The thematic part of the second issue of Practical Sense unites articles on transnational fields of cultural production. As the recently published volume Impérialismes (2023, various translations forthcoming) makes clear, Bourdieu and his collaborators worked on a broadly conceived research program on “internationalization” and “globalization” since the late 1980s and 1990s. Some of this work, like Bourdieu’s article on “The International Circulation of Ideas” (original 1989), has been frequently translated and is relatively well known. Other parts of the research program, however, have not circulated widely, were never published in the first place, or have otherwise remained largely invisible.
The current issue contains articles on respectively the global space of cinema by Julien Duval, the transnational literary field by Gisèle Sapiro, the global field of art by Larissa Buchholz, the transnationalization of the social and human sciences by Johan Heilbron, a joint interview with Ana Paula Cavalcanti Simioni and Ian Merkel on the inequality of North-South cultural exchanges by Carolina Pulici and Jéssica Ronconi.
Each one of these relatively short articles is based on extensive research that has been undertaken over many years. The objective of bringing them together is to draw attention to some of their most salient results, and – by uniting them in a single issue – to contribute to overcoming the usual separation of the sociology of art, literature, cinema and scholarship. Well-grounded comparisons on transnationalism in different cultural and intellectual fields provoke a host of questions pertaining both to the observation of empirical patterns and to theoretical issues about how to conceive of transnational structures and their dynamics. Aside from stimulating such comparisons and thus advancing research in these areas, the articles also raise issues about how to conceive of transnational and global fields more generally and about pursuing research on these topics.
On international and comparative research we have included a short and largely unknown text by Pierre Bourdieu. It originally appeared in French in 1992, but was published merely in a confidential research report, and barely circulated beyond the scholars who were involved in the workshop meetings from which it originated.
The issue, furthermore, contains rubrics. The volume Impérialismes is reviewed in the “recent books” sections, which also provides a list of such publications. The “events” section features short notes about two recent manifestations, one held in Bordeaux and the other one in Paris. Finally, a new section introduces research groups using Pierre Bourdieu’s tools, one in Italy and the other one in an endangered Argentina.
The editorial team