How To Practice Visual and Material Culture Studies? A Cultural Sociological Perspective
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2013 |
| Type | Article in Periodical |
| Magazine / Source | Sociologica |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| web | http://www.sociologica.mulino.it/doi/10.2383/73714 |
| Doi | http://dx.doi.org/10.2383/73714 |
| Field | Sociology, demography |
| Keywords | visuality cultural studies material culture materiality cultural sociology culture |
| Description | We seem to be living in a time of revolutions which do get televised or at least tweeted, or both. Yet, for a given observer, most political upheavals are remote “news“ about numerous distant struggles. Following countless observations of this fact, a contributor to this volume notes that ours is a culture of “media-ubiquity“ and “image-saturation“ (Frosh, p.186). Moreover, prominent visual media scholars argue, that visuality is as much about perception as it is – literally and figuratively – a political matter of concealment and spectacle, a “technique of colonial and imperial practice“ (Mirzoeff 2013: xxxvii). The editors of the present book concur. The world is indeed full of conflict and associated visual strife. Each national outbreak has the potential of shaking the international stage and even punching above its own weight, provided it is properly shown and referenced. If this social process does happen, it is possible in no small measure because of sustained visual exposure that helps turn a given local occurrence into a translocal event, or – to use Bruno Latour’s parlance – ‘a matter of fact‘ into ‘a matter of concern.‘ This review essay examines how the book edited by Gillian Rose and Divya P. Tolia-Kelly deals with the intricacies of the outlined topic and the related matters, and how sociologists can improve the methods and theories proposed in the volume. In particular, it interrogates the relation between visuality and linguality on the one side, and aims to adjudicate the merits of interpretive cultural sociology vis-a-vis materialist cultural studies on the other. |
| Related projects: |