Welcome to the Sociology of the Arts Group at Exeter University (SocArts). We are a team of past and present Ph.D. students of Professor Tia DeNora, united by a commitment to examine music and the arts in situations of action. Put simply, our research aims to ‘put the art back in social science approaches to the arts’. 

SocArts research is empirical and frequently linked to practical applications. Building on an Adorno-inspired account of music as a template for knowledge production, SocArts research illuminates artistic materials as they frame and mediate action and agency by probing precisely what takes place in the aesthetic encounter. How do various forms of artistic media enter into and structure action (seen as social relations, experiences, situations, or environments)? This requires consideration of both the constitutive aesthetic features of artistic genres, as well as a careful examination of artistic engagement as a social process. Our research projects employ innovative research methods to examine the specific ‘affordances’ of musical/artistic media; these include personal diaries and musical CDs, training peer-interviewers, photography, microethnography and video-elicitation. Much of this work also doubles as ‘action-research’, leading to policy recommendations for NGOs, cultural institutions, community arts schemes, and medical programs.

At the same time, we practice grounded theory in order to consider and document how music and the arts work in everyday life. Exploring the arts as they enter into social experience points to the often-overlooked emotional and embodied dimensions of social life, including pre-cognitive and non-verbal modes of knowing about and responding to our social/material environment. This results in a clearer understanding of how explicit culture (seen in the aesthetic properties unique to musical/artistic materials) may anchor or transform implicit culture (conceived of as repertoires, conventions, symbol systems, etc.) on varying degrees of embodied and cognitive levels. For more information about the theoretical impact of such an approach, see Acord and DeNora, 2009 (in Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 619, 1: 223-237). 

Our on-going projects address these themes through specific studies of the arts-in-action, which include health, conflict transformation, ethics, collective memory, aesthetic politics, embodied knowledge, mind and consciousness, migration, social inclusion, political culture and identity politics. Please click on individual project descriptions for further information about our work-in-progress. We are always interested in new research questions; you can contact any of us directly through the ‘contact’ tab above.