Seminar (GlobaLS): "The Cultural Sociology of Reading"

Program

Abstract

The book as an object and reading as a practice have for long been claimed by a number of disciplines, including history, literary theory, publishing studies, psychology, sociology, and anthropology. With notable exceptions, these lines of research have remained separate. This seminar will facilitate a conversation between sociologists and scholars in the humanities with the aim of imagining avenues for interdisciplinary work. The seminar will begin with a presentation about what is the cultural sociology of reading, its key theoretical and methodological ideas, and how it is different from existing work in sociology and cultural studies. This will be followed by a discussion of recent cultural sociological research of the reading practices of contemporary book lovers in the UK (Thumala Olave) and the global reception of the Colombian novel One Hundred Years of Solitude (Santana Acuña). The objective will be to identify the potentials and limitations of the approach of a cultural sociology of reading for the collaborative study of the production, circulation, and consumption of books and texts in global contexts.

(*Professor Thumala has shared 3 texts that will be discussed in the seminar. If you wish to participate in this discussion, please contact GlobaLS’ coordinator Diana Roig-Sanz, at dsanzr@uoc.edu, for these)

María Angélica Thumala Olave

Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Edinburgh. Her research brings together the sociology of religion, the sociology of the self, and cultural sociology, to interpret accounts of self and the justification of action in a global perspective. She is the author of the edited volume The cultural sociology of reading. The meanings of reading and books across the world. (2022, Palgrave Macmillan Cultural Sociology Series). Her forthcoming monograph, to be published by Manchester University Press (2026), is entitled The Love of Books. Attachment to a changing cultural object.