, and the nature and appeal of imagistic thinking in sociology. She addresses the desire for certainty and the timeliness of doubt and concludes with a meditation on the intersection of aesthetics and ethics, arguing that ethical issues are very much implicated in aesthetic discourse. (shrink)

Science maps are visual representations of the structure and dynamics of scholarly knowl­edge. They aim to show how fields, disciplines, journals, scientists, publications, and scientific terms relate to each other. Science mapping is the body of methods and techniques that have been developed for generating science maps. This entry is an introduction to science maps and science mapping. It focuses on the conceptual, theoretical, and methodological issues of science mapping, rather than on the mathematical formulation of science mapping techniques. (...) After a brief history of science mapping, we describe the general procedure for building a science map, presenting the data sources and the methods to select, clean, and pre-process the data. Next, we examine in detail how the most common types of science maps, namely the citation-based and the term-based, are generated. Both are based on networks: the former on the network of publications connected by citations, the latter on the network of terms co-occurring in publications. We review the rationale behind these mapping approaches, as well as the techniques and methods to build the maps. We also present less-common types of science maps, including co-authorship networks, interlocking editorship networks, maps based on patents’ data, and geographic maps of science. Moreover, we consider how time can be represented in science maps to investigate the dynamics of science. We also discuss some epistemological and sociological topics that can help in the interpretation, contextualization, and assessment of science maps. Then, we present some possible applications of science maps in science policy. In the conclusion, we point out why science mapping may be interesting for all the branches of meta-science, from knowl­edge organization to epistemology. (shrink)

Feminism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, and Marxism, among other critical approaches, have undermined traditional notions of aesthetics in recent decades. But questions of aesthetic judgment and pleasure persist, and many critics now seek a "return to aesthetics" or a "return to beauty." Janet Wolff advances a "postcritical" aesthetics grounded in shared values that are negotiated in the context of community. She relates this approach to contemporary debates about a committed politics similarly founded on the abandonment of certainty. Neither universalist nor relativist, the (...) "aesthetics of uncertainty" provides a discourse on beauty that contemporary critics can engage with and offers a basis for judgment that is committed to assigning value to works of art. Wolff explores her position through a range of topics: the question of beauty in relation to feminist critique; the problematic status of twentieth-century English art, visual representations of the Holocaust, Jewish identity as portrayed by the artist R. B. Kitaj, refugee artists and modernism in 1940s Britain, and the nature and appeal of imagistic thinking in sociology. She addresses the desire for certainty and the timeliness of doubt and concludes with a meditation on the intersection of aesthetics and ethics, arguing that ethical issues are very much implicated in aesthetic discourse. (shrink)

For centuries it has been assumed that democracy must refer to the empowerment of the People's voice. In this pioneering book, Jeffrey Edward Green makes the case for considering the People as an ocular entity rather than a vocal one. Green argues that it is both possible and desirable to understand democracy in terms of what the People gets to see instead of the traditional focus on what it gets to say. The Eyes of the People examines democracy from the (...) perspective of everyday citizens in their everyday lives. While it is customary to understand the citizen as a decision-maker, in fact most citizens rarely engage in decision-making and do not even have clear views on most political issues. The ordinary citizen is not a decision-maker but a spectator who watches and listens to the select few empowered to decide. Grounded on this everyday phenomenon of spectatorship, The Eyes of the People constructs a democratic theory applicable to the way democracy is actually experienced by most people most of the time. In approaching democracy from the perspective of the People's eyes, Green rediscovers and rehabilitates a forgotten "plebiscitarian" alternative within the history of democratic thought. Building off the contributions of a wide range of thinkers--including Aristotle, Shakespeare, Benjamin Constant, Max Weber, Joseph Schumpeter, and many others--Green outlines a novel democratic paradigm centered on empowering the People's gaze through forcing politicians to appear in public under conditions they do not fully control. The Eyes of the People is at once a sweeping overview of the state of democratic theory and a call to rethink the meaning of democracy within the sociological and technological conditions of the twenty-first century. In addition to political scientists and students of democracy, the book likely will be of interest to political journalists, theorists of visual culture, and anyone in search of political principles that acknowledge, rather than repress, the pathologies of political life in contemporary mass society. (shrink)

In Bielefeld, Germany in April, 1997 an author conference was devoted to Arthur C. Danto's 1995 Mellon Lectures After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History. This essay provides an introduction to seven essays given at that conference and expanded for this Theme Issue of History and Theory. Danto presented his view of the nature of art in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. He then added in the Mellon lectures a sociological perspective on the current situation (...) of the visual arts, and an Hegelian historiography. The history of art has ended, Danto claims, and we now live in a posthistorical era. Since in his well-known book on historiography, Analytical Philosophy of History, Danto is unsympathetic to Hegel's speculative ways of thinking about history, his adaptation of this Hegelian framework is surprising. Danto's strategy in After the End of Art is best understood by grasping the way in which he transformed the purely philosophical account of The Transfiguration into a historical account. Recognizing that his philosophical analysis provided a good way of explaining the development of art in the modern period, Danto radically changed the context of his argument. In this process, he opened up discussion of some serious but as yet unanswered questions about his original thesis, and about the plausibility of Hegel's claim that the history of art has ended. (shrink)

The body is a rich object for aesthetic inquiry. We aesthetically assess both our own bodies and those of others, and our felt bodily experiences have aesthetic qualities. The body features centrally in aesthetic experiences of visual art, theatre, dance and sports. It is also deeply intertwined with one's identity and sense of self. Artistic and media representations shape how we see and engage with bodies, with consequences both personal and political. This volume contains sixteen original essays by contributors (...) in philosophy, sociology, dance, disability theory, critical race studies, feminist theory, medicine, and law. They explore bodily beauty, sexual attractiveness, the role of images in power relations, the distinct aesthetics of disabled bodies, the construction of national identity, the creation of compassion through bodily presence, the role of bodily style in moral comportment, and the somatic aesthetics of racialized police violence. -/- Contents: Maria del Guadalupe Davidson, "Black Silhouettes on White Walls: Kara Walker’s Magic Lantern"; A. W. Eaton, "Taste in Bodies and Fat Oppression"; C. Winter Han, "From 'Little Brown Brothers' to 'Queer Asian Wives': Constructing the Asian Male Body"; Deborah L. Rhode, "Appearance as a Feminist Issue"; Shirley Anne Tate, "A Tale of Two Olympians—Beauty, 'Race,' Nation"; Glenn Parsons, "The Merrickites"; Stephen Davies, "And Everything Nice"; Tobin Siebers, "In/Visible: Disability on the Stage"; Jill Sigman, "Live, Body-Based Performance: An Account from the Field"; Barbara Gail Montero, "Aesthetic Effortlessness"; Peg Brand Weiser and Edward B. Weiser, "Misleading Aesthetic Norms of Beauty: Perceptual Sexism in Elite Women's Sports"; Yuriko Saito, "Body Aesthetics and the Cultivation of Moral Virtues"; George Yancy, "White Embodied Gazing, the Black Body as Disgust, and the Aesthetics of Un-Suturing"; Richard Shusterman, "Somaesthetics and the Fine Art of Eating"; Ann J. Cahill, "Sexual Desire, Inequality, and the Possibility of Transformation"; Sheila Lintott and Sherri Irvin, "Sex Objects and Sexy Subjects: A Feminist Reclamation of Sexiness" -/- . (shrink)

This essay presents the early days of human cytogenetics, from the late 1950s until the mid 1970s, as a historical series of images. I propose a chronology moving from photographs of bodies to chromosome sets, to be joined by ultrasound images, which provided a return to bodies, by then focused on the unborn. Images carried ontological significance and, as I will argue, are principal characters in the history of human cytogenetics. Inspired by the historiography of heredity and genetics, studies on (...) visual cultures, the conceptualization of circulation, and the sociology of pregnancy, I suggest that cytogenetics, through its focus on pregnancy, pregnant women, and their offspring, found strategic living materials that stabilized human chromosome studies as a biomedical, post-eugenics practice. The historicity of each path displays a wide circulation of objects, tools, and methods that condensed on images that shared in the centuries-old visual expertise that medicine and botany had manufactured. (shrink)

Seen through the quest for a new metaphysics, the visual arts were interpreted in the framework of the particular sense of progress that the generation of György Lukács developed in the first decade of the twentieth century. They saw Impressionism as the veritable symptom of the deficiencies of their age and dreamed of a great, solid, lasting new Hungarian culture which would transcend the fragmentariness, sociological interests, and ethereality of Impressionism. Although exhibitions of contemporary modernist art were organized in (...) Budapest and the Nagybánya artists' colony was in contact with the living French art, the nascent aesthetic theory, first of all that of Lukács, based the appreciation of Post-Impressionism on ideological considerations rather than the artistic particularities of the artists. Central to this aesthetic was the notion of greatness and a sense of metaphysics derived from German idealist philosophy and applied to the art of Cézanne, Gauguin, and the Budapest group The Seekers, all of whom were appreciated for features pointing in the direction of a new Classicism. (shrink)

نَرُومُ من خلال هذه الدراسة استقراء ما تُتِيحُه البيبليوغرافيا البحثية حول موضوع أفلام المرأة وقضايا الجندر في السينما، إذ سَنَعْمَدُ على تحليل الدراسات المتوفِّرة بشكل نقدي، وذلك بغية الوقوف على حدود ما كُتب حول الموضوع. والحال أن مراجعاتنا النقدية قد قادتنا إلى الخروج باستنتاج مفاده أن حقل الدراسات السينمائية في العالم العربي عامةً والمغرب خاصةً لا يزال يُعاني من شُحٍّ على مستوى الكم، فقلة قليلة هم الباحثون في العلوم الإنسانية الذين يهتمون بموضوع السينما والثقافة البصرية، وظواهرها المركبة، التي تلتقي فيها (...) رهانات المخرجين وجمالية أعمالهم مع تطلعات الجمهور وردود أفعالهم. زيادة على ذلك، سنحاول في هذه الدراسة بَيَان الدواعي الواقعية التي تستدعي توجيه بوصلة البحث نحو الاهتمام بقضايا السينما، كما سنحاول إثبات الفعالية العلمية لسوسيولوجيا السينما كمبحث بمقدوره تجاوز أحكام القيمة التي تتخلل كتابات النقد الفني حول سينما المرأة، وبمقدوره أيضا تجاوز القصور الذي يَسِمُ المقاربات السيميولوجية التي تَحْصِرُ نفسها في تحليل المضمون الداخلي للأفلام فقط. (shrink)

Rhythm is the fundamental pulse that animates poetry, music, and dance across all cultures. And yet the recent explosion of scholarly interest across disciplines in the aural dimensions of aesthetic experience--particularly in sociology, cultural and media theory, and literary studies--has yet to explore this fundamental category. This book furthers the discussion of rhythm beyond the discrete conceptual domains and technical vocabularies of musicology and prosody. With original essays by philosophers, psychologists, musicians, literary theorists, and ethno-musicologists, The Philosophy of Rhythm (...) opens up wider-and plural-perspectives, examining formal affinities between the historically interconnected fields of music, dance, and poetry, while addressing key concepts such as embodiment, movement, pulse, and performance. Volume editors Peter Cheyne, Andy Hamilton, and Max Paddison bring together a range of key questions: What is the distinction between rhythm and pulse? What is the relationship between everyday embodied experience, and the specific experience of music, dance, and poetry? Can aesthetics offer an understanding of rhythm that helps inform our responses to visual and other arts, as well as music, dance, and poetry? And, what is the relation between psychological conceptions of entrainment, and the humane concept of rhythm and meter? Overall, The Philosophy of Rhythm appeals across disciplinary boundaries, providing a unique overview of a neglected aspect of aesthetic experience. (shrink)

This is the first book to explore the relationship between Martin Heidegger's work and modern anthropology. Heidegger attracts much scholarly interest among social scientists, but few have explored his ideas in relation to current anthropological debates. The discipline's modernist foundations, the nature of cultural constructionism and of art ñ even what an anthropology of art must include ñ are all informed and illuminated by Heidegger's work. The author argues that many contemporary anthropologists, in their concern to return subjectivity and 'voice' (...) to their interlocutors, neglect to recognize that language and other representational practices conceal the world and human subjectivity as much as reveal it. The author also suggests that Heidegger's critique of western technology provides the basis for a return to anthropology's sociological foundations. Emerging from over ten years of original research, and drawing on a rich knowledge of Australian and Melanesian ethnography, this book reassesses the underlying framework of modern and, particularly, visual anthropology. Innovative and provocative, it will be of interest to all anthropologists, philosophers and students of art and culture. (shrink)

Dis/Abling Practices: Rethinking Disability The paper discusses how ordinary acts of everyday life make up the complex and contingent scenarios of disabilities that create enabling and disabling (dis/abling) practices. Drawing on qualitative empirical data the societal visibility and relevance of dis/abling practices are analyzed by connecting disability studies and sociological ideas with insights from Science and Technology Studies (STS). The essay explores how (visual) dis/ability is the outcome of human and non-human configurations and suggests that dis/ability can be understood (...) neither as an individual bodily impairment nor as a socially attributed disability. Rather, dis/ability refers to complex sets of heterogeneous practices that (re-)associate bodies, material objects, and technologies with sensory practices. These practices, the paper concludes, draw attention to the multiple processes that (re-) concatenate the conduct of human affairs. (shrink)

Objections arise to the concept of artistic intention based upon the psychology of a period. Here too we experience trends or volitions which can only be explained by precisely those artistic creations which in their own turn demand an explanation on the basis of these trends and volitions. Thus "Gothic" man or the "primitive" from whose alleged existence we wish to explain a particular artistic product is in truth the hypostatized impression which has been culled from the works of art (...) themselves. Or it is a question of intentions and evaluations which have become conscious as they find their formulation in the contemporary theory of art or in contemporary art criticism. Thus these formulations, just like the individual theoretical statements of the artists themselves, can once more only be phenomena parallel to the artistic products of the epoch; they cannot already contain their interpretation. Here again this parallel phenomenon would, in its entirety, represent an extraordinarily interesting object of humanistic investigation, but it would be incapable of defining in detail a methodologically comprehensible volition. So, too, the view of art which accompanies a period's artistic output can express the artistic volition of the period in itself but cannot put a name to it for us. This view can be of eminent significance when we are seeking a logical explanation for the perception of tendencies dominating at a given time and thus also for the judgment of artistic volition at that time, which must also be interpreted.Erwin Panofsky, the renowned art historian, was professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University, until his death in 1968. Among his many books and articles are Meaning in the Visual Arts, Early Netherlandish Painting, and Renaissance and Renascenes in Western Art. Kenneth Northcott is professor of German and comparative literature at the University of Chicago and the translator of Arnold Hauser's Sociology of Art . Joel Snyder is chairman of the committee on general studies in the humanities at the University of Chicago. (shrink)