The great fear: the politics of performing

Join us for this special event at which sociologist Richard Sennett will speak about his new book, The Performer: art, life, politics.

The Performer explores the relations between performing in art (particularly music), politics and everyday experience. It focuses on the bodily and physical dimensions of performing, rather than on words. Richard Sennett is particularly attuned to the ways in which the rituals of ordinary life are performances.

The book draws on history and sociology, and more personally on the author's early career as a professional cellist, as well as on his later work as a city planner and social thinker. It traces the evolution of performing spaces in the city; the emergence of actors, musicians, and dancers as independent artists; the inequality between performer and spectator; the uneasy relations between artistic creation and social and religious ritual; the uses and abuses of acting by politicians. The Janus-faced art of performing is both destructive and civilizing.

Meet our speaker and chair

Richard Sennett (@richardsennett) grew up in the Cabrini Green housing project in Chicago, attended the Julliard School in New York and then studied social relations at Harvard. Over the course of the last five decades, he has written about social life in cities, changes in labour and social theory. His books include The Hidden Injuries of Class, The Fall of Public Man, The Corrosion of Character, The Culture of the New Capitalism, The Craftsman and Building and Dwelling. Sennett has advised the United Nations on urban issues for the past thirty years and currently serves as member of the UN Committee on Urban Initiatives. He is an Honorary Fellow of LSE and Visiting Professor of Urban Studies at Harvard. Among other awards, he has received the Hegel Prize, the Spinoza Prize and the Centennial Medal from Harvard University. 

Monika Krause is Professor in Sociology in the Department of Sociology at LSE.Her research addresses comparative questions about forms of expertise, professions, organizations and fields of practice. Her book Model Cases. On Canonical Research Objects and Sites asks about the concrete material research objects behind shared conversations about classes of objects, periods and regions in the social sciences and humanities. She has also written on journalists, playwrights, psychoanalysts, conservation NGOs, and human rights NGOs.  Her theoretical work develops concepts for sociological analysis and seeks to apply insights from a sociology of the social sciences to sociological practice. 

Suzanne Hall is Professor of Sociology at LSE and Head of Department. Her research and teaching explore the intersections of global migration and urban marginalisation. Suzi’s focus is on everyday claims to space and how political economies of displacement shape racial borders, migrant livelihoods, and urban multicultures. She is author of The Migrant’s Paradox and City Street and Citizen. Her work has developed through numerous funded research collaborations. She is recipient of an ESRC Future Research Leaders award (2015-2017) and the Philip Leverhulme Prize in Sociology in 2017, and she gave the inaugural Cities Annual Lecture at Birkbeck in 2022.

More about this event

This event will be available to watch on LSE Live. LSE Live is the new home for our live streams, allowing you to tune in and join the global debate at LSE, wherever you are in the world. If you can't attend live, a video will be made available shortly afterwards on LSE's YouTube channel.

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