School of Social and Political Science

Description

Presented by the Sociology Speaker Series.

In-person venue: Violet Laidlaw Room, 6th floor Chrystal Macmillan Building

About the talk:

It sometimes feels like we live in an age of uncertainty. But this feeling is more familiar in some fields than others. In this talk, Chong will take us into the highly subjective and ephemeral world of fiction reviewing and explore how book critics navigate distinct types of uncertainty in their work. What emerges is a story about how what we don't know isn't an absence of information, but a form of information that shapes what we do in the present.

About the speaker:

Phillipa K. Chong is a cultural sociologist who specializes in how we define and evaluate worth: this includes the value we assign to social objects (e.g., books, paintings, knowledge, opinions, etc) and social groups (e.g., experts, artists, minority groups, etc). To date, her empirical focus has been on book reviewers as market intermediaries in the cultural market.

Her present work explores how fiction reviewers engage in the dual project of constructing (i) the value of new novels in the absence of objective indicators of aesthetic quality; and (ii) the legitimacy of their professional judgments given the accepted subjectivity of taste. She has written a book on these topics, entitled, Inside the Critics' Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times, forthcoming with Princeton University Press.

She currently works as an Assistant Professor in Sociology at McMaster University. Before arriving at her current post, she earned her PhD in Sociology from the University of Toronto, and was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Sociology at Harvard University.

About the series:

The Sociology Speaker Series presents the latest research by academic staff members and distinguished guests from across the United Kingdom and beyond. Registration is free and open to all University of Edinburgh students and staff.