Subject Area: Sociology and Anthropology
This course investigates the interrelationships between culture, economy and power within modernity. The course will address some emergent 19th to 21st century cultural features of ‘the modern’: popular culture, consumption ( fashion, shopping, leisure) visual culture (photography, mass mediated images, science imaging) and the rise of aesthetic modernism and avant-gardism. It will also contextualise ‘the modern’ within the longer legacy of the Enlightenment ‘project of modernity’ and thus related issues of democratisation, science and rationality, money and the commodity form, public sphere, politico-cultural hegemony and non-party social movements. Theorists covered will include: Simmel, Veblen, Marx, Gramsci, Weber, Benjamin, Freud, Williams.