5th ISA Forum of Sociology (6-11 July 2025)

Antonio Strati once made the intriguing suggestion that the field he had toiled in, namely, organizational aesthetics, and the sociology of culture were like two rivers running parallel to each other and which mostly didn’t intersect. The metaphor is equally applicable to the sociology of art. This is regrettable as, in his programmatic essay of 1896, “Sociological Aesthetics”, and in his various forays into aesthetic phenomena ranging from food and adornment to picture frames and Rembrandt’s art, Georg Simmel had provided one model for forging connections between aesthetics and social life. Yet the ongoing resistance to aesthetic approaches is all the more puzzling because, in addition to the interest in aesthetics that Strati mentions amongst organizational and management scholars, entire new fields and frameworks have emerged that might serve to build bridges between aesthetics and sociology: everyday aesthetics, somaesthetics, relational aesthetics, the aesthetics of cities and places, environmental aesthetics, and the study of aesthetic atmospheres, to name a few. But what about the sociology of art? Is it simultaneously the most obvious and yet the most difficult field in which to navigate aesthetic and sociological currents? We invite papers willing to ride the dangerous currents linking aesthetics and the sociology of art by thinking about the aesthetics of creativity, objects, bodies, events, places and spaces, systems and networks, economies and ecologies, or even theory and method as practiced by sociologists of the arts, in new and productive ways.