SGS Seminars: Prof. Paul E. Willis
The School of Graduate Studies hosts Prof. Paul E. Willis, a distinguished scholar in sociology of culture launching his newly translated book into Turkish, Profane Culture (Aykırı Kültür). Dr. Gökben Demirbaş, translator of the book, will be the discussant.
Profane Culture, Princeton University Press, 2014 / Aykırı Kültür, Ayrıntı Yayınları, 2022
Abstract: A classic of British cultural studies, Profane Culture takes the reader into the worlds of two important 1960s youth cultures—the motor-bike boys and the hippies. The motor-bike boys were working-class motorcycle enthusiasts who listened to the early rock ‘n’ roll of the late 1950s. Hippies were middle-class drug-users with long hair and a love of progressive music. Both groups were involved in an unequal but heroic fight to produce meaning and their own cultural forms in the face of a larger society dominated by the capitalist media and commercialism. They were pioneers of cultural experimentation, the self-construction of identity, and the curating of the self, which, in different ways, have become so widespread today.
The Making of a Cultural Ethnographer
In his talk, Professor Paul E. Willis will briefly explain his academic and biographic formations as an ethnographer of daily life forms and situated conduct as they are closely intertwined with the development of British Cultural Studies at the famous Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University in the 1960s and 70s. He will go on to outline some of the main themes of his book and conclude by highlighting the contributions that a theorised cultural ethnographic method can make to the understanding of contemporary everyday life forms.
About the Speakers:
Professor Paul E. Willis, an ethnographer and cultural theorist, is a prominent scholar of British Cultural Studies. He is a founding editor of Ethnography journal and the author of the books, Learning to Labor: How Working-Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs, Ethnographic Imagination, and Being Modern in China: A Western Cultural Analysis of Modernity, Tradition and Schooling in China Today, among others.
Dr. Gökben Demirbaş is a young scholar, holding a Sociology PhD award from the University of Glasgow. Her academic endeavour is located in sociology of leisure, investigating leisure in relation to gender, space and everyday life.