Coda

2021 ◽  
pp. 156-158
Author(s):  
Robert Volpicelli
Keyword(s):  
Social World ◽  
Academic Institution ◽  
Postwar Period ◽  
The Public ◽  
Alternative Perspective ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Us ◽  
The University ◽  
Lecture Tour ◽  
Social Engagements

The coda to this book uses modernist authors’ diverse engagements with academic institutions on the US lecture tour as an opportunity to reconsider long-standing scholarly narratives about modernist institutionalization. In particular, it argues that the academic institution is not the closed, autonomous space that critics frequently make it out to be and that modernism’s relocation into the university during the postwar period should not be seen as a retreat from the social world. After highlighting several scenes from this book that reflect an alternative perspective on modernism’s relationship with the university, the coda makes a final call for us to model our contemporary institutions on the US lecture tour’s diverse social engagements as a way of furthering recent efforts in the public humanities.

Correspondent

2021 ◽  
pp. 134-155
Author(s):  
Robert Volpicelli
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Public Speaking ◽  
Academic Institution ◽  
World War ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
The University ◽  
Lecture Tour

Chapter 5 demonstrates how W. H. Auden’s public lecturing was deeply interconnected with his poetry writing during the World War II era. Important to this argument is the fact that Auden didn’t come to the US with the intention of conducting a lecture tour; instead, he arrived as a European émigré during the onset of World War II. Once in America, though, he started delivering lectures as a means of generating a secondary income. Taking these circumstances into account, this chapter examines how the outbreak of World War II informed Auden’s approach to public speaking. Through his work as a lecturer, the poet quickly assumed the role of a wartime correspondent. Yet his early lectures and addresses left him with deep ambivalence about how easily he could stir up the emotions of his audiences. This is an anxiety that compelled Auden to move to the university as a place of semi-detachment. The rest of this chapter thus goes on to trace how he used his poetry to develop a new mode of allegorical speech that still allowed him to address political issues from his new position within the postwar academic institution.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Robert Volpicelli
Keyword(s):  
Public Education ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Popular Entertainment ◽  
Literary Celebrity ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Us ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Lecture Tour

The Introduction to this book provides a framework for analyzing both the “lecture” and the “tour.” The first half presents the lecture as a pervasive yet unexamined authorial practice. It draws on current theories of literary celebrity to demonstrate how lecturing is primarily concerned with the construction of an author’s “personality.” However, it also shows how an analysis of lecturing demands a close attention to live, embodied performance generally lacking among the scholarship in this area. The second half of the Introduction then looks at the social and historical contexts surrounding the US lecture tour. Focusing on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it highlights two institutions—the lyceum and the Chautauqua—that were crucial in connecting the practice of lecturing to a larger traveling-show culture that hovered between public education and popular entertainment. Detailing this context underscores how the US lecture tour injected modernist authors into an environment of great social variety where they had to learn how to vary the presentation and performance of their own authorship.

scholarly journals What Do ‘We’ Know That ‘They’ Don’t? Sociologists’ versus Non-Sociologists’ Knowledge

2009 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 671-696 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Mesny
Keyword(s):  
Social World ◽  
Public Sociology ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
The Public ◽  
The People ◽  
Embedded Knowledge ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Status ◽  
Critical Policy ◽  
The Relationship

This paper attempts to clarify or to reposition some of the controversies generated by Burawoy’s defense of public sociology and by his vision of the mutually stimulating relationship between the different forms of sociology. Before arguing if, why, and how, sociology should or could be more ‘public’, it might be useful to reflect upon what it is we think we, as sociologists, know that ‘lay people’ do not. This paper thus explores the public sociology debate’s epistemological core, namely the issue of the relationship between sociologists’ and non-sociologists’ knowledge of the social world. Four positions regarding the status of sociologists’ knowledge versus lay people’s knowledge are explored: superiority (sociologists’ knowledge of the social world is more accurate, objective and reflexive than lay people’s knowledge, thanks to science’s methods and norms), homology (when they are made explicit, lay theories about the social world often parallel social scientists’ theories), complementarity (lay people’s and social scientists’ knowledge complement one another. The former’s local, embedded knowledge is essential to the latter’s general, disembedded knowledge), and circularity (sociologists’ knowledge continuously infuses commonsensical knowledge, and scientific knowledge about the social world is itself rooted in common sense knowledge. Each form of knowledge feeds the other). For each of these positions, implications are drawn regarding the terms, possibilities and conditions of a dialogue between sociologists and their publics, especially if we are to take the circularity thesis seriously. Conclusions point to the accountability we face towards the people we study, and to the idea that sociology is always performative, a point that has, to some extent, been obscured by Burawoy’s distinctions between professional, critical, policy and public sociologies.

Habitus and Field

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Leander
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Social World ◽  
The Body ◽  
International Studies ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Implicit And Explicit ◽  
Heuristic Devices

The terms habitus and field are useful heuristic devices for thinking about power relations in international studies. Habitus refers to a person’s taken-for-granted, unreflected—hence largely habitual—way of thinking and acting. The habitus is a “structuring structure” shaping understandings, attitudes, behavior, and the body. It is formed through the accumulated experience of people in different fields. Using fields to study the social world is to acknowledge that social life is highly differentiated. A field can be exceedingly varied in scope and scale. A family, a village, a market, an organization, or a profession may be conceptualized as a field provided it develops its own organizing logic around a stake at stake. Each field is marked by its own taken-for-granted understanding of the world, implicit and explicit rules of behavior, and valuation of what confers power onto someone: that is, what counts as “capital.” The analysis of power through the habitus/field makes it possible to transcend the distinctions between the material and the “ideational” as well as between the individual and the structural. Moreover, working with habitus/field in international studies problematizes the role played by central organizing divides, such as the inside/outside and the public/private; and can uncover politics not primarily structured by these divides. Developing research drawing on habitus/field in international studies will be worthwhile for international studies scholars wishing to raise and answer questions about symbolic power/violence.

The Social Life of Rumors

2019 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 462-474
Author(s):  
Ammara Maqsood
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Social World ◽  
Military Operations ◽  
Conspiracy Theories ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Us ◽  
Tribal Areas

Abstract In the aftermath of 9/11, with respect to the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) in Pakistan have been the site of immense violence and destruction, including from US drone attacks, ground military operations by the Pakistan Army, and retaliatory attacks by different factions of Taliban fighters. Using uncertainty as an analytic and ethnographic concept, this article traces the social life of the rumors, conspiracy theories, and stories that float around this violence. It draws attention to their multiple and often contradictory effects: rumors simultaneously breed fear and confusion, help forge intimacy, and provide certainty and coherence. Rather than subvert power relations or simply critique the powerful, I suggest that rumors and conspiracy theories provide the means through which tribal Pashtuns live and make their way in a social world in which they remain unequal, but coeval, participants.

scholarly journals Algumas dimensões culturais da trajetória de estudantes pobres no ensino superior público: o caso da UFMG

2019 ◽  
Vol 87 (216) ◽  
Author(s):  
Écio Portes
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Sociology Of Education ◽  
The Public ◽  
Poor Students ◽  
The Social ◽  
Education School ◽  
University Life ◽  
Institutional Strategies ◽  
Object Of Study ◽  
The University

Estuda as trajetórias de estudantes pobres em cursos altamente seletivos da Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, como Ciência da Computação, Comunicação Social, Direito, Engenharia Elétrica, Fisioterapia e Medicina. Explica o conjunto de circunstâncias que propiciaram esse sucesso escolar. Realiza esse intento investigando a história de estudantes pobres no ensino superior no século 20, nas Faculdades de Direito de Olinda/Recife e de São Paulo e a história do atendimento a estudantes pobres empreendido pela UFMG desde o momento de sua criação. Utiliza os trabalhos que lidam com trajetórias escolares, principalmente de sociólogos franceses, como Bourdieu, De Queiroz, Lahire, Laurens e Terrail, entre outros. Os resultados confirmam a existência de estudantes pobres no ensino superior desde a implantação deste, mesmo que pouco representativa; e, como conclusão, é afirmado que a inclusão e a permanência de estudantes pobres no ensino superior brasileiro são uma tarefa de difícil execução, que se deu sem a presença de ações desenvolvidas pelo Estado. No passado, esses estudantes desenvolveram estratégias próprias que se associariam, já no século 20, a estratégias filantrópicas e institucionais empreendidas no seio da própria instituição universitária, a exemplo do que vem fazendo a UFMG ao longo do tempo. Essas ações sustentaram um grupo de estudantes pobres no interior da universidade pública, mas não puseram fim às discriminações sofridas nem minimizaram os constrangimentos econômicos perpetuados historicamente e pelos quais outros vêm passando no cotidiano universitário. Palavras-chave: sociologia da educação; trajetórias escolares; estudantes pobres; ensino superior. Abstract This work gives priority to the historic and theoretical search necessary to the understanding of the object of study, the social and school trajectories of poor students, in the past and in the present. The new data and the proposed analyses lead us to believe that the fact of poor students being included in the Brazilian higher education and remaining at the University is not an easy task and took place without any government policies. In former times, these students developed their own strategies, which became associated, in the twentieth century, to institutional strategies, organised inside the University itself, following the example of what UFMG has been doing all this time. These actions supported a group of poor students in the public University but did not hinder prejudice nor diminished economical embarrassments, which they historically have been going through in their university routine. Keywords: sociology of education; school trajectories; university life; poor students; higher education.

scholarly journals Social contexts of music culture in the epoch of “current modernity”: from aleatoric to reflecting Shostakovich

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 23-28
Author(s):  
Marina A. Petinova
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Social Communication ◽  
Social Ontology ◽  
Social World ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Digital Environment ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Public Sphere

The dynamic processes taking place in society encompass all the meridians of activity-based forms of culture, including art. The social optics of everyday life shows that today the conditions for the existence of institutions can suddenly change, leading to a change in the way a person exists, transforming his place and habitual forms of activity, leading to an unexpected change in perception, destroying established expectations and goals. Time in such a new social ontology loses its processuality and connectedness, turning into isolated moments, impulses. Creativity processes either freeze, giving way to states of obscurity, prostration, or go into the development of a new media reality, into the public sphere of the digital environment and social communication. The above-described properties of the modern social world have allowed Sigmund Bauman to metaphorically describe it as fluid modernity. But if the borders are fluid and pass everywhere (M. Bakhtin), then the global question arises of the place and position of culture and, in particular, art. Time in such a new social ontology loses its processuality and connectedness, turning into isolated moments, impulses. Creativity processes either freeze, giving way to states of obscurity, prostration, or go into the development of a new media reality, into the public sphere of the digital environment and social communication. The above-described properties of the modern social world have allowed Sigmund Bauman to metaphorically describe it as fluid modernity. But if the borders are fluid and pass everywhere (M. Bakhtin), then the global question arises of the place and position of culture and, in particular, art. In the article, music as a form of culture is considered in relation to the social theory of Z. Bauman. And also mentioned D.D. Shostakovich in the context of the double meaning of his work.

scholarly journals Against Commodification: The University, Cognitive Capitalism and Emergent Technologies

2012 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 184-202 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Hall ◽  
Bernd Stahl
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Affective Computing ◽  
Connection To Nature ◽  
The Public ◽  
Emergent Technologies ◽  
The Social ◽  
University Life ◽  
Social Factory ◽  
The University ◽  
Labour Power

This paper investigates how four specific emergent technologies, namely affective computing, augmented reality, cloud-based systems, and human machine symbiosis, demonstrate how technological innovation nurtured inside the University is commodified and fetishised under cognitive capitalism or immaterial labour, and how it thereby further enables capital to reproduce itself across the social factory. Marx’s critique of technologies, through their connection to nature, production, social relations and mental conceptions, and in direct relation to the labour process, demonstrates how capital utilises emergent technologies to incorporate labour further into its self-valorisation process as labour-power. The University life-world that includes research and development is a critical domain in which to site Marx's structural technological critique, and it is argued that this enables a critique of the public development and deployment of these technologies to reveal them as a fetishised force of production, in order to re-politicise activity between students, teachers and the public.

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