Creativity and Sociology: Doing Social Research with and on Artistic Sources explores the relationship between artistic and sociological narratives, considering the ways in which artistic narratives in their different forms can be both subjects of sociological observation and tools for the sociological analysis of reality. Thematically divided into sections that focus on “doing sociology on art” ’ and “doing sociology with art”, it observes the major forms of art – including literature, music, theatre, painting, photography, cinematography, and interactive arts such as videogames – examining each as objects and instruments of sociological analysis: as narratives that can offer new perspectives on the world. Bringing together under a single epistemological framework area of research that frequently remains separate, or beyond sociological framing, this book will appeal to scholars of sociology, social theory, and social science methodology with interests in media and artistic narratives.
Introduction Part 1: Creative Sources of Social Research: Doing Sociology on Art 1. Literature - From Aesthetics to Politics: Opening up the Sociological Dimension of Literature 2. Theater - After the Brain Invasion: From Oppressed People to Capability Context 3. Cinema - Cinema as Traumatic Memory: The Sociological Use of Documentary Films 4. Photography - Interrogating ‘Street Photography’ as a Cultural Practice, a Visual Data Source, and a Sociological Research Strategy 5. Comics - On the Sociology of Comics: History, Dreams, and Panoptical Thinking 6. Music - ‘Soundscapes’ and the ‘Acoustic Past’: Collective Memories and The Musical Composition of Space and Time 7. Videogames - The Videogame Plane: A Non-Representational Methodology of Form Part 2: Creative Methodologies of Social Research: Doing Sociology with Art 8. Literature - Making Social Research with Fictional Narratives 9. Theater - Sociology of Theatre in the Age of the Uncertainty of ‘Glocal’ and Mediatized Societies 10. Cinema - Qualitative Research with Social Science Films: From Data Collection to Film Production 11. Photography - Rethinking Photo-Elicitation in Ethnography, Autoethnography, Creative (Art-Based) Methods and Collaborative Methods 12. Comics - The Society Born from the Balloon: Doing Sociology with Comics 13. Music - Musicking, Boundary-Work, and Collective Memory: The Construction of Genre, Heritage, and Canons 14. Videogames - The Representation of Delirium: A Link between Player and Society
Matteo Jacopo Zaterini is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Human and Social Science at the University of Salento, Italy. Corrado Punzi is an associate professor in sociology of cultural and communicative processes at the University of Salento, Italy. Mariano Longo is a professor of sociology at the University of Salento, Italy. He is the author of Emotions through Literature and Fiction and Social Reality.
