10.30–10.45 Welcome (Coordinator of RN7 and Dean of Faculty)
10-45–12.00 Keynote: Jukka Gronow, University of Helsinki
Chair: Anna-Mari Almila
Abstract
The individuality of mass culture
Industrially produced mass culture, presumably shared by the great majority of the population, has the reputation of being uniform and monotonous, levelling out all genuine cultural distinctions of excellence, leaving hardly any room for originality and creativity, and obscuring real class differences of wealth and power. Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of the habitus and taste preferences of the dominated or working class is not of much help in understanding modern popular culture either. The taste preferences of the members of ‘his’ working class are dictated by pure functional, natural needs, guided by sensual pleasures, as if they were down-to-earth creatures beyond human culture. In stark contrast to this conception, other theorists of popular culture emphasize the increasing individuality of mass culture, due to individual lifestyles of sub-cultures, neo-tribes or social worlds – you name it! These are said to be made possible by the increasing opulence and leisure time of the working masses, followed by the continuous product differentiation and marketing of consumer goods and services satisfying the demand for individuality.
In discussing the relation between the general and the particular in the modern culture, less attention is usually paid to the important role of the social formation of fashion, operative in most, if not all, consumer goods markets. In fashion, one, almost compulsively, promotes one’s individuality by imitating others, one’s originality by doing what others do. Fashion has no permanent, external, point of reference. On the contrary, its eternal change guarantees its stability. As Georg Simmel knew, it is a phenomenon of modernity par excellence. By using, among others, David Gartman’s studies of the historical development of the American automotive markets and my own studies of the history of the Soviet fashion industry and design as examples, I shall problematize the transformative nature of fashion and its role in the modernity, as well as the forces promoting individuality, and their limits in the modern society.
12.00–12.30 Break
12.30–14.00 1st parallel session
Panel 1: Wine
Chair: Simon Stewart
Old/New/New-New/Ancient: On the Contemporary Complexification of Wine’s Social Geographies
David Inglis
Wine on paper: a study on wine distribution catalogs in Italy
Mario de Benedittis
The globalisation of wine in Hong Kong and Finland: consumption practices, social change and tast
Hang Kei Ho
Panel 2: Mapping and boundaries
Chair: Predrag Cvetičanin
Are there cultural Boundaries between Finnish Swedes and Titular Finns? An Imitation Game Inquiry
Otto Segersven
Between global and local: Cultural map of Croatian urban youth
Željka Tonković, Krešimir Krolo, Sven Marcelić
Value Orientations of Croatian Youth as a Predictor in Taste of Television Genres
Krešimir Krolo, Sven Marcelić, Željka Tonković
Panel 3: Heritage and memory
Chair: Anna Lisa Tota
Culture as ‘bridge and door’: the case of intangible cultural heritage
Rita Ribeiro
Assemblage of Memory. On the Structure and Process of Collective Memory
Katarzyna Niziołek
National Allegories in Transhistorical and Transcultural Contexts: Exodus (1400 B.C.), The Red Detachment of Women (1962), and Forrest Gump (1994)
Huang Zhuojun
14.00–14.45 Lunch break
14.45–16.15 2nd parallel session
Panel 1: Art and aesthetics
Chair: Simon Ridley
What about gastronomy? The artifying process and its limitations
Roberta Shapiro
Crafting “authentic” places and experiences: Aestheticization of taste and cultural legitimacy in craft beer culture
Süheyla Schroeder
High art to the masses: the roles and meanings of art merchandise in the contemporary art market
Svetlana Kharchenkova
Panel 2: Cosmopolitanism and EU
Chair: David Inglis
Cosmopolitan Selves: On the uses and abuses of the “citizen of the world” self-presentation
Peter Holley
Banal cosmopolitanism? What values have to do with cultural practices and taste
Sven Marcelić, Željka Tonković, Krešimir Krolo
What does it mean to support or oppose the EU? A qualitative exploration of Dutch citizens’ perceptions and evaluations of the European Union
Elske van den Hoogen, Willem de Koster & Jeroen van der Waal
Panel 3: Education and instruction
Chair: Mark Jacobs
The professional pop musician: how Dutch pop academies prepare their students for a career in music
Rick Everts, Pauwke Berkers, Erik Hitters
Bridging Nodes: Arts Instruction, Parental Education, and Omnivorous Consumption
Thomas Calkins
16.15–16.45 Break
16.45–18.00 RN07 business meeting
09.45–11.15 3rd parallel session
Panel 1: Gender
Chair: Anna-Mari Almila
Gender and Modernity: Cultural Consumption of Men and Women in Croatia
Mirko Petrić, Inga Tomić-Koludrović, Filip Užarević
Gender and the representation of visual artists abroad: the case of the Netherlands
Michaël Berghman, Pauwke Berkers, Ton Bevers
Vicarious Masculinity: Travel Writers in Disguise
EmmaLucy Cole
Panel 2: Migration, religion, ethnicity
Chair: Carmen Leccardi
Migration in the Media: The Development of the Research Field “Media and Migration” in Slovenia
Rok Smrdelj
Civic Engagement as Religious Duty among American Muslims in Los Angeles
Valentina Cantori
Cultural Repertoires on Ethno-Cultural Diversity among Primary School Children
Imane Kostet
Panel 3: Consumption and location
Chair: Lisa Gaupp
“It’s just so Roskilde”. Festival, risk and youth culture
Annette Michelsen la Cour
Consumer Culture of Moscow Hookah Bars’ Visitors
Maksim Novokreshchenov, Kseniya Shepetina
Sounds from the Street: Urban Inequality and Record Store Foundings, Milwaukee 1970-2010
Thomas Calkins
11.15–11.45 Break
11.45–13.00 Keynote: Esperança Bielsa, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Chair: David Inglis
Abstract
Translation and cultural sociology
My presentation will develop a view of the central place of translation in a conception of encompassing culture conceived as a whole way of life. It will argue that a recognition of this centrality can have profound consequences for cultural sociology, driving it in the direction of what I call a translational sociology. The presentation is divided into three parts. In the first part, I seek to establish a broad view of what translation entails and of its ubiquitous place as a process that is internal to culture approached as meaning-making activity. The second part identifies the importance of translation in a post-monolingual world where the monolingual designs of nation states are becoming increasingly challenged by widespread processes of cultural globalization. Translation contributes to question the monolingual vision that is often associated with methodological nationalism, but it also serves to avoid the opposite tendency of a methodological globalism which assumes that the substantial overcoming of physical distance implies the overcoming of cultural distance and the production of global uniformity. The last part of my presentation specifies the need for a material approach to translation as a process of linguistic transformation that is necessarily embodied in words. This is an issue that needs to be insisted upon in the context of a cultural sociology where meaning-making processes occupy a central place, but the linguistic materials that make such meanings possible have still not received the attention they deserve.
13.00–13.45 Lunch break
13.45–15.15 4th parallel session
Panel 1: Fashion
Chair: Joost van Loon
Testing trickle down: The hierarchical and transnational diffusion of cultural elements in fashion photography
Luuc Brans, Giselinde Kuipers
Fashion systems and global fashion research: from divisions to connections
Anna-Mari Almila
Femvertising and the Failed Promise of Empowering: Victoria’s Secret Goes to China and the Commercialised Sexiness Market
Xintong Jia
Panel 2: Taste, arts, creative labour
Chair: Dominik Zelinsky
Performed Boudaries in Co-Working Spaces: Interaction Rituals as Facilitators of Knowledge Exchange in Creative Work
Yosha Wijngaarden
Using Virtual Reality to study class-based dispositions to architecture and aesthetics
Dennis Mathysen & Ignace Glorieux
Objective culture and the analysis of evaluative judgements
Simon Stewart
Panel 3: Neighbourhoods and borders
Chair: Predrag Cvetičanin
Biographies of people and neighbourhoods: overlapping and splitting
Varvara Kobyshcha, Alisa Maximova
Borders made of time: how firms understand changes in time culture patterns
Emília Rodrigues Araújo, Luísa Ribeiro, Pedro Videira
Memory construction for a local community: from within and from outside
Varvara Kobyshcha Alisa Maximova
15.15–15.45 Break
15.45–17.15 5th parallel session
Panel 1: Geographies
Chair: Otto Segersven
In the Beginning There Were Interests: Revisiting Albion Woodbury Small’s General Sociology to Analysing Imagined Geographies
Joost van Loon
Computational parasitism: towards a new framework for the study of post-geographical intermediation
Danai Tselenti
From deconstructing divisive Eurocentrism to reconstructing sociological key concepts: Meanings of inequality across geographic borders
Bettina Mahlert
Panel 2: Power and money
Chair: Rita Ribeiro
‘They don’t know what it’s like to be at the bottom’: Exploring the role of perceived cultural distance in less-educated citizens’ discontent with politicians
Kjell Noordzij, Willem de Koster, Jeroen van der Waal
Across the Ocean, across the Ages: Sex, Power, and Money as Fungible Media of Scandalous Exchange
Mark D. Jacobs
The transformations of money and its importance for economic action and individual subjectivities
Matilde Massó Lago, Rebeca Noya, Nazaret Abalde
17.15–17.30 Break
17.30–18.45 Culture guest: Hamy Ramezan, film director
11.45–13.00 Keynote: Predrag Cvetičanin, University of Niš
Chair: Simon Stewart
Abstract
Classes and Culture Wars in Serbia
In the first part of my talk, I will present a model to analyse the class structure of hybrid post-socialist societies in South-East Europe (SEE), using the case of Serbia. These societies' hybridity results from their bearing clear marks of their socialist past and, on the other hand, from having been exposed to an intensive neoliberal transformation over the last thirty years. In hybrid societies, social inequalities are generated by several mechanisms of similar strength, exploitative market mechanisms and different types of social closure mechanisms based on: (1) political party membership; (2) social networks based on kinship, common geographic origin, and informal interest groups; (3) ethnicity, religion, and gender; and (4) credentials and membership in professional associations. Therefore, to analyse class divisions in such societies, a novel approach is needed.
In this new model for analysing class structure, collective symbolic cleavages also play an important part. They can lead to culture wars – struggles to achieve and maintain the power to define reality (Hunter, 1991). This notion of culture wars is close to the other conceptions of symbolic struggles in society – the concept of hegemony (Gramsci, 1948-1951) or classification struggles (Bourdieu, 1979). Cultural wars in Serbia are waged on three main symbolic battlefields: 1) between the members of the “patriotic” block on the one hand, and the “cosmopolitans” on the other, i.e. between proponents of local and global culture; 2) symbolic struggles along “the orientalist line” – between what is perceived the “European” North and “Oriental” South of the country and 3) between those who belong to scientifically minded Enlightenment pole and those at the Anti-Enlightenment pole (anti-vaxxers, flat-earthers, anti-evolutionists, religious fundamentalists…). Presentation of these symbolic struggles in Serbia will comprise the second part of my talk.
In the concluding part, I will argue that sociology cannot be "de-territorialised" in the same way economic science is (or tries to be), precisely because symbolic realm and symbolic divisions play such an important role in the social fabric and in attempts to understand society. However, what can be done is to "unpack" the naturalised and seemingly well-known meanings of "territorial" symbolic divisions.
13.00–13.45 Lunch break
13.45–15.15 6th parallel session
Panel 1: Repertoires and institutions
Chair: Anna-Mari Almila
Towards a sociology of awkwardness
Yosha Wijngaarden / Pauwke Berkers
Is Europe a stranger to itself?
Dagmara Beitnere-Le Galla
Childcare Deinstitutionalization, Development, and World Culture
Olga Ulybina
Panel 2: Class and subaltern
Chair: Joost van Loon
Agency and imagined futures of the Russian working-class youth
Ekaterina Pavlenko
No escape from reality: Mapping Finnish “deep stories” of cultural non-participation
Riie Heikkilä
Beyond East/West and South/North: Global Extremism and a New Low Culture
Simon Ridley
Panel 3: Music
Chair: Lisa Gaupp
Reconstructing music concerts online: How highbrow, pop and folk audiences virtually build context
Femke Vandenberg
The Local, the National, and the International in Popular Music Memorialisation in Ekaterinburg, Russia
Alisa Maximova
Precarious sounds and flavours and the ethics of care in music and cuisine
Isabelle Darmon
15.15–15.45 Break
15.45–17.30 Special sessions
Panel 1: FestiVersities: European Music Festivals, Cultural Diversity and Resilience in Times of Crisis
Uncertain Festival Futures: How Do Festivals Organizers Navigate ‘Loss’
Britt Swartjes and Pauwke Berkers
Making Space: Investigating the Diversity Conundrum for British Music Festivals
Magda Mogilnicka and Jo Haynes
Hybrid Festivals: Challenges Facing Cracow’s Festival Scene in Times of Pandemic
Karolina Golemo and Marta Kupis
Repairing Music Festivals: Compressed Cultural Trauma, Rematerialisations, and Responses to Cultural Loss
Ian Woodward and Signe Banke
Assemblages of Grief and Renewal: Body & Soul’s “Éiru’s Threshold” in the era of Covid19.
Aileen Dillane and Sarah Raine
Panel 2: Sociological Perspectives on Managing Culture within a Global Context
Agency and the Arts – Individualistic and Collectivistic Approaches to Socio-Cultural Diversity
Lisa Gaupp
Challenging Assumptions in Intercultural Collaborations: Perspectives from India and the UK
Ruhi Jhunjhunwala, Amy Walker
Cultural management training within Cultural Diplomacy Agendas in the MENA region
Milena Dragićević-Šešić & Nina Mihaljinac
Panel 3: New Vistas in Cultural Sociology: challenges and innovations in the study of inequalities
The Coloniality of Distinction: Class, Race and Whiteness among Post-crisis Italian Migrants
Simone Varriale
Capitalism, Architecture, Meaning: A Cultural Sociology of the Atrium
Paul Jones
The Politics of Performative Listening and Practices of Bearing Witness in the Arts
Maria Rovisco
Discussant: Lisa McCormick
17.45–18.00 Final words and thanks