1st Edition
Artists, Cosmopolitanism, and the Civic Imagination Artists as Political Agents
Artists, Cosmopolitanism, and the Civic Imagination unpacks the political agency of artists by looking at artists as moral, reflexive, and political agents. Do artists play a role in civil society? Can artists “make a difference” in the world? In what ways do artists act politically? To address these questions, this book moves away from a focus on social organisation and the production of art, to ask how artists attach meaning to their interventions in social and political conditions.
Maria Rovisco draws from in-depth interviews with UK-based visual artists and theatre practitioners with a migrant background, and semiotic analysis of a theatre play, visual artworks, and film texts, to argue that artists are quintessential cosmopolitans who care deeply about changing society for the better. By explaining how artists get involved in cross-cultural encounters, this book reveals the processes of listening, reflection, imagination, social learning, and moral intentionality through which artists imagine and realise their visions of a better world. In so doing, it offers a new direction in thinking about the intersection of art and politics, by showing how artists play a crucial role in building a civic culture outside traditional sites of political participation.
This book will be essential reading for students and scholars across the social sciences and the humanities with interests in migration, citizenship and the public sphere, cultural sociology, media and culture, cosmopolitanism, and art.
1. Introduction: Artists, Politics, and Agency
2. Cultural Encounters, Artistic Production, and Social Transformation
3. The Expressive Public Sphere – Artists and the Civic Imagination
4. Acting Politically – The Art of Provocation
5. The Politics of Performative Listening
6. Cosmopolitan Cinema as Ethico-Political Practice - Borders, Mobility, and Cosmopolitan Dialogue
Afterword - Performing Citizenship
Biography
Maria Rovisco is Associate Professor in Sociology at the University of Leeds, UK. She is a cultural sociologist with interests in civil society, public sphere, visual culture, cosmopolitanism, and art. She is the co-editor of Visual Politics in the Global South (2023) and Social Movements and Everyday Acts of Resistance - Solidarity in a Changing World (2023).
Artists, Cosmopolitanism, and the Civic Imagination marks a true advance in the sociology of the arts. Maria Rovisco’s book takes the move beyond the production of culture approach that has dominated the field to a new height. She views artists as reflective moral agents, creating artworks that can distort reality as well as provide means for critical reflection. This brings the artists and artworks back into focus after years of being bracketed out in favour of surrounding social organization. Anyone interested in advancing sociological knowledge should read this book.
Ron Eyerman, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, Yale University, USA
Maria Rovisco has thrown down a challenge to the sociology of art. She contends that sociologists have too often confined the role of artists to mere instrumental actors and strategic players. In this robust and elegant book, Rovisco makes a cogent case for a wider framework – one that can grasp both the nitty gritty artistic agency and cosmopolitan visions in contemporary art.
Professor Nikos Papastegiadis, University of Melbourne, Australia
A beautiful and unexpected appreciation of how artists make politics and how politics creates artists, revealing many subtleties and nuances of politically challenging aesthetic work.
Professor David Inglis, University of Helsinki, Finland
