Key Passages Talk: Subject or Objects? Key Passageways between Things and Humans

Based on three research projects on aesthetic environments, this talk will discuss how and when humans and things become objects or subjects. Focusing on the figures of the opera fan, the shoe fit model, and the museum custodian, the lecture will delve into the passivity of the fan as agency, the fit model as subject and object at the same time, and the custodian and their reduction to an object, and how this, paradoxically, allows them to occupy their subject position. Audience Q&A and a reception will follow.

Claudio E. Benzecry is Professor of Communication Studies and Sociology at Northwestern University. He is the author of The Opera Fanatic: Ethnography of an Obsession and The Perfect Fit: Creative Work in the Global Shoe Industry, as well as editor of Social Theory Now (with M. Krause and I. Reed), all published by University of Chicago Press. He’s currently Co-editor in Chief of Qualitative Sociology. His work has received multiple awards from the American Sociological Association, including the Lewis Coser, and the Mary Douglas prizes.

Cosponsored by the IHC’s Key Passages series and Sara Miller McCune and George D. McCune Endowment