The last three decades have seen extensive reflection concerning how science communication should be modelled and understood. In this essay we propose the value of a cultural approach to science ...communication — one that frames it primarily as a process of meaning-making. We outline the conceptual basis for this view of culture, drawing on cultural theory to suggest that it is valuable to see science communication as one aspect of (popular) culture, as storytelling or narrative, as ritual, and as collective meaning-making. We then explore four possible ways that a cultural approach might proceed: by mobilising ideas about experience; by framing science communication through identity work; by focusing on fiction; and by paying attention to emotion. We therefore present a view of science communication as always entangled within, and itself shaping, cultural stories and meanings. We close by suggesting that one benefit of this approach is to move beyond debates concerning ‘deficit or dialogue’ as the key frame for public communication of science.
Dynamic Form traces how intermedial experiments shape modernist texts from 1900 to 1950. Considering literature alongside painting, sculpture, photography, and film, Cara Lewis examines how these ...arts inflect narrative movement, contribute to plot events, and configure poetry and memoir. As forms and formal theories cross from one artistic realm to another and back again, modernism shows its obsession with form—and even at times becomes a formalism itself—but as Lewis writes, that form is far more dynamic than we have given it credit for. Form fulfills such various functions that we cannot characterize it as a mere container for content or matter, nor can we consign it to ignominy opposite historicism or political commitment. As a structure or scheme that enables action, form in modernism can be plastic, protean, or even fragile, and works by Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Mina Loy, Evelyn Waugh, and Gertrude Stein demonstrate the range of form's operations. Revising three major formal paradigms—spatial form, pure form, and formlessness—and recasting the history of modernist form, this book proposes an understanding of form as a verbal category, as a kind of doing. Dynamic Form thus opens new possibilities for conversation between modernist studies and formalist studies and simultaneously promotes a capacious rethinking of the convergence between literary modernism and creative work in other media.
There is a renewed interest amongst science communication practitioners and scholars to explore the potential of storytelling in public communication of science, including to understand how science ...storytelling functions (or could fail) in different contexts. Drawing from storytelling as the core theme of the 2018 conference of the Public Communication of Science and Technology (PCST) Network, we present a selection of papers, essays and practice insights that offer diverse perspectives. Some contributions focus on the cultural and structural qualities of science stories and its key success factors, while others explore new formats, platforms and collaborators in science storytelling activities.
What do sociologists mean when they describe culture as founded on "shared understandings"? Sharing an understanding does not necessarily imply having the same opinions but rather agreeing on the ...structures of relevance and opposition that make symbols and actions meaningful. Because meaning is contextual, different people might interpret the same reality in different ways. Yet standard quantitative sociological methods are not designed to take such heterogeneity into account. In this article, I introduce a new method -- relational class analysis -- that uses attitudinal data to identify groups of individuals that share distinctive ways of understanding the same domain of social activity. To demonstrate its utility I use it to reexamine the cultural omnivore thesis. I find that Americans' understandings of the social symbolism of musical taste are shaped by three competing logics of cultural distinction, in a manner that complicates contemporary sociological accounts of artistic taste. Adapted from the source document.
This engaging study explores how the works of Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, and others were taken up by caricaturists as a means of helping the eighteenth-century British public make sense of political ...issues, outrages, and personalities. The first in-depth exploration of the relationship between literature and visual satire in this period, David Taylor's book explores how great texts, seen through the lens of visual parody, shape how we understand the political world. It offers a fascinating, novel approach to literary history.
When the mind turns more than one would wish towards questions of - as W. G. Sebald puts it - the 'natural history of destruction', comparative consideration by artists and interdisciplinary scholars ...is directed to the interstices between images, novel, essay, (auto)biography, memorial and travelogue. Artists have been among Sebald's most prolific interpreters - as they are among the more fearless and holistic researchers on questions concerning what it means never to be able to fix an identity, to tell a migrant's story, or to know where a historical trauma ends. Sebald has - as this book attests - also given artists and scholars a means to write with images, to embrace ambiguity, and to turn to today's migrants with empathy and responsibility; as well as to let academic research, creation and institutional engagement blend into or substantially inform one another in order to account for and enable such necessary work in the most diverse contexts.
•Jazz was not accepted in the elite institutions of the world of music in the 1940s or 50s.•But it gained a toehold in some of them in the 1930s, in others after 1960.•In the 1940s and 50s, jazz ...advocates built alternative institutions for jazz, duplicating the mainstream or working around it.•Alternative institutions increased the profile of jazz in mainstream ones after 1960.•Consecration of musics like jazz is therefore uneven and combined.•Jazz will attain full equality with classical music unless advocacy efforts stop.
I find that jazz gained a toehold in U.S. concert halls, music awards, festivals, and schools in the 1930s, 60s, 70s or 80s. I reconcile this with extant research, which identifies the 1940s and 50s as the crucial moment for jazz, by linking the processes that transpired in the sites I examine to those past research has focused on. During the 1940s and the 50s, facing resistance in the mainstream institutions I highlight, advocates of jazz built alternative institutions that duplicated or worked around the mainstream; some of these then helped jazz enlarge its mainstream foothold. Based on these findings, I extend the conceptualization of consecration as ongoing permanent revolution: in already settled fields, the consecration of new, racially stigmatized art forms may follow from uneven and combined development across multiple institutional sites, constituting a string of loosely-related events of varying intensity. A reassessment of the highbrow-lowbrow scheme follows.
Posing questions of quality and beauty as discoverable in artefacts, On the Aesthetics of Beowulf and Other Old English Poems significantly advances our understanding not only of aesthetics and Old ...English poetry, but also of Old English attitudes towards literature as an art form.
In the field of theory of literature and art (i.e., the discipline of Wenyi xue) in contemporary China, the post-1930s and the post-1950s generations (scholars who were born between 1930 and 1939 and ...between 1950 and 1959, respectively) are the most influential ones. They are father and son generations both in a physiological and a sociocultural sense; both occupied or are still occupying important positions in Chinese academia. Their profound differences in life experiences, educational background, intellectual structures, cultural stances, and literary perspectives significantly affect their knowledge production in Chinese literary theory. This article attempts to use Karl Mannheim's theory of generations to analyze the knowledge production in literary and art theory in contemporary China and to explore the sociohistorical reasons for the formation of the differences between the two generations of scholars. In order to demonstrate their differences in literary conceptions and cultural positions, by reviewing the "aesthetic ideological debates" that took place in the 1990s within the post-1930s generation, as well as the history of textbook compilation, this article explores how their views on the aesthetic properties and the autonomy of literature are a matter related to "generations."
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