{"id":2811,"date":"2026-06-05T16:08:01","date_gmt":"2026-06-05T14:08:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/practicalsense.net\/?page_id=2811"},"modified":"2026-06-18T13:30:50","modified_gmt":"2026-06-18T11:30:50","slug":"bourdieu-lectures-no-4","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/practicalsense.net\/index.php\/bourdieu-lectures-no-4\/","title":{"rendered":"Practising the Sociological Gaze. Gender, Domination and Visuality"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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\u00a0Bourdieu Lectures, November 19-20, Bielefeld, Germany<\/span><\/em><\/p><\/div>

Amelie Kybart<\/strong><\/span><\/p>

The first impression when entering the Kunsthalle Bielefeld is one of controlled dissonance: large-format black-and-white photographs from colonial Algeria line the walls, while in the adjacent lecture hall scholars discuss gendered bodies, field structures and symbolic violence in late modern societies. The 2025 Bourdieu Lectures<\/em>, titled \u201cGeschlecht \u2013 Herrschaft \u2013 Visualit\u00e4t\u201d [Gender – Domination – Visuality], unfolded precisely in this tension between historical images and contemporary diagnoses, between exhibition and symposium, between aesthetic experience and praxeological theory. Bringing together the University of Bielefeld, Zeppelin University, the University of Education Freiburg and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna<\/em> in cooperation with the Fondation Bourdieu<\/em>, the event proposed a particular way of \u201cdoing\u201d Bourdieu today: by training a sociological gaze that is at once visual, gender-sensitive and reflexive.<\/span><\/p>

A conversion of the gaze<\/span><\/strong><\/p>

The accompanying booklet to the exhibition \u201cPierre Bourdieus soziologischer Blick\u201d explicitly frames Bourdieu\u2019s Algerian work as a \u201cKonversion des Blicks\u201d, a conversion of the gaze. Drafted as a young conscript in the midst of the Algerian War of Independence, Bourdieu turned away from an academic trajectory in Parisian philosophy towards ethnographic fieldwork among Kabyle populations and displaced peasants, equipped with a camera and a notebook. <\/span>
The exhibition arranges roughly thematic sections around this biographical and methodological turning point: the gendered order of the world, the visualisation of sociological concepts, colonial destruction and uprooting, enforced modernity, and the parallel processes of \u201cEntb\u00e4uerlichung\u201d [Urbanization] on both sides of the Mediterranean. In each section, photographs are carefully juxtaposed with quotations from Bourdieu\u2019s own writings and later commentaries, forming text\u2013image collages that invite visitors to read images not as illustrations, but as condensations of practical sense. A photograph of Kabyle women returning from a well, for instance, is placed alongside dense descriptions of female hexis \u2013 bent posture, lowered gaze, restricted movement \u2013 through which Bourdieu came to conceptualise gendered dispositions as embodied honour and shame.<\/span>
These curatorial choices re-enact, for a contemporary audience, the very process of learning to \u201csee\u201d social structures in gestures, spatial arrangements and everyday routines that Bourdieu underwent in Algeria. In this sense, the exhibition does not simply display Bourdieu\u2019s photographs; it performs a pedagogy of the gaze, training its viewers in a praxeological way of apprehending the world.<\/span><\/p>

Gender, domination and symbolic violence<\/span><\/strong><\/p>

The lecture programme mobilised Bourdieu\u2019s concepts in order to interrogate contemporary gender regimes. Across two days, keynotes, workshops and colloquia traced the reach and the limits of Bourdieu\u2019s analysis of masculine domination in fields as diverse as education, migration, queer spaces and global capitalism.<\/span>
Several contributors took Bourdieu\u2019s notion of symbolic violence as a starting point for re-examining forms of gendered domination that operate beyond direct physical coercion. A workshop on \u201cInterdisciplinary dialogues on violent articulations\u201d proposed to treat symbolic violence as a processual analytic lens for uncovering how patriarchal orders are sustained through routine schemes of perception and evaluation in everyday practices \u2013 be it in medical visualisations of normative bodies, in juridical procedures or in the normalisation of right-wing language in public discourse.<\/span>
Other panels shifted the geographical and institutional frame. A talk on South Korea read Bourdieu\u2019s capital and gender theory against an \u201cAsian modernity\u201d characterised by belated industrialisation, a strong educational ethos and a rapidly transforming welfare state, asking how meritocratic distributions of economic, social and cultural capital intersect with gendered expectations in a digitalised, globally integrated society. Another contribution analysed \u201cthird path\u201d access to higher education via vocational routes, showing how non-traditional students\u2019 trajectories are not only constrained by economic conditions, but also by patriarchal and spatial structures in peripheral regions.<\/span>
The themes of marriage, inheritance and generational transmission \u2013 central to Bourdieu\u2019s own work on Kabyle societies and on rural B\u00e9arn \u2013 were also revisited from a gender-reflexive perspective. One project on first-generation female students, for example, re-read Bourdieu\u2019s famous vignette of the \u201cson\u201d who betrays class expectations through educational upward mobility by focusing instead on mother\u2013daughter relations. Here, mothers emerge both as negative foil and as carriers of a familial project of mobility, complicating the paternal figure that dominates Bourdieu\u2019s own narrative of \u201cwounded\u201d trajectories. Such empirically sensitive work underlines how Bourdieusian concepts can be re-oriented to account for gendered experiences that were only partially visible in the original texts.<\/span><\/p>

Bourdieu Lectures<\/em> as a reflexive format<\/span><\/strong><\/p>

A distinctive feature of the Bourdieu Lectures was their continuous movement between text, image and embodied discussion. The presence of the exhibition meant that panels on gender doxa in schools, on habitus analyses of marriage migration or on the classed and gendered structuring of social milieus unfolded only a few steps away from photographs of Kabyle houses, regroupment camps and rural festivities in B\u00e9arn.<\/span>
In their combination of exhibition, digital reader, keynotes, workshops and publisher presentation, the Bourdieu Lectures<\/em> 2025 offered a reflexive format for engaging with Bourdieu\u2019s theory of practice at a time when gender orders, colonial legacies and global inequalities are being renegotiated under conditions of accelerated neoliberal capitalism. Situating the Algerian photographs at the centre, yet insisting on contemporary re-appropriations and critiques, the Lectures<\/em> treated Bourdieu not as a closed system, but as an open repertoire of concepts and sensibilities to be tested, revised and sometimes resisted.<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0Bourdieu Lectures, November 19-20, Bielefeld, Germany Amelie Kybart The first impression when entering the Kunsthalle Bielefeld is one of controlled dissonance: large-format black-and-white photographs from colonial Algeria line the walls, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_EventAllDay":false,"_EventTimezone":"","_EventStartDate":"","_EventEndDate":"","_EventStartDateUTC":"","_EventEndDateUTC":"","_EventShowMap":false,"_EventShowMapLink":false,"_EventURL":"","_EventCost":"","_EventCostDescription":"","_EventCurrencySymbol":"","_EventCurrencyCode":"","_EventCurrencyPosition":"","_EventDateTimeSeparator":"","_EventTimeRangeSeparator":"","_EventOrganizerID":[],"_EventVenueID":[],"_OrganizerEmail":"","_OrganizerPhone":"","_OrganizerWebsite":"","_VenueAddress":"","_VenueCity":"","_VenueCountry":"","_VenueProvince":"","_VenueState":"","_VenueZip":"","_VenuePhone":"","_VenueURL":"","_VenueStateProvince":"","_VenueLat":"","_VenueLng":"","_VenueShowMap":false,"_VenueShowMapLink":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-2811","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/practicalsense.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2811","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/practicalsense.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/practicalsense.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/practicalsense.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/practicalsense.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2811"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/practicalsense.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2811\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3207,"href":"https:\/\/practicalsense.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2811\/revisions\/3207"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/practicalsense.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}