Rebecca Coleman
I'm a Reader in the Sociology Department, Goldsmiths, University of London. I teach on a range of programmes, including the MA Visual Sociology, MA in Gender, Media and Culture, and MA in Brands, Communication and Culture.
My research focuses on images and sensory culture; bodies and materiality; temporality, and especially presents and futures; surfaces; visual and inventive methodologies; social, cultural and feminist theory.
I have recently published three books concerned with images, sensory culture and bodies: The Becoming of Bodies: Girls, Images, Experinece (2009, Manchester University Press), Transforming Images: Screens, Affect, Futures (2012, Routledge) and, co-edited with Jessica Ringrose, Deleuze and Research Methodologies (2013, Edinburgh University Press).
My current research is extending these interests via a focus on temporality and the future. This has included the ESRC Seminar Series 'Austerity Futures: Imagining and Materialising the Future in an 'Age of Austerity"' (2012-14). I am currently working on a book, Engaging Futures: Methods, Materials, Media (Goldsmiths Press), and developing work on affective experiences of the present.
My research focuses on images and sensory culture; bodies and materiality; temporality, and especially presents and futures; surfaces; visual and inventive methodologies; social, cultural and feminist theory.
I have recently published three books concerned with images, sensory culture and bodies: The Becoming of Bodies: Girls, Images, Experinece (2009, Manchester University Press), Transforming Images: Screens, Affect, Futures (2012, Routledge) and, co-edited with Jessica Ringrose, Deleuze and Research Methodologies (2013, Edinburgh University Press).
My current research is extending these interests via a focus on temporality and the future. This has included the ESRC Seminar Series 'Austerity Futures: Imagining and Materialising the Future in an 'Age of Austerity"' (2012-14). I am currently working on a book, Engaging Futures: Methods, Materials, Media (Goldsmiths Press), and developing work on affective experiences of the present.
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Papers by Rebecca Coleman
In this Introduction to a special section on Visualising Surfaces, Surfacing Vision, we argue that to conceive vision in the contemporary world it is necessary to examine its embedding within, expression via and organisation on the surface. First, we review recent social and cultural theories to demonstrate how and why an attention to surfaces is salient today. Second, we consider how vision may be understood in terms of surfaces, discussing the emergence of the term ‘surface’, and its transhistorical relationship with vision. Third, we introduce the contributions to the special section, which cover written articles and artworks. We make connections between them, including their exploration of reflexivity and recursion, observation, objectivity and agency, ontology and epistemology, relationality, process, and two- and three-dimensionality. Fourth, we consider some implications of an understanding of visualising surfaces/surfacing vision.
The starting point for this article is that the future is difficult to research because of its intangibility. Drawing on recent work in visual and sensory sociology, affect, and time and futurity, I propose that sensory methodologies provide some ways of grasping, understanding, attuning and relating to the future. To develop this argument, I pay close attention to the Children of Unquiet (2013-14) project by artist Mikhail Karikis, and especially the film of the same name. This project involved Karikis working with local children to probe the possible futures of a site that was invested with hope and progress in the twentieth century, but has since been depopulated. In turning to an art project to consider the developments of a sensory sociology of the future, my intention is to examine the resonances between the project and some of the concerns of a sensory sociology of the future. In particular, I discuss the participation of children, and a conceptualization of hope as potentiality, open, affective and in the present. In conclusion, I explicate how the article seeks to contribute to a sensory sociology of the future, not by providing a blueprint for further work but rather by offering some indicative points and coordinates for this emerging field of research, including its involvement in creating conditions through which possible futures might be provoked or invented.
This article suggests that feminist theoretical turns are illuminating to study, as they make explicit how Western feminist theory is interested not only in the content of different theoretical turns, but also, relatedly, in how these turns move feminist theory in particular directions. Exploring some of the current and historical debate about turns in feminist theory, I pay particular attention to how these debates might be understood in terms of a wide range of work on the non-linear temporalities of feminist theory. I suggest that one way to understand the non-linear temporalities evident in debates over feminist theoretical turns is through a ‘turn to the surface’. To explicate this suggestion, I offer a series of five indicative issues, terms and ideas, which emerge both from recent work on the surface and feminist theory, and from my attempts to think conceptually about turns, surfaces, and the relations between them. These are: (i) reflexivity; (ii) possibility; (iii) lines; (iv) knots; and (v) diagrams. I conclude by raising a number of further points that emerge through an attempt to engage in the surfacing of feminist theory.
This article examines the relationships between austerity, debt and mood through a focus on temporality and the future. Its starting point is a poll, conducted in Britain in 2011, which showed an increase of pessimism about the future and led to suggestions that ‘a new pessimism’ had become the ‘national mood’. Exploring this survey and other related examples, I ask whether and how pessimism about the future might be considered a mood characteristic of austerity in the UK, consider some of the implications of the future being imagined not as better but as diminished and, drawing on Berlant’s concept of cruel optimism, propose a notion of hopeful pessimism. I explore the politics of pessimism about the future, focusing especially on the affects and emotions that some women and young people might feel. In these senses, I aim to turn around the focus of this special issue to inquire not so much about the future of austerity as about the kinds of futures that are imagined in the new age of austerity, and the affective experiences of such imaginations.
Available here: http://research.gold.ac.uk/14615/
In this follow-up interview to her keynote lecture at the MeCCSA-PGN 2015 Conference in Coventry, Rebecca Coleman discusses the affective relations between bodies, images and environments. Coleman offers an overview of her work on images and the body, as well as her interest in theorising the present and the future, and explains her engagement with feminism, new materialism and Deleuze, in particular. To understand how bodies ‘become’, she argues for the need to understand both process, transformation and change, and what stays, sticks or gets stopped.
In this Introduction to a special section on Visualising Surfaces, Surfacing Vision, we argue that to conceive vision in the contemporary world it is necessary to examine its embedding within, expression via and organisation on the surface. First, we review recent social and cultural theories to demonstrate how and why an attention to surfaces is salient today. Second, we consider how vision may be understood in terms of surfaces, discussing the emergence of the term ‘surface’, and its transhistorical relationship with vision. Third, we introduce the contributions to the special section, which cover written articles and artworks. We make connections between them, including their exploration of reflexivity and recursion, observation, objectivity and agency, ontology and epistemology, relationality, process, and two- and three-dimensionality. Fourth, we consider some implications of an understanding of visualising surfaces/surfacing vision.
The starting point for this article is that the future is difficult to research because of its intangibility. Drawing on recent work in visual and sensory sociology, affect, and time and futurity, I propose that sensory methodologies provide some ways of grasping, understanding, attuning and relating to the future. To develop this argument, I pay close attention to the Children of Unquiet (2013-14) project by artist Mikhail Karikis, and especially the film of the same name. This project involved Karikis working with local children to probe the possible futures of a site that was invested with hope and progress in the twentieth century, but has since been depopulated. In turning to an art project to consider the developments of a sensory sociology of the future, my intention is to examine the resonances between the project and some of the concerns of a sensory sociology of the future. In particular, I discuss the participation of children, and a conceptualization of hope as potentiality, open, affective and in the present. In conclusion, I explicate how the article seeks to contribute to a sensory sociology of the future, not by providing a blueprint for further work but rather by offering some indicative points and coordinates for this emerging field of research, including its involvement in creating conditions through which possible futures might be provoked or invented.
This article suggests that feminist theoretical turns are illuminating to study, as they make explicit how Western feminist theory is interested not only in the content of different theoretical turns, but also, relatedly, in how these turns move feminist theory in particular directions. Exploring some of the current and historical debate about turns in feminist theory, I pay particular attention to how these debates might be understood in terms of a wide range of work on the non-linear temporalities of feminist theory. I suggest that one way to understand the non-linear temporalities evident in debates over feminist theoretical turns is through a ‘turn to the surface’. To explicate this suggestion, I offer a series of five indicative issues, terms and ideas, which emerge both from recent work on the surface and feminist theory, and from my attempts to think conceptually about turns, surfaces, and the relations between them. These are: (i) reflexivity; (ii) possibility; (iii) lines; (iv) knots; and (v) diagrams. I conclude by raising a number of further points that emerge through an attempt to engage in the surfacing of feminist theory.
This article examines the relationships between austerity, debt and mood through a focus on temporality and the future. Its starting point is a poll, conducted in Britain in 2011, which showed an increase of pessimism about the future and led to suggestions that ‘a new pessimism’ had become the ‘national mood’. Exploring this survey and other related examples, I ask whether and how pessimism about the future might be considered a mood characteristic of austerity in the UK, consider some of the implications of the future being imagined not as better but as diminished and, drawing on Berlant’s concept of cruel optimism, propose a notion of hopeful pessimism. I explore the politics of pessimism about the future, focusing especially on the affects and emotions that some women and young people might feel. In these senses, I aim to turn around the focus of this special issue to inquire not so much about the future of austerity as about the kinds of futures that are imagined in the new age of austerity, and the affective experiences of such imaginations.
Available here: http://research.gold.ac.uk/14615/
In this follow-up interview to her keynote lecture at the MeCCSA-PGN 2015 Conference in Coventry, Rebecca Coleman discusses the affective relations between bodies, images and environments. Coleman offers an overview of her work on images and the body, as well as her interest in theorising the present and the future, and explains her engagement with feminism, new materialism and Deleuze, in particular. To understand how bodies ‘become’, she argues for the need to understand both process, transformation and change, and what stays, sticks or gets stopped.
Readers will gain crucial insights into cutting-edge Deleuzian methodologies, making the book essential for students, academics and teachers interested in how Deleuze is informing social science research.""