How I Would Gaze in Wonder. Imagination and Ordinary Beauty
Sociología Ordinaria Encounters #12
Free, until full capacity is reached
How I Would Gaze in Wonder. Imagination and Ordinary Beauty is the title of a new encounter by Sociología Ordinaria, a transdisciplinary research group that explores the daily knowledge deemed ordinary, superficial or frivolous from a traditional academic and intellectual viewpoint. This fresh edition looks to address the power of imagination in daily life, beauty as method and imaginative methodologies to invoke futures that are already here and pasts still to be discovered.
In a world shaped by uncertainty and damaging forms of vulnerability, imagination allows us at once to conceive of hopeful futures and endows us with the necessary creativity and innovation to make these visions a reality. It drives us to think unconventionally, to escape the “waffling” of pre-conceived ideas and the opinionated, stereotypical “in-law” to challenge and disregard the whole “that’s the way it goes; it is what it is” and search for other orientations outside established norms.
Furthermore, the premise that beauty can be a method is indebted to Afro-American academics and writers Christina Sharpe and Saidiya Hartman and their studies on racism, slavery and colonisation. For both, aesthetics and perception embody powerful tools for resistance, healing and transformation amid oppression and trauma. Thus, beauty as a method entails a reconceptualization of aesthetics as a form of resistance to violence and dehumanisation.
This activity’s programme is, therefore, articulated from a selection of proposals received through an open call from the Complutense University of Madrid. It aims to provide an open and diverse space with the capacity to welcome transdisciplinary interventions that combine different vital styles, formats, generations and situations.
Sociología Ordinaria is a research group from the Complutense University of Madrid’s (UCM) Sociology Department. Formed in 2011, its concerns revolve around developing new research and teaching methodologies that enable sociological imagination to be applied to contemporary daily life. The group seeks to place value on the dense socio-political roots of the ordinary, an aspect which is often indiscernible in predominant academic analysis. Under the slogan “learning from the banal, the frivolous and the superficial”, its members look to render an account of the complexity and power relations underlying such diverse social and cultural phenomena as the use of dating apps, language around COVID-19, the world of the cuplé, reality shows, pyjama parties, popstars, TikTokers and club culture.
Programme
Ways of Making – The Materialities of Imagination
10am Ordinary Presentation
10:30am Doodles: Imagination and Charcoal
For a Monumental Imagination. Exercises in Blurring and Memory
— Conducted by Carla Boserman Romero
Shoddy Pictures, Doodles, Smudges and Other Meaningless Ways of Imagining
— Conducted by Ignacio Tejedor
11:30am Coffee with Posters I
The Artificial Body: Re-imagining the Possibilities of Aesthetic Intervention
— Conducted by Lucía García Fernández
The Strength of Imagination in Virtual Spaces: Door to a Universe of Shared Meaning in the Slash World
— Conducted by Ana Leirós Vilas
The Visibility of (Extra)ordinary Death: Notes on Artistic and Therapeutic Writing in the Mutual Support Groups of Suicide Survivors
— Conducted by Andy Eric Castillo Patton
Sticking, Sewing, Chatting: Radical Imagination to Inhabit the Neoliberal City
— Conducted by Pablo Alonso García, Cristina Briongos Garcés, Candela Castillo Crespi, Iván Gallardo Esclapez, Saioa Marrón Pérez, Biel Navarro López
12:30pm Listening, Writing, Mapping
Listening to Pink Floyd as a Space of Health
— Conducted by Rebeca González
“Writing is to inhabit a parallel, imagining is to explore it”. Speculative Methodologies for the Study of Pain
— Conducted by Dresda Emma Méndez de la Brena
Mapping Bodies-Territories. Towards New Imagined Worlds
— Conducted by Valeska Morales Urbina
1:45pm Break
4pm Back to the Future: Times of Imagination
Manual of Chronodiversity: Imagining Other Times
— Conducted by the Institute of Suspended Time (Raquel Friera and Javier Bassas)
Archive of External Memories. The Extension and Resignification of Ordinary Experience
— Conducted by Youssef Taki
5pm We Need to Talk: Materials of Academic Extractivism
What You Do to Me Is Not Nice. Notes on Academic Extractivism Carried Out by a Subject of Study
— Conducted by Fernando Balius
6pm Sound Imaginations (and Apparitions)
An Electronic Kitchen: Re-imagining the Domestic
— Conducted by Helena Mariño and Enri La Forêt
Beyond Sociology. “Meta-lecture” by Jesús Ibáñez
— Conducted by Informe
Ordinary Imagination for Another City
10am Everything Sends Me Round and Round
Tell Me Where You Drink and I’ll Tell You Who You Are. Bar/Pubbing Aesthetics and Politics
— Conducted by Francisco Javier Rueda Córdoba
Round and Round the Roundabout: Urban Pathologies on the Outskirts
— Conducted by Manuel Padín Fernández
11am R/existences
If a Lesbian History Barely Exists, Do I? Representations of Lesbian Identity in Spanish Urban Space in the 1980s and 1990s
— Conducted by Catarina Botelho
Imagining to R/exist: Collective Experiences of Activist Sex Workers
— Conducted by Ana Rosa B. Gonçalves
12pm Coffee with Posters II
I’ve Dug my Trench on Calle Ferraz. Accounts of Extreme-right Demonstrations in Spain
— Conducted by Sofía Gómez Ramírez
XXN
— Conducted by Maca8
Imagination in Daily Displacements
— Conducted by Alessandra Coppari
Migrant Seeds: Re-imagining the Connection with the Earth that Nourishes Us
— Conducted by Karen Rodríguez Campos
1pm Imaginations for Eco-Social Emergencies
How Much Forest Is There in Your Neighbourhood?
— Conducted by Manuel Cabrera de Diego
Phantasia on the Edge: Disruption, Absence and Time
— Conducted by Víctor Alonso Rocafort
Cultural Studies of Imagination (and Beauty)
4pm Pop-imagination
And if We… Talk About Science Fiction? Collective Imagination to Transform Reality
— Conducted by Elisabeth Méndez Pérez and Octavio Barajas Torrubias
Sad Boys: Representations and Paradoxes of a New Masculinity
— Conducted by Paula Jiménez Argumosa
Exploring the Tittle-Tattle: The Ins and Outs of the Sálvame Community on Twitter/X
— Conducted by Mikel de Aralar Armendariz, Ignacio Ceinos and Teresa Martínez
5:30pm Imagination on the Dance floor
Flowers in the Hair. Dancing Music and Ritual Performances as Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet
— Conducted by Antonio Girón
Tuttipari in Granada: Music and Performativity to Construct Otherness in Andalusian Electronic Club Culture
— Conducted by Miguel Ángel Bonilla Rodilla
6:30pm Barely Spoken: Writing and Beauty
Textual Rituals of Beauty: The Academic Doesn’t Divest Itself of the Coquettish
— Conducted by Sopa Sólida (Selina Blasco, Gloria G. Durán and Javier Pérez Iglesias)
