We are pleased to announce our next OCE Research Seminar: Eeva Luthtakallio – Professor of Sociology – University of Helsinki) will join us on October 1st to discuss her work:
“Studying visual politicization: Visibility, authenticity and ‘fame democracy’”
Abstract :
The public sphere is increasingly dominated by visual content, and understanding of political action is becoming further anchored in visual repertoires. Thus, the visual dimension of political action should be a key concern in studying participation and processes of politicization. This presentation introduces work done to this end in a European, four-country comparative research that coins the concept of visual politicization to address the specificity of visual action in political sociology. I will first discuss some methodological developments that have been necessary to address visual politicization: a machine learning based computational method, and the Snap-along ethnography method that feed into one another to grasp both the big picture and an in-depth thick understanding of visual political action. Secondly, I illustrate what visual politicization may look like, and what it brings about in terms of understanding the current public sphere. I argue that a shift in the underlying values that inform people’s actions in the public sphere is taking place in the social media age. Based on conceptual and empirical work accomplished, I suggest that to tackle this shift, we need a more realistic and empirically grounded approach to the moral foundations of public action. With empirical examples from the above research, I show how the notion of fame increasingly challenges the valuation logics of the market and the civic as the value base informing public action. I illustrate the argument with examples from our ethnographic work on social media activists, the figure of an influencer/politician, and contentious political actors countering the algorithmic logic of the present public sphere.
Bio of Eeva Luhtakallio:
Eeva Luhtakallio (PhD) is professor of Sociology at the University of Helsinki. Her research situates within political and cultural sociology, and has the overarching theme of studying the mundane, everyday practices constituting democracy. She has recently written about the public sphere in the social media age, the state-civil society relations in climate activism, and the development of methods for studying visual politics. Her work has been published in e.g., the British Journal of Sociology, Distinktion, Ethnography, and Theory and Society. Luhtakallio leads several research projects as well as the Centre for Sociology of Democracy (csd.fi), a research hub bringing together sociologists with a variety of projects connected to the sociological study of democracy.
The event takes place in emlyon business school, at Lyon (144 avenue Jean Jaurès – 69007 Lyon) and on Zoom.
Please register you on the link below to be completed by September 23rd: https://forms.office.com/e/ZikWLz5w1h