Periodic Reporting for period 3 - DissectingSociety (Nineteenth-Century Sociographic Journalism and the Formation of Ethnographic and Sociological Knowledge)
Reporting period: 2023-05-01 to 2024-10-31
The project enacts novel perspectives on the multigenre history of social reasoning. It represents the first comprehensive study to investigate pieces of nineteenth-century sociographic journalism as formative frames of social knowledge and science. In the discipline-oriented historiographies of the social sciences and humanities, journalism has been largely ignored as a form of knowledge. The project's eight work packages look at the following topics: (1) the representational methods of sociographic journalism forms; (2) how they relate to various epistemic developments; (3) sociographic journalism's embeddedness in socio-spatial settings and its relationships to academic, artistic, and governmental projects; and (4) how the journalistic sketches are to be situated in relation to processes of urbanization, cultural transfer, nation-building, and the institutionalization of academic research. By exploring the epistemic significance of sociographic journalism, the project promises to instuitute 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.
At the beginning of the project, all team members had to become familiarized with the relevant secondary literature. Additionally, we gained a reasonable overview of the periodical markets in various geographic contexts (the German, French, English, and Spanish-speaking worlds) and selected relevant sources in light of the project's objectives and individual work packages. As some of the researchers had been working with the PI on related issues before, there was a good foundation for quickly starting with the first publications. Already a year after the project started, we published the bilingual volume Skizzen, Romane, Karikaturen. Populäre Genres als soziographische Wissensformate im 19. Jahrhundert. In this volume, the research team investigates how different genres on the commercialized print market (e.g. caricature, photography, urban sketches) produced ethnographic and sociological knowledge for a broad audience in diverse geographical contexts. The volume was complemented by scholarly articles from researchers from other institutions (University of Bergen and University of Vienna), which look at the representational features of early Costa Rican periodicals and pictures and descriptions of Viennese “folk types”.
In June 2022, we organized an international conference titled "Ethnography, Folklore, and Nineteenth-Century Print Culture,” which brought together researchers from different fields who contribute to new perspectives on the history of social study by connecting the print revolution with the development of social thought and study. We were happy to welcome speakers from diverse disciplines (Hispanic Literature, French Literature, History, German Philology, Cultural Anthropology) and from all over Europe (University of Brest, Oxford University, University of Tartu, University of Bergen, Free University Bozen) and the US (University of Texas at Austin). In the talks and subsequent discussions, we were able to reveal various alternative contexts and strands of early social knowledge production and open perspectives for a history of social knowledge beyond disciplinary, national, and genre-related methodologies. We are currently organizing the edition of a conference volume based on the talks and discussions.
Other major outcomes are articles in renowned journals such as Nineteenth-Century Contexts (Routledge), Nineteenth-Century Literature (University of California Press), and the Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies (Routledge).
In June 2022, we organized an international conference titled "Ethnography, Folklore, and Nineteenth-Century Print Culture,” which brought together researchers from different fields who contribute to new perspectives on the history of social study by connecting the print revolution with the development of social thought and study. We were happy to welcome speakers from diverse disciplines (Hispanic Literature, French Literature, History, German Philology, Cultural Anthropology) and from all over Europe (University of Brest, Oxford University, University of Tartu, University of Bergen, Free University Bozen) and the US (University of Texas at Austin). In the talks and subsequent discussions, we were able to reveal various alternative contexts and strands of early social knowledge production and open perspectives for a history of social knowledge beyond disciplinary, national, and genre-related methodologies. We are currently organizing the edition of a conference volume based on the talks and discussions.
Other major outcomes are articles in renowned journals such as Nineteenth-Century Contexts (Routledge), Nineteenth-Century Literature (University of California Press), and the Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies (Routledge).
The conference “Ethnography, Folklore, and Nineteenth-Century Print Culture” was a crucial event for developing research perspectives on the relevance of (commercial) print for the development of social thought and science among a larger academic community. The discussants strongly valued the conference's interdisciplinary and international character and are currently all contributing to the creation of a volume based on the conference's talks and discussions. In addition to the edition of that volume, we are currently processing eight more articles and a book based on a doctoral researcher's dissertation. A joint exhibition with a museum (tbd) and the principal investigator's final book will serve as the project's icing on the cake. The final monograph will evaluate sociographic journalism texts and illustrations and related genres as constituents of a cross-genre and global development of social and cultural thought, which in the course of the century would gradually separate from literature, illustrative art, and journalism and differentiate into academic disciplines.