Book chapter
«Город затейный…» Калейдоскопическое жизненное пространство
The aim of this research was to contribute to the discussion on the role of visual methods in improving student learning. Visual methods provide means to understand the practices of representations as cultural texts, to develop interpretations of meanings in socio-cultural context, to decode images of social relations and individual experience. Visual sources play a growing role in social studies as well as in teaching as they offer new routes to understanding the past and the present. It was anticipated that when students learn to interpret visual images of social issues as constructs and metaphors in addition to reading relevant literature they might develop critical and contextual imagination, namely connect individual incidences to historical conditions and social institutions, to link seemingly impersonal and remote forces with the lives of real people in concrete institutional and symbolic environments. The main data set included anonymous student journals and portfolio with assignments. The study documented student discourse around visual methods implementation and examined student identities as sociologists, their perceptions of academic expectations at universities, their views of the curriculum, and their identity claims. The results are concerned with the outcomes of teaching and learning considered not only in relation to visual methods but also to the public sphere and sociology. The more and less desirable identity for a sociologist was articulated, some tensions and biases were discovered but more research is needed in order to see more explicitly the role of visual methods and other pedagogical tools in overcoming these barriers.
Collection of articles dedicated to the activities of the outstanding French historian E. Le Roy Ladurie. The various aspects of his multifaceted work: historical anthropology, the history of climate, cliometrics, economic history, history of the peasantry, visual anthropology, etc., and especially the perception of his work by the teaching community of different countries.
The article is dedicated to the review of ways of looking at social space in the sociological theory. Basing on works of those authors, who paid special attention for this question, in the text there is considered the variety of theoretical interpretations and instrumental using the category of social space. The accent is made on application of space in the context of urban sociology. All the material is systematized according to division into three aspects of looking at social space: 1. the space of social actors's interactions; 2. the structure of status positions; 3. the connection of geographic space and social meanings that are attached to it.