Hegemony and Fields. Dialogues through Gramsci and Bourdieu.

Within the disciplinary fields of the humanities and social sciences, several well-established and globally flourishing research traditions have produced, and continue to produce, exegetical and theoretical studies on both Antonio Gramsci and Pierre Bourdieu. Alongside these lines of research, various attempts have been made to extend and empirically apply elements or aspects of each author’s intellectual oeuvre, taken separately. However, the fact is that research practices inspired by them have frequently circulated loosely leading to questionable conflations and and parallels. The two authors have also been used by researchers attempting to distance themselves from them to promote their own theories. We think we should move beyond these approaches and create the conditions for a structured epistemological, theoretical and methodological dialogue; this means systematically identifying points of convergence and divergence.

This context provides an opportunity to account for terrains, trajectories, strategies and ties, with their related developing potentials and criticalities, by which we have sought to initiate outlining a dialogical space between Italian and French scholars, and between France and Italy as national spheres that produced Gramsci and Bourdieu as intellectuals organic to their own times, but whose social trajectories and histories of critical reception and circulation show significant connections and homologies.

One of the underlying objectives of this project is to illustrate the operativity and the potential of certain nodes, conceptual tools, epistemological and methodological perspectives drawn from a close dialogue and interaction, not so much between Gramsci and Bourdieu’s works (opus operatum), but more specifically between their respective modus operandi – that is, their thought styles and interpretative and analytical perspectives on the production and reproduction of the multiple articulations of legitimation processes – mainly through a discussion of the complementarity between the epistemological framework of hegemony and the analytical infrastructure of the field.