For this stream, the most postponed in the history of this small channel, we will see how insights from one of the most influential social scientists of the 20th century, Erving Goffman, can help us understand Astronaut Dramaturgy and how it has been relentlessly exposed and dismantled by critical analysts since 2014, with concepts such as backstaging, ‘creating a scene’ and notion of ‘inopportune intrusions’.
We will be reflecting on Goffman’s book “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life” first published in 1959. My academic work is related to Goffman’s in various ways, but also in how we share our PhD fieldwork location, the Shetland Islands, located at latitude 60 north, and I have drawn extensively from his 1953 PhD thesis, which is not very well known. Yet, his dissertation appears in the preface as the source of some real life examples that he uses in the ‘Presentation of Self in Everyday Life’.
Join me to see how we can bring into the study of space dramaturgy insights from what ended up becoming one of the most influential books in the history of social science that you may never hear about from the mainstream.
You may also get a hard copy of this seminal book, and read Goffman’s PhD dissertation, based on his fieldwork in Shetland.
