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Nineteenth-Century Sociographic Journalism and the Formation of Ethnographic and Sociological Knowledge

Project description

Journalism as a form of social knowledge production

The rise of commercial media in the 19th century was connected to an increased public and academic interest in social dynamics. Market-oriented publishing, newspapers, illustrated magazines, books and various forms of visual media tracked social changes in daily practices – from fashion to transport and social roles. In this context, the EU-funded DissectingSociety project will explore the epistemic significance of sociographic journalism. It will institute a cross-genre, transdisciplinary and transnational historiography of the evolution of social knowledge and revise mono-disciplinary and Eurocentric tales of the past and present. Specifically, the project will review social sketches and examples of related knowledge frames (travel accounts, philanthropic reports, caricatures) from Western Europe, the German-speaking countries and (post-)colonial Latin America.

Objective

This project enacts cutting-edge perspectives on the multigenre history of sociological and anthropological reasoning. It represents the first comprehensive study to investigate pieces of nineteenth-century sociographic journalism as formative frames/catalysts of social knowledge and science. These social sketches (often referred to as panoramic literature) provide rich ethnographic micro-analysis and often relate to debates held by statisticians, moralists, folklorists, and ethnologists. However, in the discipline-oriented histories of the social sciences and humanities, journalism has been ignored as a form of knowledge and as a founding genre of modern (disciplinary, academic) social science. By exploring the epistemic significance of sociographic journalism, the project promises to institute a cross-genre, transdisciplinary, and transnational historiography of the evolution of social knowledge and to revise mono-disciplinary and Eurocentric tales of the past and present.

The project has five kinds of outcome: a series of essays, a conference, a public exhibition, a volume, and two monographs. The corpus comprises social sketches and examples of related knowledge frames (travel accounts, philanthropic reports, caricatures etc.) from Western Europe, the German-speaking countries, and (post-)colonial Latin America. The project develops an innovative mix of anthropological/historiographical approaches to examine (1) the representational techniques of sociographic journalism (e.g. methods of constructing social types, the influence of scientific paradigms); (2) how it connects with epistemic developments (e.g. towards materialist and historicizing conceptions of society); (3) its embeddedness in socio-spatial settings and its relations to academic, artistic, and governmental projects; and (4) how the journalistic sketches are to be situated against processes of urbanization, cultural transfer, nation-building, and the institutionalization of academic disciplines.

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Keywords

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Programme(s)

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Topic(s)

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Funding Scheme

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ERC-STG - Starting Grant

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Call for proposal

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(opens in new window) ERC-2018-STG

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Host institution

LUDWIG-MAXIMILIANS-UNIVERSITAET MUENCHEN
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 1 477 125,00
Address
GESCHWISTER SCHOLL PLATZ 1
80539 MUNCHEN
Germany

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Region
Bayern Oberbayern München, Kreisfreie Stadt
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
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Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

€ 1 477 125,00

Beneficiaries (1)

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