‘Thinking through’ technique or thinking ‘through’ technique? Expanding the toolkit of cultural sociology

Despite growing concerns over the ability of conventional research methods to effectively tackle key theoretical issues within the contemporary sociology of culture, these have yet to produce concerted efforts at rethinking existing methods, let alone at crafting novel techniques of sociological inquiry. As a result, there is a steadily widening gap between our variegated theoretical conceptions of ‘culture’ and the actual tools that we use to put these conceptions to the empirical test. This special issue aims to address this gap by exploring a series of new methods designed to chart the role of culture in everyday life. The various contributions to this issue start from the premise that conventional techniques of sociological research very often constrain our understanding of culture and effectively limit the types of questions we come to ask of it. To overcome such constraints, each paper presents a method that is designed to tap into different and often un(der)explored aspects of culture: from the issue of how we effectively ‘experience’ cultural forms or the problem of how we can systematically articulate and describe the embodied dimension of ‘culture-in-action’ to the question of the classificatory principles that inform our everyday esthetic judgments or the genesis of these principles in early childhood. Together, the different contributions to this issue aim to demonstrate that a more rigorous approach to core theoretical issues among contemporary scholars of culture inevitably implies a more systematic effort at ‘thinking through’ the conventional toolkit of cultural sociology.