Sara Malou Strandvad: From fields and worlds to a multiplicity of spheres? Theorizing cultural production in the 21st century  

Digitalization, internationalization, and mass education have radically transformed art production. Yet, sociologists of the arts continue to promote conceptual models developed in bounded national spaces with analogous social interactions and clear internal power dynamics. The most dominant approaches in the sociology of the arts have long been inspired by Pierre Bourdieu and Howard S. Becker. Bourdieu’s work on the production of culture, presented in The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (1993) and The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (1996), and Becker’s Art Worlds (1982) remain the cornerstones in cultural production studies. These works have been essential in defining what the sociology of the arts is, demonstrating how artists and their work are made by the social worlds in which they exist. Nevertheless, these perspectives have also been criticized for their dated empirical foundations and for ignoring the affective properties of the art that is made. Bourdieu’s fields of cultural production concept is mapped on the French literary field of the late 19th century, and Becker’s notion of art worlds is based on the 1940s Chicago jazz scene. Both highlight the importance of social conventions: they demonstrate how conventions are maintained and how they steer cultural production processes.  
Using contemporary artist residencies as an empirical case study, including publicly funded intercontinental network collaborations and a myriad of self-organized initiatives, this presentation takes some first steps towards a new conceptualization of the multiplicity of social spheres in the arts in the twenty-first century. By unpacking how residencies embody constructive institutional critiques that counterbalance the notoriously precarious work in the arts and promote global mobility, diversity and sustainability, the presentation offers ‘ecologies of artistic production’ as an alternative, moving us toward a transnational approach centered on artistic projects in-the-making.

BIO
Sara Malou Strandvad is Lead of libraries, citizen service and culture houses in Odsherred municipality, Denmark since August 2024. Before then, she was Associate Professor in Arts Sociology at the Department of Arts, Culture and Media at University of Groningen and chair of the section on Arts, Policy and Cultural Entrepreneurship for seven years. A sociologist whose research concerns creative work and production studies, her research includes studies of development processes in Danish film production based on a socio-material perspective inspired by science and technology studies, observation studies of the valuation processes in a design school entrance exam, research on the market creation among social media performance artists, studies of cultural entrepreneurship training for self-employed Dutch artists, supported by the Dutch Research Council, and interview studies with self-employed production staff in the performing arts sector in the North of the Netherlands.

• Program, Æstetisk Seminar E2024
• Plakat, Æstetisk Seminar E2024

Æstetisk Seminar E2024 er tilrettelagt af Christiane Særkjær og Jan Løhmann Stephensen, Institut for Kommunikation og Kultur, Aarhus Universitet.