Connecting, Broadening, Imagining: Children and Art

there is none. This is an essay that was printed as a booklet and offered to all conference participants (about 700 people from the world of arts education

Work hard, play hard:on the reciprocity of work conditions and leisure lifestyles

The term work–life balance suggests a potential conflict, or imbalance,between work and ‘life’. Too much work would seem to imply too little‘life’ – the latter term representing everything we do when we are not engagedin paid work. In this chapter, I will argue that the notion of ‘balance’ in thiscontext of paid work versus leisure and unpaid work is more complex thana straightforward metaphor of communicating vessels suggests. Drawing onthe work of Gary Becker and Juliet Schor, I will explore how we can conceiveof both work and leisure as products of households that make more or less predictabledecisions regarding how to use the time and money required by bothareas of life. This approach will be complemented by sociological work on theachievement of social status through consumption and how this causes peopleto live lives that are busier and more consumption-focused than scholarsenvisioned around 50 years ago. By addressing the issue of work–life balancefrom a more historical and sociological angle, I hope to show how the choicespeople make in this area are always socially embedded. This chapter thus seeksto clarify that apparently irrational decisions can be explained in large part bya combination of labor market dynamics, people’s notions of social hierarchy,and an awareness of the fact that we tend to evaluate our own quality of life bycomparing it to that of others, often in materialist terms

Culturele leefstijlen: It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it

Rede, uitgesproken bij de openbare aanvaarding van het ambt van bijzonder hoogleraar Culturele Leefstijlen, in het bijzonder trends en sociale differentiatie in culturele praktijken bij de afdeling Kunst- en Cultuurwetenschappen van de Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication van de Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam op donderdag 6 juni 201

Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out?:A Typology of Psychedelic Microdosing as Technologies of the Self

Psychedelic microdosing, or taking small doses of psychedelic substances that do not induce intoxication or altered states but rather subtle outcomes such as increased focus, has quickly become a mass media phenomenon. Many claim microdosing has become the new secret to enhancement in work contexts. Drawing from literature on psychedelic microdosing, technologies of the self, self-identity and the sociology of work and leisure, this study understands microdosing as a technology individuals introduce into their lives to modify themselves for various purposes. We explore the ways in which the 1960s iconic psychedelic drugs, that once offered turning on, tuning in and dropping out, are now finding new uses across different contexts. Taking a cultural-sociological perspective, we examine how individuals use microdoses of classic psychedelic drugs and how they make sense of microdosing in their daily lives. Based on our findings, we identify three different uses of psychedelic microdosing: (1) as technology of self-esteem and control at work, (2) as a self-help technology, and (3) as a technology of ‘slow living’.status: Published onlin

Culturele consumptie en de habitus

__Abstract__ Cultural consumption and the habitus: The role of knowledge and aesthetic dispositions The habitus is a crucial concept in Bourdieus theory of taste. In this article, we assess the relations between cultural taste or participation and two measured elements of habitus: aesthetic dispositions and domain-specific knowledge. To his end, we have analyzed a sample of 2,500 Flemings in 2003-2004. Active culture lovers attach more significance to the form of cultural products than to their function and are more interested in serious societal issues such as science and politics, but also in lifestyle topics. The results further show that these indicators of elements of the habitus greatly increase the explanatory power of the models for predicting cultural taste and consumption while their addition to the models diminishes the impact of more general socioeconomic background characteristics