Third ISA Forum of Sociology (Web), Session organizers: Anna Schober, Justus Liebig University Giessen and Regev Nathansohn, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Time: July 10-14, 2016
Venue: Vienna
Abstract until 30 September 2015; Read the full CfP as PDF

Everyday life usually goes unnoticed. It has to do with repetition, with the usual and the regular, but also with consummation and continuance. Visual culture is involved in the constitution and maintenance of everyday life as well as in creating meaning in respect to it. As such it testifies to everyday and to ordinary processes which often escape our attention. This ordinary, everyday life, however, is also a site from which rupture, change and even upheaval or revolution might arise. And since the ordinary and the everyday are also linked to commonality, i.e. to a notion of society rather than to the monadic individual, visual culture also testifies to transformations of our ways of being in common.

At the same time, however, visual culture can trigger identification and adoption processes as well as conflict, and in this way itself becomes an agent transforming everyday life. Hence it not only indicates passages from unusual to usual or from irregular to regular but also from remaining unnoticed to becoming noticed – which highlights the political capacity of the visual in respect to everyday, regular life.

The session explores the multiple and sometimes contradictory and conflictual relations between everyday life and visual culture. Papers can include examinations focusing on any of the following topics:

• the role of visual culture in achieving everyday processes and rituals as well as in triggering change and upheaval;
• ‘the political’ in the relationship between visual culture and everyday life;
• the visual perceived as an archive of forms of everyday life (also in a comparative perspective, relating to different cultures, ages, genders, etc.);
• the uses and adoptions of various forms of visual culture in everyday practices, feelings or conditions.

Please submit your abstract until 30 September 2015 online (max. 300 words, in English). To upload your abstract please visit this link (for information see this link) AND send the abstract via email to the session organizers Anna Schober (anna.schober@sowi.uni-giessen.de ) and Regev Nathansohn (regev@umich.edu).