The sociological imagination of modernity is entangled with our senses and, primarily, with vision, yet the process of being able to see something is often extraordinarily complex. Marx’s attempt to visualise commodities, Durkheim on totems of religious life, Simmel on money and the metropolis, Elias on social taste, are all projects which attempt to see beyond the empirical and into levels of abstraction and immateriality that lie beyond the senses. Visualisation is part of the making of modernity and a response to it.
This series explores and elaborates upon our experiences of modernity. It offers ways of seeing from the margins of our world and from its exemplary sites of industry and urbanisation. Grand narratives of human history mix with micro-histories that are embedded across our globe. Using multi-disciplinary methods, it seeks to expand upon our knowledge of global and local visual cultures, whether in architecture, painting, photography, theatre, film and other cultural forms. Examining the material and the tangible as well as the immaterial and the imaginary it aims to offer the best of sociological thinking and thought: literally re-visioning our social world.
Visual Modernities welcomes new studies that have visualisation at their heart and embed new ways of perceiving our shared world and our multiple and complex experience of modernity. It seeks to publish works that are innovative, multi-disciplinary in scope and which challenge and rupture the classical social sciences with new ways of looking at method, theory and our social futures.
By Julie Crawshaw
September 25, 2023
Tracing the associations between artists, planners and engineers with and within the materials of our environment, this book introduces the relational theory of ‘art worlding’ as a way of coming to know our organic continuity. Through a series of ‘sculptural’ ethnographies of the making and doing ...
By Martyn Hudson
May 31, 2023
This book examines the social production of our world, of the worlds of the past and of the worlds of the future, considering the ways in which worlds are created in both actuality and imagination. Bringing together central concepts of classical sociology, including social change, transformation, ...
By Martyn Hudson
April 07, 2023
Social Ghosts and the Dead of World History looks at the global phenomena of the dead in world history, examining the phantasms and spirits of classical social science and philosophy. From Hegel’s ‘World-Spirit’ to Max Weber’s ‘Verstehen’ and Marx’s phantasms, there is a recurring obsession with ...
By Jeremiah Morelock
January 09, 2023
With a focus on I Am Legend and Day of the Dead—two series of film remakes of popular science fiction stories—this book addresses the social origins of the recent surge in authoritarian and populist social movements. Exploring the ways in which the themes of tribalism, confidence in medical science...
By Paul Alexander Stewart
August 01, 2022
This book offers a re-examination of art production in terms that understand the process of learning as the production of art itself. Drawing on the thought of Ranciere, Freire, Gramsci and Mouffe, it provides an account of the politics of art production and a theoretical understanding of hegemonic...
By Martyn Hudson
August 27, 2019
Methods of visualising modernity and capitalism have been central to classical social science. Those methods of seeing, specifically in the work of Marx, were attempts to capture visually the fragmenting edifice of capital in its death throes and were part of a project to hasten its demise - yet ...