Norbert Elias et l’histoire: Journée d’étude, 4 avril 2014

A study day on the topic of ‘Norbert Elias and History’ will be held on Friday 4 April 2014, from 09.00 to 17.30 in the Salle Julien Gracq, Lycée Henri IV, 23 rue Clovis, 75005 Paris.

Speakers are: Marc Joly, Pierre-Henri Castel, Quentin Deluermoz, Florence Delmotte, Stéphane Dufoix, Florence Hulak, and Arnaut Skornicki. The study day is organised by Claire Pagès.

Further details: email collectif@ciph.org

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Conference Update

Two significant pieces of news regarding the Elias Conference in Leicester in June. The first is that we are delighted to announce that Professor Liz Stanley will be opening the event on Friday 20th June!

The other piece of news is that, after much last minute adjustment, the Elias Conference Website is now live, complete with links to the online booking. The pricing is a follows:

The full conference WITH accommodation, all meals, refreshments, registration fees – £300.
The full Conference WITHOUT accommodation. Includes all meals (not breakfast), refreshments and registration fees – £200.
One day of the Elias Conference WITH accommodation. Includes all meals, refreshments, registration fees for one day – £150 per day.
One day of the Elias Conference WITHOUT accommodation. Includes all meals (not breakfast), refreshments, and registration for one day – £80 per day.

Please book before the 25th April to obtain these prices, which will increase thereafter by approximately 10%.

Link: http://www2.le.ac.uk/conference/elias

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Five classic essays by Richard Kilminster

Five essays by Richjard Kilminster have been added to the ‘Classic Essays’ page of the Norbert Elias Foundation website. See: http://www.norberteliasfoundation.nl/network/essays.php

We use this page to make available essays that are not so easily found elsewhere. One of Richard’s papers, on the phenomenon of naked ‘streaking’ at public events, has never been published at all, but was known to exist through the grapevine.

The full list is:

Richard Kilminster, ‘The debate about utopias from a sociological perspective’ (1982)

This paper was a product of Richard Kilminster’s participation in 1981 in the Utopieforschuungsgruppe at the Zentrum für interdisciplinäre Forschung at the University of Bielefeld. It was translated into German as ‘Zur Utopiediskussion aus soziologischer Sicht’, in Wilhelm Voßkamp (ed.) Utopieforschung: Interdisziplinäre Studien zur neuzeitlichen Utopia, Band 1 (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler Verlag, 1982). The original English text is published here for the first time. Elias’s contribution to the research of the group, ‘Thomas More’s critique of the state: with some thoughts on a definition of the concept of utopia’, translated by Edmund Jephcott, is to be found in Richard Kilminster and Stephen Mennell (eds), Essays I: On the Sociology of Knowledge and the Sciences, (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2009 [Collected Works of Norbert Elias, vol. 14]), pp. 212—57.

Richard Kilminster, ‘Streaking: the naked truth’ (1988)

Richard Kilminster’s essay on streaking has had an almost mythical status since it was written in 1988. Its existence has been known among some members of the figurational research network for a long time, but few if any of them had actually read it – because the typescript remained unpublished. It is published here for the first time. It originated in an interview with Kilminster on the topic by Tim Dower on Radio Leeds on 3 June 1988. It was also broadcast on Radio York. The text was written as a light-hearted piece for publication in the New Statesman and Society, but never appeared. It has not been revised or updated, but some more recent references and explanatory notes have been provided; they are enclosed in square brackets.

Richard Kilminster, ‘Image and Conviction in Sociology’ (1988)

This wry assessment of the plight of academic sociology was written for Footnotes, the newsletter of the American Sociological Association. It was written in the wake of economic retrenchment and the institutional contraction of sociology in Britain in the 1980s during the Thatcher governments. Drawing on his Leeds experience, Kilminster takes a longer, comparative view of the problem of promoting the importance sociology in the face of the historically recurring attacks on the field from Left, Right and Centre of the political spectrum. He also raises the awkward question of the hesitant allegiance to the discipline of many sociologists themselves.

Richard Kilminster, ‘Theory’ (1992)

Originally published in one of the long out-of-print annual updates of the main specialisms in sociology in the UK edited by Mike Haralambos, which appeared in a ring-binder format. They were intended for teachers of ‘A’-level Sociology and their more advanced students – that is, for use in secondary or high schools. The Eliasian inspiration is evident in the unadorned language, the developmental approach and the stress on intellectual tendencies as paradigm-communities. The three-phase model was elaborated further with additional evidence in Richard Kilminster’s book Sociological Revolution: From the Enlightenment to the Global Age (London: Routledge 1998 [paperback 2002]), chapter 8.

Richard Kilminster, ‘Elias and the neo-Kantians: an alternative view’ (1994)

This article, written jointly by Richard Kilminster and Cas Wouters, appeared in the January1994 issue of the now discontinued journal Amsterdams Sociologisch Tijdschrift. It was a robust response to an article in Dutch in the previous issue by Benjo Maso entitled ‘Elias and the neo-Kantians’, which was highly critical of Elias’s allegedly unacknowledged intellectual debts to Ernst Cassirer and Elias’s latent ‘substantialism’. The exchange was reprised in a slightly revised form in Theory, Culture and Society, 12: 3 (1995). There, the revised version of this piece appeared under the title, ‘From Philosophy to Sociology: Elias and the neo-Kantians’.

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Elias Twitter Feed

To all of you who are in the Twittersphere(!), you may or may not already have Followed an account dedicated to the work of Norbert Elias @neliasresearch  If not, now is the time to do so. This account will be centrally used to Tweet about the forthcoming Elias conference in Leicester, before, during and also after the event.

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Sponsor a Chair…

Our friend and colleague, Gordon Fyfe (Keele University, UK), has recently brought to our attention an initiative at the University of Leicester library which allows for the sponsoring of chairs. For the price of £115 per chair (approx €140) it is possible to ensure a chair in the library will carry the inscribed name of Norbert Elias. The library has also indicated that should ten or more chairs be sponsored in this way, it would be possible to create an entire reading room devoted to Norbert Elias. This would be a wonderful and fitting tribute to Elias, who spend a considerable amount of time in the library when he was employed at Leicester. If you are interested in sponsorship, please read the attached information. And should you be generous enough to want to go ahead, please let me know (jason.hughes@le.ac.uk).

UoL_Library_Sponsor_a_Chair

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New edition of Human Figurations journal

The latest issue of the Human Figurations has now been published online.  You can view the papers here:

http://quod.lib.umich.edu/h/humfig/11217607.0003.1*?rgn=full+text

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A Civilized Evening with Norbert Elias. University of Edinburgh, 20th February 2014

elias

 

Liz Stanley, Emilia Sereva and Jacques Human are organising a ‘Civilized Evening with Norbert Elias’ at the University of Edinburgh on 20th February from 16.00–18.00. Full details of the event are here.

The provisional programme is as follows:

Introduction

Elias talking 1: ‘The Task of Sociology’ ‘Wishful Thinking’

Readings: What is Sociology?

Elias talking 2: ‘Hegel, Marx, above all Marx’

Reading: Reflections on a Life

Elias talking 3: ‘Excitement, Boredom, Violence’

Readings: The Civilizing Process, and The Germans

Elias talking 4: ‘The Problem of Time’

Reading: The Loneliness of the Dying

Elias talking 5: ‘How To Become Human’

Readings: Involvement and Detachment

Eliasian Moments: Collegial Discussion & Convivial Talk

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PhD in Cultural Sociology at the University of Amsterdam

The post is fully funded for three years. Full details here: http://www.uva.nl/en/about-the-uva/working-at-the-uva/vacancies/item/14-032.html

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Three Graduate Teaching Assistantships in Sociology, University of Leicester

The Department of Sociology, University of Leicester has today announced three Graduate Teaching Assistantships in Sociology. The Assistantships cover full time home/EU fees, but it would be possible for international students to apply (and to pay the difference between home and international fees). The successful applicants will also receive an annual stipend and salary (worth £13,726 each year) as well as an annual Training Grant (worth £750 each year) to support appropriate research and development expenses.

The three new GTAs are the latest in a series of opportunities in the Department for funded postgraduate work. These form part of a broader initiative to grow our already substantial PhD community, and clearly mark the Department’s commitment to investing in the future of the discipline.

As subscribers to this blog will no doubt be aware, Leicester has a long-standing association with the work of Elias. An engagement with Elias’s work continues to this day, and the Department would particularly welcome applications from prospective candidates who have an interest in exploring, applying, and extending the principles of process sociology. Please direct any informal queries to me at jason.hughes@le.ac.uk

The deadline for applications is  31st March, 2014. The proposed start date is October 2014.

Further details and application forms are available on the University website, here:

http://www2.le.ac.uk/study/research/funding/sociology-gta

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Elias, Conference, Leicester. Extended Deadline: 31st January

We’ve had an amazing response to this event. To date, we have received in excess of 90 abstracts. However, we’ve also received a number of late submissions citing the Christmas vacation, family commitments, etc. as the reason for not making the deadline. In view of this, we’ve decided to extend the deadline to 31st January, 2014. It’s thus in early February that we’ll contact everyone who’s submitted an abstract with further information.

Below, once more are details of the Call for Papers.

From the Past to the Present and towards Possible Futures: The Collected Works of Norbert Elias

College Court, University of Leicester, 20th–22nd June 2014

Call for Papers

‘One cannot ignore the fact that every present society has grown out of earlier societies and points beyond itself to a diversity of possible futures.’ 

‘Today we have basically lost the ability to think of a future. Most people do not want to go beyond their present – they do not like to see themselves as a link in the chain of generations’ – Norbert Elias, 1987

In 2014 the eighteenth and final volume of the Collected Works of Norbert Elias in English will be published by University College Dublin Press.

The mammoth undertaking, in association with the Norbert Elias Foundation, Amsterdam, and under the stewardship of Professor Stephen Mennell, has taken a decade to bring to fruition. It brings together the entire corpus of Elias’s works, featuring many writings previously unpublished or not hitherto translated into English, faithfully representing his core ideas and his overall sociological position.

The conference marking the completion of the whole project will appropriately be held at the University of Leicester, where Elias lived and taught from 1954 to 1977. It both honours Elias’s association with the University of Leicester, and recognises the widespread, international and interdisciplinary interest in his work, and its resurgence within the University and more generally within the human sciences.

Craig Calhoun, Director of the London School of Economics, has agreed to give the opening address (Friday 20th). A further keynote address on  will be provided by Abram de Swaan (Saturday 21st). Further invited plenary sessions will also be provided by: Behrouz Alikhani, Marc Joly,  Marta Bucholc and Bo Paulle.

The conference is organised around some of Elias’s key works: On the Process of CivilisationWhat is Sociology?The Established and the OutsidersQuest for Excitement; and Essays I: On the Sociology of Knowledge and the Sciences.

Despite its focus on the Collected Works of Elias, the spirit of this event is one of openness to, and dialogue with, competing sociological positions. It will pose questions including:

·         How might Elias’s work be employed to address some of the challenges of the human sciences in the twenty-first century?

·         Elias was not a sociologist in the narrow sense: he aimed at a grand sociological, historical, psychological synthesis. Did he succeed?

·         To what extent does Elias’s work provide a means of redressing the fragmentation of the human sciences and, especially, reintegrating sociologists who have intellectually migrated to different, increasingly diverse, specialisms and sub-disciplines?

·         Is Elias’s critique of sociologists’ ‘retreat into the present’ still valid today? What role might Elias’s work have in the more general ‘relational turn’ that has become a major topic of discussion in recent years?

·         Is it possible to reconcile Elias’s ‘figurational’ sociological practice – marked by its emphasis on long-term processes and its caution regarding the intrusion of ‘heteronomous values’ – with the institutional demands for short-term ‘impact’, ‘accountability’, and the increasing emphasis on the short-term practical and monetary value of social scientific research for specific ‘user groups’?

·         Can Elias’s approach be squared with recent calls for a more ‘public’ sociology, and indeed, more explicitly politically-involved and directed ‘partisan’ scholarship’?

In addition to a series of postgraduate workshops and keynote presentations on these and related central concerns, the conference will feature five parallel streams organised according to Elias’s key works as follows:

On the Process of Civilisation

Civilising processes, decivilising processes, ‘dyscivilising’ processes and debates about processual ‘directions’

Violence, war, terror and international relations in long-term developmental perspective

Sociogenetic and psychogenetic relationships

Critiques, revisions and extensions to Elias’s magnum opus

(Contributors may also wish to refer to related works, such as The Court SocietyHumana Conditio and Essays II: On Civilising Processes, State Formation and National Identity)

What is Sociology?

Power, figurations, interdependence, and theoretical debates about them

Sociogenesis of sociology and the concept of ‘society’

Game models and relational thinking

Structure/agency and the society of individuals

(Contributors may also wish to refer to related works, such as The Society of Individuals and Essays III: On Sociology and the Humanities)

Essays I: The Sociology of Knowledge and the Sciences

Knowledge and scientific establishments

The politics of figurational sociology

Problems of method and methodology

Unplanned long-term processes versus planning and policy

Prospects for a grand synthesis of history, psychology and the social sciences

Elias’s sociological practice

(Contributors may also wish to refer to related works, such as Involvement and Detachment and The Symbol Theory)

Quest for Excitement

Sport, social bonding and violence

Mimetic and leisure activities

Work, leisure and consumption

Gender, power and identities in the spare time spectrum

The Established and the Outsiders

Community studies and community relations

Blame and praise gossip in the formation of communities

Developments in established–outsider relations theory

Ethnicity, migration and locality

Abstracts of no more than 500 words for the conference should be submitted to the conference organisers, John Goodwin (jdg3@leicester.ac.uk) and Jason Hughes (jason.hughes@le.ac.uk) not later than 31 January, 2014.

Abstracts must:

·         Specifically address one or more of the conference themes (and specify preferred stream)

·         Include details of institutional affiliation

·         Be written in English, since all presentations will be in English

Abstracts received after the closing date will not be considered. Registration for the conference will open 3 March 2014.

Further information about the Collected Works of Norbert Elias

Besides containing many texts never before published in English, or not published at all, the Collected Works contain new editions, extensively amended, annotated and cross-referenced. Intending contributors to the conference are recommended to consult the new editions.

1        Early Writings

2        The Court Society

3        On the Process of Civilisation

4        The Established and the Outsiders (with John L. Scotson)

5        What is Sociology?

6        The Loneliness of the Dying and Humana Conditio

7        Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilising Process (with Eric Dunning)

8        Involvement and Detachment

9        An Essay on Time

10      The Society of Individuals

11      Studies on the Germans

12      Mozart and Other Essays on Courtly Art

13      The Symbol Theory

14      Essays I: On the Sociology of Knowledge and the Sciences

15      Essays II: On Civilising Processes, State Formation and National Identity

16      Essays III: On Sociology and the Humanities

17      Interviews and Autobiographical Reflections (Autumn, 2013)

18      Supplements and Index to the Collected Works (Spring 2014)

For further information, see the UCD Press website: www.ucdpress.ie

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