8/14: To be honest arriving at ASA to see a big ol’ blown up version of the book cover at the Stanford booth was pretty exciting. As are the blurbs I got to read:

“The Work of Art offers an intimate investigation of the economics of earning a living making art: where the money comes from and where it goes, and how artists justify, to themselves and others, their strategies for supporting their work. Alison Gerber makes a solid contribution to sociology, to economics, and to our understanding of the practicalities of an artistic career.”

—Howard S. Becker, author of Art Worlds

“Alison Gerber’s The Work of Art is a welcome treatment of how artists develop their self-conceptions and their production practices. This account expands our insight into a cutting edge area of economic and cultural sociology, examining the art world where questions of valuation and good work are highly salient, and provides an exciting approach to how material objects are given value. Personal and powerful, Gerber’s work will alter how those who care about the lives of artists think about the role of money and identity in the creative process.”

—Gary Alan Fine, author of Everyday Genius

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3/8: Happy to see another thoughtful review of my book, this in the AJS by Elise Herrala. She reads the book, as I’d intended, as an inquiry into value in working life more generally, writing that “The Work of Art offers insights beyond the art world into the valuation of labor for the nontraditionally employed” and calls the book “an important and much-needed contribution to the neglected question of how artist value their work and time.. a well-written account that paints a nuanced portrait of art as work and pushes forward sociological thinking about valuation, especially in nontraditional employment.” This academic book-writing process is a crazy one – reviews and citations start to come out over a year after the thing is printed – and I’m really grateful to Dr. Herrala for her thoughts and care, and for all who have taken the time to let me know what they think!

3/6: Lots going on here in southern Sweden, especially if you’re interested in photography and knowledge! Why not join us at our conference April 5-6 in Landskrona? Or join us for the opening of Pierre Bourdieu In Algeria: Testimonies of Uprooting at Landskrona Foto the evening of April 6? Or come by some of the five evening seminars we’ve organized? Like I said: lots going on. Hope to see you there!

1/20: Happy to see a kind review of my book by Hannah Wohl appearing in Contemporary Sociology this month! It’s a great overview of the argument chapter by chapter for those of you who might not want to read the whole thing ;). She calls the book “methodologically rigorous, theoretically insightful, and engagingly written” and says that I make a “strong contribution to the sociology of valuation.” Aw, shucks! They couldn’t have picked a better reviewer – Hannah’s own work on creativity is awesome, and I’m grateful for her close reading of my work. Check it out.

12/8: A couple of days from now I’ll be in Helsinki for a symposium on Creativity in Art and Science featuring some pretty amazing folks at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. It’s been put together by Ugo Corte with Susanna Lindberg, Matthias De Groof, & Kirsi Tirri and should be great. Register if you’re planning to come so they know how many snacks to pick up, and see you soon-

10/10: Tomorrow I’ll be in Copenhagen speaking at a conference on Visual Social Sciences and Digital Media Politics at the Center for Anthropological, Political, and Social Theory at the University of Copenhagen. Get in touch if you wanna talk related issues but can’t make it!

10/3: Hey friends. I’m involved in putting together a maybe conference maybe workshop it depends on what you wanna do, all about **Photography as / and knowledge.** I’m pasting the call below. Holler if you want to talk about possibilities. It will be good. Hope to see you there.

Photography as / and knowledge

Photographs are unusually rich objects of inquiry and media for communication. As photographs capture detail indiscriminately, they always contain far more than the photographer intends. Diverse perspectives approach photographs in different ways: they are fine art objects, historical records, and chemical traces all at once, conveying both concrete, stable evidence and possibilities for infinite interpretation. An interdisciplinary research environment has been developing around these issues in recent years at Lund University, with contributions from disciplines across the University as well as community partners.

With an opening April 4th, the Department of Sociology at Lund University in cooperation with Landskrona Foto will host the exhibition Pierre Bourdieu In Algeria: Testimonies of Uprooting. In connection to the exhibition the Department of Sociology will arrange a conference with the purpose of exploring photography as a base for knowledge.

The planned conference aims to build a strong Scandinavian research network around the photographic image, including multidisciplinary academic and artistic perspectives. The design of the conference will be based on participants’ contributions. We welcome proposals for paper presentations, workshops, and other activities for a two-day conference on the photographic image to take place April 5-6 2019 at Landskrona Foto in Landskrona, Sweden. Conference participation is free of charge, but participants will need to cover any necessary travel and accommodation expenses. If you are interested in joining us in April, please submit your idea for participation or an abstract (no more than one page) to Britt-Marie Johansson at

britt-marie.johansson@soc.lu.se

before November 5th 2018. Acceptances and a preliminary program will be available in November.

8/20: Like books, speak Swedish? I’ll be at Bokmässan talking about my new book with Evelina Stenbeck on Friday September 28th – see you there!

6/8: To close out our year at the Pufendorf Institute for Advanced Studies we (the Advanced Study Group on The Roles of Photography in Academic Research and Communication) held a two-day workshop on cartography, collaboration, and data: the year behind us and the years ahead. Thanks especially to all our guests and to Bull.Miletic for our public program, The Aerial View in Motion.

5/31: Good news! We’ve been awarded 450,000 crowns in funding from the Crafoord Foundation to support our work in the Rädda Bildarvet (aka Rädda Bildminnet) project. It’s a collaboration between the sociology department at Lund University and Landskrona Foto, and we’re focused on photographs as data + practice across disciplines, the development of new search + discovery tools for digitized images, and the value + valuation of photographic cultural heritage. Thanks much to Crafoordska!

5/29: A new network at Lund University for research on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning just launched, and I’ve been really impressed at the level to which the social sciences and humanities are represented in the network and how central their voices are, along with the math and computer science folks you’d expect. There’s a proto-website where you can find out more, and if you’re interested you should definitely put a “save the date” in your calendar for the next fika-to-fika all-day meetings on September 26 and November 22.