Social Aesthetics Research Unit
About
The Social Aesthetics Research Unit (SARU) brings together academic and postgraduate researchers, industry and creative/performing arts professionals, interested in exploring the intersections between aesthetic research/creativity and aspects of social, cultural and economic life.
The central vision underpinning SARU’s core research activities is that aesthetics are important in all intellectual fields and human domains. Artistic performance and aesthetic form are keys to the understanding of social behavior. There is an ineffable circle that binds creativity, imagination, dramaturgy, performance, aesthetics, art, social action, politics, and economics.
Social aesthetics incorporates the traditions of the art historian and the philosopher alongside those of the sociologist and the anthropologist, the dramaturge and the composer, the theologian and the economist, the musicologist and the communication theorist. In a knowledge economy, social aesthetics and theories of performance are also of increasing interest to academics and professionals in marketing, organisational studies, communications, leisure and arts management, and other applied fields.
The aim of the Social Aesthetics Research Unit is to generate a two-way conversation in which the aesthetic dimensions of what has been traditionally defined as non-aesthetic are rigorously understood and explained; and, in turn, people in the social sciences and applied areas of study come to see that they too can learn from aesthetic practitioners, theorists and researchers. In this, and many other respects, SARU is an inherently interdisciplinary research venture that draws on several kinds of expertise into the ‘performative’ and ‘aesthetic’ (i.e., sensorial, imaginative and creative) aspects of human activity.
The executive members of the Social Aesthetics Research Unit include Dr Janine Burke, Dr Elizabeth Coleman, Dr Eduardo de la Fuente (Deputy Director), Dr Stuart Grant, Dr Shane Holman, Professor Andrew Milner, Associate Professor Peter Murphy (Director), Dr Graeme Smith (Deputy Director), and Professor Peter Snow (Director). SARU has founding members from the disciplines of drama and theatre studies, music, communications and performance studies, and comparative literature and cultural studies, classics and women’s studies, at Monash University. The unit has three portfolios – Music, Performance, and Social Aesthetics – with key researchers in each of these divisions. A number of its researchers also have extensive interests in the field of cultural economics.
Social Aesthetics Research Unit publications
Some of the recent and forthcoming books and works from researchers in the unit include:
Social Aesthetics publications
Janine Burke’s The Gods of Freud, Peter Murphy’s Creativity and the Global Knowledge Economy, Elizabeth Coleman’s Negotiating the Sacred II: Blasphemy and Sacrilege in the Arts, Peter Murphy and David Roberts’ Dialectic of Romanticism, David Roberts’ Elias Canetti’s Counter-Image of Society, Janine Burke’s The Heart Garden: Sunday Reed and Heide, Andrew Milner’s Contemporary Cultural Theory, Andy Ruddock’s Investigating Audiences, Andrew Milner’s Literature, Culture and Society, (and forthcoming) Peter Murphy’s Global Creation, Andrew Milner’s Tales of Resonance and Wonder: Locating Science Fiction, Elizabeth Coleman’s Religion, Medicine and the Body, Peter Murphy’s Imagination, Axel Fliethmann’s Narratives of Work
Music publications
Margaret Kartomi’s The Gamelan Digul and the Prison Camp Musician Who Built It, Graeme Smith’s Singing Australia: A History of Folk and Country Music, Shane Homan’s Sounds of then, sounds of now, (forthcoming) Eduardo dela Fuente’s Twentieth Century Music and the Question of Modernity, (forthcoming) Eduardo dela Fuente and Peter Murphy’s Philosophical and Cultural Theories of Music, Bronia Kornhauser and Margaret Kartomi, Out of Babylon: The Music of Baghdadi-Jewish Migrations into Asia and Beyond CD and commentary, Thomas Reiner’s compositions Aerofoil, Contemplation, Dawn for voice and piano, Desert Factory, Sweet Flute, Time Sliding, Shane Homan’s Access All Eras: Tribute Bands and Global Pop Culture, Margaret Kartomi’s forthcoming Musical Journeys in Sumatra.
Performance publications
Peter Snow’s productions of original work include Guilt Frame (Sydney Theatre Company 2008), Thought/ Action Suites (Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Brussels, Gent, Leeds 2005), Four Grand Narratives (Melbourne 2004), A Silent Thread (Kolkata 2003), and a version of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Dresden 2002, 2003). Stuart Grant has been carrying out extensive group phenomenological research on themes such as space, flow, design, and comedy.
PhD studies
SARU welcomes inquiries from intending PhD researchers and visiting scholars who may want to be affiliated with the research unit. Prospective PhDs who are interested undertaking research in the unit should contact one of the four directors of the unit. The unit encourages inquiries from postgraduate researchers who are independent minded and who have wide-ranging intellectual curiosities.
Events
The unit is very active in the organisation of workshops, symposia and conferences. SARU has international relationships with the Department of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen and the Centre for Cultural Sociology, Yale University. It has sponsored visits in recent years by Agnes Heller (New School), Jeffrey Alexander (Yale), Michael Bull (Essex), and Philip Bohlman (Chicago). SARU is the organiser of regular conferences and seminars on ‘music, culture and society’ at Monash University.
In 2009 SARU is the co-organiser of a major international conference on SocioAesthetics at the University of Copenhagen. Among other events, in 2009 the unit is one of the sponsors of an international conference on Time Transcendence, Performance organised by SARU member Stuart Grant and of an international conference on Religious Communication organised by SARU member Elizabeth Coleman. The unit will also host seminars with Endeavour Visiting Scholar and University of Turin Professor Massimo Leone in 2009-2010. It will hold a one-day seminar on December 7 on Aesthetics: An International Colloquium on Art, Aesthetics and Imagination. Participants will include Agnes Heller, Massimo Leone, and David Roberts. Planned for 2010 are events on the themes of “Peter Maxwell Davies”, “Place, Art and Aesthetics”, “Pygmalion: Sculpture, Silence, Art”, “Manoly Lascaris and Patrick White”, and “Improvisations and Interpretations: Musical Freedom, Aesthetics, Hermeneutics, and Performance”
Institutional location
SARU is sponsored jointly by the School of English, Communications and Performance Studies and the School of Music-Conservatorium.