Dr Eduardo de la Fuente
- BEc (Sydney), BA Hons (UNSW), PhD (Griffith)
- First Year coordinator Semester 2
- Contact details
- Full Curriculum Vitae
(PDF)
Background
Eduardo de la Fuente has an interdisciplinary background in the fields of communication studies, sociology and social theory. He has held positions at the University of Tasmania (1998-2001) and Macquarie University (2002-7) prior to coming to Monash University, and is currently a Faculty Fellow of the Yale Center for Cultural Sociology (2005- ). With Brad West of Flinders University, he co-convenes the TASA Cultural Sociology Thematic Group. He has published in journals such as Sociological Theory, Cultural Sociology, Journal of Classical Sociology, Journal of Sociology, European Journal of Social Theory, Thesis Eleven and Distinktion: The Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory. He is currently completing a scholarly monograph for Routledge on twentieth century music and the question of cultural modernity.
Research Interests
My research interests are in the following areas:
- Sociology of the arts
- Classical and contemporary social theory
- The history of the social sciences
- The aesthetics of everyday life
- Cultural dimensions of modernity
During the next few years I will be completing a major project on the role of music in modern culture with special reference to so-called ‘twentieth century’ classical music; also finalize a study of the impact of Romanticism on the social sciences through a history of how the arts have been treated in sociology, anthropology and communication studies; and continue to publish essays on aesthetic explanations of social life (guess that might evolve into a major project at some stage). Before I retire to a life of fly-fishing and quietude (about 25 years to go) I would also like to do a study of what humour tells us about communication processes; although, cities and their design are also starting to interest me greatly.
Broadly speaking my work invokes the traditions of theoretically-informed ‘interpretive’ social science. I am influenced by the writings of Max Weber, Georg Simmel, Emile Durkheim, John Dewey, Lewis Mumford, the entire Chicago School, Erving Goffman (dramaturgical theory in general), Kenneth Burke, Suzanne Langer, Hugh Duncan, Clifford Geertz, Victor Turner, Mary Douglas, Howard Becker, Bruno Latour, and Jeff Alexander (the ‘strong program in cultural theory’); although, recently I’ve also started to dip into eccentrics like Alfred Gell and Michel Maffesoli, and have begun to think that the aesthetic dimension of social life is more important than communication scholars and sociologists have hitherto realized. At the moment, my favorite social science publication is Harvey Molotch’s (2003) Where Stuff Comes: How Toasters, Toilets, Computers, and Many other Things Come to be as They Are (New York: Routledge), a book that combines an ‘art worlds’ ethnography of how the design industry works with a sensitive account of the aesthetic (there’s that word again) appeal and sensuous form of designed objects. It also contains some rich material on how place shapes creativity and the production of goods.
In terms of supervision, I have supervised postgraduate and honours theses on topics such as DJs and club cultures, socio-cultural studies of food, the Internet and the public sphere, charities and the media, the media consumption habits of diasporic groups, and the role of listening in everyday life. In other words, I’m open to supervising lots of different topics in communications and the socio-cultural study of phenomena.
Selected Publications
‘The New Sociology of Art: Putting Art Back into Social Science Approaches to the Arts’.
This article maps recent developments in social science writing about the arts and argues that an interesting development in the field has involved the desire to move beyond merely examining contextual or external factors. The ‘new sociology of art’ is praised for framing questions about the aesthetic properties of art (and non-art objects) in ways that are compatible with social constructionism.
‘On the Promise of a Sociological Aesthetics: From Georg Simmel to Michel Maffesoli’
This article focuses on aesthetic explanations of the social bond and examines the thought of Georg Simmel and Michel Maffesoli on the matter. It compares the former’s writing on the aesthetic experience of the meal with the latter’s analysis of bonding through the joint consumption of wine. The article argues that an aesthetic explanation of the social bond has the advantage of highlighting the role of aesthetic sensation in getting an individual to comply with the norms governing a social situation, as well as the sense of abandonment or fusion that aesthetic forms of sociality entail.