3/11: At the Swedish biennial sociology conference parties are in castles and there is always assigned seating like at a wedding. There were also songs about sociology and sociology-themed stand-up, including a complicated joke about birth rates that involved puns on letting sleeping dogs lie and kicking a man when he’s down. Demography jokes.
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.
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-
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!
