Cultural Sociology
Cultural sociology studies how people construct and interpret reality in contact with other people. As in other parts of sociology culture is regarded in a broad social context. Culture can legitimate prevailing conditions, it can split or manipulate people, or it can unite them.
For cultural sociologists culture is – its diversity of symbols, ideas and practices – an analytical perspective more than a concrete theme. This means that those who work with culture at our department are unified by forms of understanding, not primarily by having research areas in common. Nevertheless, meaning, power and change can be said to be general themes.
Cool Rasta Dude. Photo: Doug (Some Rights Reserved)
The research profile is broad. Among the research interests followed by cultural sociologists at the department are:
- studies of children and youth culture
- political culture
- elite-/sub-culture
- consumer culture
- leisure culture
- scientific culture
- studies of multiculteral society
The researchers of the culture field are connected to a number of national and international collaborative projects, many of which are comparative and/or interdisciplinary.
Both Master's students and internal and external research fellows contribute to this field with their research, both with individual and group projects. One example of the latter is a student-initiated book project about class mobility, which sprung out of a conference in which the inequality and culture group was involved.
Research Projects:
- EUMARGINS: On the Margins of the European Community. Young adult immigrants in seven European countries (Katrine Fangen).
- Political leadership in Norway and France (Anne Krogstad)