ICS Researchers Produce Journal Special Issues

Two special journal issues edited by ICS researchers Professor Tony Bennett, Professor Greg Noble and Dr Megan Watkins have been released. These special issues are titled 'Habit and Habituation: Governance and the Social' and 'Antipodean Fields: Working with Bourdieu'.

Megan Watkins introduces the Body and Society Special Issue on Habit. 

Habit and Habituation: Governance and the Social

'Habit and Habituation: Governance and the Social', edited by Tony Bennett, Francis Dodsworth, Greg Noble, Mary Poovey and Megan Watkins has been published in a special issue of Body & Society (June-September 2013, 19.2-3). This paper emanated from the Habit, Governance and the Social Workshop held at UWS Parramatta in August 2010.

Abstract

The papers collected in this special issue examine the questions that are at stake in the current resurgence of interest in the subject of habit. We focus on the role that habit has played in conceptions of the relations between body and society, and the respects in which such conceptions have been implicated in processes of governance. Habit has typically constituted a point of leverage for regulatory practices that seek to effect some realignment of the relations between different components of personhood – will, character, memory and instinct, for example – in order to bring about a specific end. In reviewing its functioning in this regard across a range of modern disciplines – philosophy, psychology, sociology – the papers explore the tensions between its use and interpretation in different lineages: in particular, the Cartesian–Kantian/Ravaisson– Bergson–Deleuze lineages, for example.

Visit the Sage (opens in a new window) website to download 'Habit'.

Antipodean Fields: Working with Bourdieu

'Antipodean Fields: Working with Bourdieu', edited by Tony Bennett, John Frow, Ghassan Hage and Greg Noble has been published in a special issue of The Journal of Sociology (June–September 2013, 49.2–3). This special issue was developed from the Antipodean Fields: Bourdieu and Southern Cultures Conference event held at UWS Parramatta in June 2011.

Abstract

The papers collected in this special issue of the Journal of Sociology seek both to develop a sense of the cumulative impact of Bourdieu’s work on Australasian (‘antipodean’) debates, and to get a sense of how these debates might raise questions regarding the portability of Bourdieu’s categories. These have to do, first, with the salience of different and more fluid models of the structural variables of class, gender and ethnicity; second, with a questioning of the nation-state as the ‘natural’ border of cultural fields; and third, with the way Indigeneity, in both Australia and New Zealand, is seen to transform the ‘main¬stream’ culture and thereby to challenge many of the conventional ways of thinking about such things as cultural artefacts, cultural markets, and the ‘rules of art’.

Visit the Sage (opens in a new window) website to download the 'Antipodean Fields: Working with Bourdieu' paper.