26.10.2020 Felix Lang has been awarded the SAGE Prize for Innovation/Excellence 2020

Felix Lang, member of the research group Figures of Thought | Turning points. Cultural Practices and Social Change in the Arab World (Department of Arabic Studies) has been awarded the SAGE Prize for Innovation / Excellence 2020 for his article “Bourdieu, Latour and Rasha Abbas: The Uses of Actor-Network Theory for Studying the Field (s) of Cultural Production in the Middle East and North Africa”, published in Cultural Sociology. The prize is awarded by SAGE in collaboration with the British Sociological Association.

The article is based on the observation that regional and international actors and institutions play an important role in the cultural production of the Arab world and, using the example of the Syrian author Rasha Abbas, shows the limits of Bourdieu's field theory in the analysis of such transnational, spaces of cultural production in flux. The article outlines a conception of the artistic field as a networked space, including important elements of the actor-network theory (ANT), especially with a view to objects and non-human actors.