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The Department of the Sociology of Gender and Family of the Institute of Sociology invites you to an open seminar and lecture by Prof. Helena Flam from the University of Leipzig. The main language of the seminar and the lecture will be Polish; questions and discussion in English will be possible as well.
The seminar entitled A Walk Through the Exhibition, or an Introduction to the Critical Sociology of Images will take place on Wednesday, May 8, 2024 at 13:15 on the Koszarowa Campus at the Institute of Sociology, room 203.
In sociology various types of text analysis are well-known. However, the analysis of visuals is rare. The purpose of this seminar is to provide an introduction to Critical Visual Analysis. Racist, anti-AIDS and empowering images and cartoons will be discussed.
The lecture entitled Against Affect, For Emotions will take place on Thursday, May 9, 2024 at 13:15 at the Institute of Sociology, room 240.
Departing from the present-day free-floating assertions about affect I will offer their critical appraisal. I will question it as a sociological tool of analysis. This will be accomplished by discussing “affect as is“, “individual affective wiring”, and “affect is relational” to show that these ideas either already have been covered and researched by the sociologists of emotion and/or can be studied only indirectly via indicators which are at present missing or poorly specified. In the second part of my presentation I will turn to a more general question of what it is we want to know when we study affect or emotion. The current sociology of emotions suffers from an overabundance of case studies, relying on a rather arbitrary theory-mix. To counteract this tendency it makes sense to think back to various sociological grand theories. I will offer a few examples showing which research agenda each of these theories implies.
Prof. emeritus Helena Flam was educated in Lund, Sweden, and received her PhD from Columbia University in New York in 1982. As a post-doc she was associated with the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Uppsala, the Max Planck Institute and the University of Constance. Since 1993 she has been associated with the University of Leipzig. Her work includes publications on social organisations and movements. Recently, she has called for a combination of research on social movements, occupations and civil society. She is a European pioneer in the sociology of emotions. The Research Handbook on the Sociology of Emotion, edited by her, has just been published by Edgar Elgar.
Prof. Helena Flam has been invited to the University of Wrocław within the program Initiative of Excellence – Research University (IDUB).