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FIELDS, WORLDS AND FIGURATIONS: USING ELIAS TO REVISIT DEPTH CONCEPTUAL IMAGERY AND EMANCIPATORY CRITIQUE

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posted on 2022-08-12, 10:01 authored by J Hughes, A Saramago, M Dunning, K Hughes
We centrally explore the significance of conceptual imagery, particularly ideas of ‘depth’ and its relationship to ideals of critique, emancipatory action, and conceptions of social structure and action. We consider how depth imagery is invoked in critiques of sociological thinkers understood to employ ‘f lat’ social ontologies. We develop a three-way comparison between Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘field,’ Howard Becker’s ‘world,’ and Norbert Elias’s ‘figuration’ to argue t hat not only is t he ‘f latness’ charge unwarranted in the case of Becker’s and Elias’s ontologies, but the axioms upon which it is made are static, substantialist, and reductively mechanistic. Drawing on the work of Elias, we consider the merits of alternative more dynamically oriented conceptual imagery, reflecting upon its implications for how we might revisit the ‘politics’ of figurational sociology and understandings of emancipatory critique more generally

History

Author affiliation

School of Media, Communication and Sociology, University of Leicester

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Published in

Sociologia e Antropologia

Volume

12

Issue

1

Pagination

53 - 80

Publisher

FapUNIFESP (SciELO)

issn

2236-7527

eissn

2238-3875

Copyright date

2022

Available date

2022-08-12

Language

en

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