The « Contemporary cultural imaginaries » seminar focuses on aspects of contemporary Anglophone culture that still remain largely underresearched in France. Turning to highly recent cultural productions, practices and theoretical paradigms, it explores the hybrid aesthetic forms and categories emerging at the frontier of cultural anthropology, cultural materialism, and the history of aesthetics and technology. Such interdisciplinarity is also premised on the thorough historicizing of cultural practices and forms, whether it be from an epistemological, ideological or economic perspective.
These last years, we have more specifically turned to the new forms of visibility emerging in our digital era. A volume of essays—New Objects of Visibility—is to be published that will offer a varied range of reflexions on our contemporary visual culture, ranging from the new language of film and TV series credit sequences, to the new corporeal practices induced by digital technologies—such as swiping—or the recent avatars of phenomenology and the insistence on corporeality and immersiveness. This collective volume will explore our new sensorium in the making and the varied theoretical models it imagines. The volume is to be published in 2018.
From September 2017, building on research done these past years on visibility and immersiveness, we will turn to an exploration of the imaginaries of the body and of materialism.
Heads of the Group: Catherine Bernard.
Research seminar: Imaginaires contemporains.
