The Aesthetic and Culture in the Arts
The 3rd Sociology of the Arts Postgraduate Research Symposium
7 October 2026 (9.00am-5:00pm BST)
University of Edinburgh, UK
About the Event
The aesthetic is an unavoidable issue for sociologists who are interested in the arts, cultural objects and activities, tastes and social stratification, and so forth. But the current scholarship remains segmented across these various domains and sub-disciplines, even though the aesthetic is increasingly permeated and ubiquitous in our daily life and various cultural processes. This research landscape calls for more interdisciplinary dialogues.
This postgraduate symposium invites emerging sociologists and art historians and theorists to exchange perspectives on the aesthetic. Both Master’s and PhD students are welcome. Along with conventional presentations, the symposium also invites listeners to write down their comments to the presenters in order to foster evolving dialogue among participants. The event will have around nine presentations and end with a keynote by Dr Liliana Riga.
Keynote Speaker
- Dr Liliana Riga: The lonely palette – disenchantment and the art-historical imagination
Introduction
Despite a scholarly consensus on the need to bring artworks more fully into sociological analyses, we still grapple with how to think about the artwork itself. And yet why should art history and the humanities have all the fun? Can we articulate a non-cynical, non-critical, non-reductive art historical sociology that is also not too encumbered by homo academicus? I offer a simple sociology of aesthetic encounter that conceives artworks as age-old containers of social knowledge, of human experience, human values and moral frameworks, and as objects ‘in the museums, where infinity goes up on trial’. My focus here is on paintings because on the historical sociological record images or pictorial culture have existed in all human societies. Retrieving insights from art history, philosophy of art, historical sociology, literary theory, and anthropology, I reflect on how an aesthetically sterile sociology of art might be re-enchanted by cultivating an art historical imagination.
About the Speaker
Lilli Riga is a historical sociologist in the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh. This talk draws on a forthcoming book, The Modern Self in Art. An Art-Historical Sociology.
Registration
This event is free to attend but registration is required. Lunch and refreshments will be provided.