Sketch for a Self-analysis


Book Description

This book is about French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's lifelong preoccupation with reflexivity and the application of his theories to his own life and intellectual trajectory. Along the way if offers insights into the most important French intellectuals of the time such as Foucault, Sartre, Aron, Althusser, and de Beauvoir, as well as Bourdieu's own formative experiences at boarding school and his moral outrage at the colonial war in Algeria.




Doing Reflexivity


Book Description

This book provides social science researchers with both a strong rationale for the importance of thinking reflexively and a practical guide to doing it. The first book to build on Pierre Bourdieu's reflexive work, it combines academic analysis with practical examples and case studies. The book will be of interest to researchers and students.




Erich Fromm's Critical Theory


Book Description

Interest in Fromm is increasing: as a prominent Marxist, sociologist, psychoanalytic theorist, and public intellectual, the unique normative-humanist thrust of his writings provides a crucial critical reference point for those seeking to understand and transcend the societal pathologies of our age. The essays in this volume retrieve, revive, and expand upon Fromm's central insights and contributions. They offer a critical theory of culture, the self, psychology and society that goes beyond what is typical of the narrower concerns of the fragmented and isolated disciplines of today, demonstrating the pan-disciplinary potential of Fromm's work. But this book does not simply reassert Fromm's ideas and rehash his theories, but rather reconstructs them to bring them into meaningful dialogue with contemporary ideas and cultural, political and economic developments. Providing new approaches to Fromm's ideas and work brings them up-to-date with contemporary problems and debates in theory and society and helps us understand the challenges of our times.




Practitioner Agency and Identity in English for Academic Purposes


Book Description

This volume provides insights into EAP practitioners' identity and agency in varied contexts and field positions. Each chapter delves into a theoretical perspective (Bourdieu's field theory, Post-humanism, Legitimation Code Theory, Symbolic Interactionism..), and a variety of methodologies, enabling different questions to be explored. Each chapter is also a window into the everyday life of practitioners as they navigate their professional lives, and the specificities of their EAP contexts, the politics and struggles over power, domination, legitimacy, status, ambition and recognition. The authors' concerns and strategies vary and show that the weight of powerful structures and collective habitus is difficult - but not impossible- to resist. From a socio-analysis of EAP and its narratives of origins, to a discussion on Ethics in EAP and a critique of the Global South label, the reader will explore contributions from Canada, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Pakistan, Singapore, South Africa, the UK, and Zimbabwe. The chapters reveal a field which is made up of a constellation of worlds, each with its own logic but importantly, a field with no centre. The studies in the chapters are likely to intrigue, inspire, but also disrupt some readers' expectations and challenge their assumptions about the field and its practitioners.




The Urban Sketcher


Book Description

Make the world your studio! Capture the bustle and beauty of life in your town. Experience life as only an artist can! Join the rapidly growing, international movement of artists united by a passion for drawing on location in the cities, towns and villages where they live and travel. Packed with art and advice from Marc Taro Holmes, artist and co-founder of Urbansketchers.org, this self-directed workshop shows you how to draw inspiration from real life and bring that same excitement into your sketchbook. Inside you'll find everything you need to tackle subjects ranging from still lifes and architecture to people and busy street scenes. • 15 step-by-step demonstrations cover techniques for creating expressive drawings using pencil, pen and ink, and watercolor. • Expert tips for achieving a balance of accuracy, spontaneity and speed. • Practical advice for working in the field, choosing subjects, coping with onlookers, capturing people in motion and more. • Daily exercises and creative prompts for everything from improving essential skills to diverse approaches, such as montages, storytelling portraits and one-page graphic novels. Whether you are a habitual doodler or a seasoned artist, The Urban Sketcher will have you out in the world sketching from the very first page. By completing drawings on the spot, in one session, you achieve a fresh impression of not just what you see, but also what it feels like to be there . . . visual life stories as only you can experience them.




Life-writing in the History of Archaeology


Book Description

Life-writing is a vital part of the history of archaeology, and a growing field of scholarship within the discipline. The lives of archaeologists are entangled with histories of museums and collections, developments in science and scholarship, and narratives of nationalism and colonialism into the present. In recent years life-writing has played an important role in the surge of new research in the history of archaeology, including ground-breaking studies of discipline formation, institutionalisation, and social and intellectual networks. Sources such as diaries, wills, film, and the growing body of digital records are powerful tools for highlighting the contributions of hitherto marginalised archaeological lives including many pioneering women, hired labourers and other ‘hidden hands’. This book brings together critical perspectives on life-writing in the history of archaeology from leading figures in the field. These include studies of archive formation and use, the concept of ‘dig-writing’ as a distinctive genre of archaeological creativity, and reviews of new sources for already well-known lives. Several chapters reflect on the experience of life-writing, review the historiography of the field, and assess the intellectual value and significance of life-writing as a genre. Together, they work to problematise underlying assumptions about this genre, foregrounding methodology, social theory, ethics and other practice-focused frameworks in conscious tension with previous practices.




Manet


Book Description

What is a 'symbolic revolution'? What happens when a symbolic revolutions occurs, how can it succeed and prevail and why is it so difficult to understand? Using the exemplary case of Édouard Manet, Pierre Bourdieu began to ponder these questions as early as the 1980s, before making it the focus of his lectures in his last years at the Collége de France. This second volume of Bourdieu's previously unpublished lectures provides his most sustained contribution to the sociology of art and the analysis of cultural fields. It is also a major contribution to our understanding of impressionism and the works of Manet. Bourdieu treats the paintings of Manet as so many challenges to the conservative academicism of the pompier painters, the populism of the Realists, the commercial eclecticism of genre painting, and even the 'Impressionists', showing that such a revolution is inseparable from the conditions that allow fields of cultural production to emerge. At a time when the Academy was in crisis and when the increase in the number of painters challenged the role of the state in defining artistic value, the break that Manet inaugurated revolutionised the aesthetic order. The new vision of the world that emerged from this upheaval still shapes our categories of perception and judgement today - the very categories that we use everday to understand the representations of the world and the world itself. This major work by one of the greatest sociologists of the last 50 years will be of great interest to students and scholars in sociology, art history and the social sciences and humanities generally. It will also appeal to a wide readership interested in art, in impressionism and in the works of Manet.




AIDS and the Distribution of Crises


Book Description

AIDS and the Distribution of Crises engages with the AIDS pandemic as a network of varied historical, overlapping, and ongoing crises born of global capitalism and colonial, racialized, gendered, and sexual violence. Drawing on their investments in activism, media, anticolonialism, feminism, and queer and trans of color critiques, the scholars, activists, and artists in this volume outline how the neoliberal logic of “crisis” structures how AIDS is aesthetically, institutionally, and politically reproduced and experienced. Among other topics, the authors examine the writing of the history of AIDS; settler colonial narratives and laws impacting risk in Indigenous communities; the early internet regulation of both content and online AIDS activism; the Black gendered and sexual politics of pleasure, desire, and (in)visibility; and how persistent attention to white men has shaped AIDS as intrinsic to multiple, unremarkable crises among people of color and in the Global South. Contributors. Cecilia Aldarondo, Pablo Alvarez, Marlon M. Bailey, Emily Bass, Darius Bost, Ian Bradley-Perrin, Jih-Fei Cheng, Bishnupriya Ghosh, Roger Hallas, Pato Hebert, Jim Hubbard, Andrew J. Jolivette, Julia S. Jordan-Zachery, Alexandra Juhasz, Dredge Byung'chu Kang-Nguyễn, Theodore (Ted) Kerr, Catherine Yuk-ping Lo, Cait McKinney, Viviane Namaste, Elton Naswood, Cindy Patton, Margaret Rhee, Juana María Rodríguez, Sarah Schulman, Nishant Shahani, C. Riley Snorton, Eric A. Stanley, Jessica Whitbread, Quito Ziegler




Pierre Bourdieu


Book Description

The French social philosopher Pierre Bourdieu is now recognised as one of the major thinkers of the twentieth century. In a career of over fifty years, Bourdieu studied a wide range of topics: education, culture, art, politics, economics, literature, law, and philosophy. Throughout these studies, Bourdieu developed a highly specialised series of concepts that he referred to as his "thinking tools", which were used to uncover the workings of contemporary society. Pierre Bourdieu: Key Concepts highlights his most important concepts and examines them in detail. Each chapter deals with an individual concept and is written to be of immediate use to the student with little or no previous knowledge of Bourdieu. This new edition of the leading text is entirely revised and updated and includes new essays on Methodology, Politics and Social Space.




Transclasses


Book Description

How people become "class traitors" One is not born a worker or a boss. Social reproduction is not an iron law; it admits of exceptions that must be accounted for in order to measure its scope. This book aims to understand the passage from one social class to another and to forge a method of approaching these particular cases which remain a blind spot in the theory of social reproduction. It analyzes the political, economic, social, familial and singular causes that contribute to non-reproduction, and their effects on the constitution of individuals transiting from one class to another. At the crossroads of collective history and intimate history, Chantal Jaquet identifies class locations, the interplay of affects and encounters, and the role of sexual and racial differences. She invites us to break out of disciplinary isolation in order to grasp singularity at the crossroads of philosophy, sociology, psychology and literature. This requires deconstruction of the concepts of social and personal identity, in favour of a concepts like complexion and the criss-crossing determinations. Through the figure of the transclass, it is thus the whole human condition that is illuminated in a new light.