Professor Tony Bennett
Professor Tony Bennett has recently joined CCR, where he has been appointed Research Professor in Social and Cultural Theory. Previously he was Professor of Sociology, and Director ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-cultural Change
Research interests
My general interests are in areas where the concerns of sociology, cultural studies and cultural history intersect. Areas of special interest include: (i) the history and theory of museums, and the role played by diverse systems of representing and remembering the past in the construction of particular ways of being and acting in time; (ii) the history and theory of the development of modern forms of cultural governance and their role in shaping social conduct in the context of different regimes of citizenship; (iii) statistical and ethnographic studies of everyday cultural practice and their relevance to the concerns of both contemporary class theory and cultural policy development; (iv) the development of forms of cultural analysis, drawing on the perspectives of science studies and governmentality theory, that are capable of throwing new light on the relation between culture and the social; and (iv) the relationships between social theory and cultural theory.
Current projects underway in these areas include an ESRC funded inquiry into the relationships between cultural capital and social exclusion in contemporary Britain. This inquiry, conducted with Dr. Elizabeth Silva of the Open University and with Professor Mike Savage and Professor Alan Warde of the University of Manchester, constitutes a major empirical and theoretical engagement with the work of Pierre Bourdieu. It is also related to current cultural policy concerns through partnership arrangements with the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, the Office of National Statistics, the British Film Institute, and the four national Arts Councils.
Work is also beginning on two new projects. One, Making Culture, Changing Society focuses on the relations between the emergence of a range of distinctive entities associated with the modern concept of culture (art, aesthetics, heritage) and their enrolment in liberal forms of government. The second, Making and Mobilising Worlds, considers the role played by the relationships between collecting expeditions in the fieldwork phase of anthropology and the practices of museums and other exhibition and heritage forms as agents of social change.
Recent editorial projects include, with Professor Lawrence Grossberg of the Univesity of North Carolina and Professor Meaghan Morris of Lingnan University in Hong Kong , New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society, published by Blackwells in 2005. I am also editing a Handbook of Cultural Analysis for Sage Publications with Professor John Frow of the University of Melbourne.
Recent publications
- Bennett, T. (2008) Culture and Society: Collected Essays, Beijing: Guangxi Normal University Press.
- Bennett T. and J. Frow (eds.) (2008) Handbook of Cultural Analysis, London: Sage.
- Bennett, T. (2008) 'Sociology and culture' in T. Bennett and J. Frow (eds.) Handbook of Cultural Analysis, London: Sage.
- Bennett, T. and Warde, A. (2008) 'A culture in common: The cultural consumption of the UK managerial elite' in Williams, K., and Savage, M., (eds.) Rethinking Elites, Sociological Review Monograph.
- Bennett, T. (2007) Critical Trajectories: Culture, Society, Intellectuals, Malden US, and Oxford: Blackwell
- Bennett, T. (2007) 'Making culture, changing society: the perspective of culture studies', Cultural Studies, vol 21, nos 4-5, pp 610-629.
- Bennett, T. (2007) 'The work of culture', Journal of Cultural Sociology, vol 1, no. 1, pp 31-48.
- Bennett, T. (2007) 'Habitus clivé: aesthetics and politics in the work of Pierre Bourdieu', New Literary History,38 (1), pp 201-228.
- Bennett, T., Dodsworth, F., Joyce, P. (2007) ‘Introduction: Liberalisms, Government, Culture’, Cultural Studies 21 (4-5), pp 525-48, ISSN 0950-2386 print / 1466-4348 online. This forms the introduction to a special double issue of the journal edited by these authors.
- Bennett, T., Grossberg, L., and Morris, M., (2007) ‘Originals remakes, assemblages: A retrospect on New Keywords’, Criticism 47.4 (2007), pp 567-571.
- Bennett, T. (2006) ‘Exhibition, difference and the logic of culture’ in I. Karp and C. Kratz (eds) Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 46-69.
- Bennett, T. (2006) ‘Civic seeing: museums and the organisation of vision’, in S. MacDonald (ed) Companion to Museum Studies, Oxford: Blackwell, 263-281.
- Bennett, T. (2006) ‘Culture and differences: the challenges of multiculturalism’ in S. Boda and Maria Rita Cifarelli (eds) When Culture Makes the Difference: Heritage, Arts and Media in Multicultural Society, Rome: Meltemi Editore, 21-37.
- Bennett, T. (2006) ‘Distinction on the box: cultural capital and the social space of broadcasting’, Cultural Trends, 15 (2 and 3), 193-212.
- Bennett, T. (2005) ‘The media sensorium: cultural technologies, the senses and society’ in M. Gillespie (ed) Understanding Audiences, Milton Keynes: The Open University Press.
- Bennett, T. (2005) ‘The historical universal: the role of cultural value in the historical sociology of Pierre Bourdieu’, British Journal of Sociology, 56 (1), 141-164.
- Bennett, T. (2005) ‘Civic laboratories: museums, cultural objecthood, and the governance of the social’, Cultural Studies, 19 (5), 521-547.
- Bennett, T. (2004) Pasts Beyond Memory : Evolution, Museums, Colonialism, London and New York : Routledge.
- Silva, E. and Bennett, T. (eds) (2004) Contemporary Culture and Everyday Life, Durham : The Sociologypress.
- Bennett, T. (2002) ‘Contesting times : conflicting histories in postcolonial contexts' in Jordan and Pile (eds) Social Divisions and Differences, Oxford : Blackwells, pp. 49-78.
- Bennett, T. (2002) ‘Sociology and government' in Hamilton and Thompson (eds) The Uses of Sociology, Oxford : Blackwells, pp. 41-67.
- Bennett, T. (2002) ‘Culture and governmentality' in Jack Bratich, Jeremy Packer and Cameron McCarthy (eds) Foucault, Cultural Studies and Governmentality, New York : SUNY Press, pp. 47-66.
- Bennett, T. (2002) ‘Stored virtue: memory, the body and the evolutionary museum', in S. Radstone and K. Hodgin (eds) Regimes of Memory, London and New York : Routledge, pp. 40-54.
- Bennett, T. and Carter, D. (eds) (2001), Culture in Australia : Policies, Publics, Programs, Melbourne : Cambridge University Press, 384 pp.
- Bennett, T. (2001) Differing Diversities: Cultural Policy and Cultural Diversity, Strasbourg: Council of Europe.
- Bennett, T. and Watson, D. (eds) (2001) Understanding Everyday Life, Oxford: Blackwells.
- Bennett, T. (2000) 'Intellectuals, culture, policy: the technical, the practical and the critical', Pavis Papers in Social and Cultural Research, no. 2, Pavis Centre for Social and Cultural Research, Milton Keynes, The Open University.
- Bennett, T. Frow, J. and Emmison, M. (1999) Accounting for Tastes : Australian Everyday Cultures, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press.
- Bennett, T. (1998) Culture: A Reformer's Science, Sydney, Allen and Unwin; London and New York, Sage.
- Bennett, T. (1998) 'Pedagogic objects, clean eyes and popular instruction: on sensory regimes and museum didactics', Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science and Technology, vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 345-71.
- Bennett, T. (1998) 'Cultural studies : a reluctant discipline', Cultural Studies, vol. 12, no. 4, pp. 528-45.
- Bennett, T. (1998) 'Culture and policy : acting on the social', Cultural Policy, vol. 4, no. 2.
- Bennett, T. (1997) 'Speaking to the eyes : museums, legibility and the social order' in Macdonald, S. (ed.) Politics of Display: Science as Culture, London, Routledge.
- Bennett, T. (1995) The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics, London and New York, Routledge.
- Bennett, T. (1995) 'Figuring the audience' in Hay, J. and Grossberg, L. (eds) The Audience and its Landscape, Boulder, CO, Westview Press.
- Bennett, T. (1990) Outside Literature, London, Routledge.
Contact Details
Centre for Cultural Research
University of Western Sydney
Building EM, Parramatta Campus
Locked Bag 1797
Penrith South DC NSW 1797
Australia
email:t.bennett@uws.edu.au