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

Save

4/15: Excited to say that this fall I’ll join Olof Sundin in co-coordinating a yearlong “theme,” In Search of Search and Its Engines, at the Pufendorf Institute for Advanced Studies at Lund University. Our project is is focused on the intersection between media & information literacies and search, search engines, and search-adjacent recommender systems. The research team includes Ana Nordberg, Cristian Norocel, Helena Sandberg, Annika Wallin, Robert Willim, and Kalle Åström, and we’ve confirmed long visits from Dirk Lewandowski and Francesca Tripodi so far. I’ll be continuing my work on algorithmically generated images as evidence and visual evidence as it moves between epistemic cultures. Along with our own research activities there will be a year of public talks, symposia, and other events. Hope to see you in Lund!

3/20: We’re all rushing to move to remote/online teaching. Now is not the time to reinvent the wheel. Why not use a colleague’s thoughtfully produced A/V content and spend the time you’d be wrangling Zoom & worrying about your background engaged with your students instead? I’ve started a spreadsheet of publicly-available course content and will manage the sheet for now (get in touch if you want to help out!). Grab a lecture or 2, an explainer, a comic, a podcast, or a book talk HERE. There’s a form HERE to quickly and easily contribute content – send us your videos, podcasts, webcomics, and your favorites! Check in early + often. I’ll try to update daily. Hope you find something you can use –

12/19: It won’t technically be out till sometime next year but since you’re in the know you can check out some of my thoughts on on black holes, great men, and zero-sum games – now available advance access and free for all over at Culture Unbound.

11/28: Look who’s over here correcting page proofs like some kind of scientist…

10/30: I obviously think you should probably read Gary Alan Fine’s Talking Art: The Culture of Practice and the Practice of Culture in MFA Education. If you want to know why, and where I think we should go from here, check out my review of the book over at Contemporary Sociology.

10/16: As has become our custom, the brilliant Anna Lund & I are organizing the panels for the working group on cultural sociology for Sociologidagarna (the Swedish Sociological Association’s biennial conference). Hit me up w/ questions, send us an abstract, + see you in March… Visit the Sociologidagarna website for more information.

The working group for cultural sociology welcomes submissions that focus on the cultural dimensions of social life with diverse points of departure: both cultural perspectives on the social in general and sociological perspectives on cultural objects and institutions. Papers might focus on cultural sociology in practice – diverse empirical investigations – as well as theoretical and methodological issues. We look forward to diverse perspectives and generative conversations when we meet at this year’s Sociologidagarna.

Fokus för arbetsgruppen i kultursociologi är det sociala livets kulturella dimensioner, såväl avseende kulturella perspektiv på sociala fenomen som sociologiska perspektiv på kulturella objekt och institutioner. Inom ramen för denna breda kultursociologi välkomnas papers med olika ingångar. Det kan handla om kultursociologi i praktiken, dvs empiriska undersökningar inom olika fält, men även teoretiska och metodologiska papers. Vi ser fram emot flera givande och mångdimensionella diskussioner under de kommande Sociologidagarna (språk: engelska).

8/10: I’ve updated some old working papers and uploaded two new ones over at SocArXiv, everyone’s favorite preprint / working paper / postprint / open science platform. I’ve received great feedback on papers I’ve posted there, it’s super easy and fast, and making your work as open as possible is the right thing to do. Check out SocArXiv (or your own field’s nonprofit open access repository) and get postin’.

8/5: In the coming month or so I’ll be at ASA and 4S presenting on new work. Holler if you’d like to meet up, and I’ll see you soon-

4/11: We’ve had our first Kvällssamtal at Landskrona Foto and four more lie ahead – a series of conversations prompted by themes from the Bourdieu exhibition. I’ll moderate one; they’ll all be great. Obs, these are all in Swedish. We’ll produce a podcast with excerpts from these conversations in collaboration with Radio AF in Lund, but you don’t wanna wait till those come out – see you in Landskrona!

Krig och social omvandling 11/4
Socialt arv och ungdomars kulturengagemang 25/4
Eliterna 2/5
Kvinnor, fotografi och arkivet 9/5
En skola i kris? 15/5

[pictured above: Anna Hedlund (researcher in social anthropology at Lund University) in conversation with Claes JB Löfgren (journalist at Sveriges Television) with moderator Håkan Silverup (doctoral candidate in sociology at Lund University)]

4/9: Richard Barlow’s installation Erebus at Landskrona Foto is finished and guys, it is gorgeous. Here’s what we wrote about it:

Temporary and fragile, Richard Barlow’s chalk drawings illuminate existential and environmental concerns in beautiful site-specific installations. Barlow’s wide-ranging work uses drawing, painting, and installation to investigate issues specific to the history and form of photography and its signification of documentary truth. In a new work for Landskrona Foto, Barlow will create a wall drawing based on his time at the Arctic Circle residency: collaging multiple photographs of the receding pack ice, he first produces apparently seamless documentary images, and then uses them to produce an intricately detailed large-scale chalk drawing. The ephemeral nature of the chalk drawings maps onto the fragility of the natural world; the drawing, like the ice, is threatened by the presence of its viewers, and will eventually disappear.

It’s worth a visit, I promise. See you in Landskrona-