Body & Society 25th Anniversary: An Interview with Bryan S Turner
Image: Professor Bryan S Turner. Source: Edward Cadbury Centre.
To celebrate the 25th anniversary of Body & Society, managing editor Tomoko Tamari invited Professor Bryan S Turner to an interview. He is the key pioneer in the field of the body and still today is a leading figure, continuously developing the field. Since the 1980s, there has been an upsurge of research and writings on the importance of the body in social life. The journal Body & Society (first issue published in 1995) remarked that ‘the body as an overt and thematized issue now appears to be central to a good deal of contemporary thought and practice’ (Featherstone and Turner, 1995: 1). The journal initially attempted to explore the embodiment of social actors, the symbolic significance of the body, the representational and cultural notions of the body and the historical epistemology of the body. More precisely, it opened debates which were related to areas such as body image, the self, ageing, consumer culture, the body as a social agent, the body as a sign and symbol, affectivity and emotions, sport, gender and sex, technology and science, and the history of the body.
Read: Interview with Bryan S Turner: Reflections on the 25th Anniversary of Body & Society
Bryan S Turner is Professor of Sociology at the Australian Catholic University (Sydney), Honorary Professor and Director of the Centre for Social Citizenship at Potsdam University, Germany, Emeritus Professor at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York and Fellow of the Edward Cadbury Centre for Religion in Public Life, University of Birmingham, England. He is the founding editor of the Journal of Classical Sociology. He was awarded a Doctor of Letters by Cambridge University in 2009 and received the Max Planck Award in social science in 2015. He recently edited the ‘Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social Theory’ (2018). Other publications include ‘The New Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Religion’ (2010), ‘Religion and Modern Society’ (CUP 2011) and ‘The Religious and the Political’ (CUP 2013).
Tomoko Tamari is a senior lecturer in sociology at the Institute for Creative and Cultural Entrepreneurship, Goldsmiths, University of London. She is managing editor of Body & Society. She has published ‘Body Image and Prosthetic Aesthetics’ in Body & Society (2017) Vol. 23(1). She is currently working on the following areas: body image and disability; human perception and the moving image; probiotics and immunity.
