This talk investigates how subjectivity and objecthood are co-constituted in three ethnographic sites: opera audiences in Buenos Aires, footwear fit models in global production networks, and museum guards in elite art institutions. Drawing on theories from material cultural sociology, science and technology studies, and aesthetic philosophy, it argues that subject-object relations are not fixed but are dynamically negotiated through bodily labor, infrastructural entanglements, and affective investments. The lecture challenges conventional human/non-human binaries by revealing how individuals strategically inhabit quasi-subject or quasi-object positions within the aesthetic regimes of art worlds. Unlike most studies done to demonstrate the “agency” of things, this paper shows two cases in which humans are made into objects to occupy their proper subject position.

About the speaker:

Claudio E. Benzecry is Professor of Communication Studies and Sociology at Northwestern University. He is the author of The Opera Fanatic. Ethnography of an Obsession (University of Chicago Press, 2011), which received an Honorable Mention in 2014 for the ASA Distinguished Book Award, and The Perfect Fit. Creative Work in the Global Shoe Industry (University of Chicago Press 2022). His latest book Culture and Creativity (with Vanina Leschziner) is forthcoming with Polity Press.

He is the editor of five books on culture, theory, and knowledge, including of Social Theory Now (with Monika Krause and Isaac Reed, University of Chicago Press, 2017). In 2019 he started his tenure as co-Editor in Chief of Qualitative Sociology.

His work has received the Mary Douglas, the Junior Theorist, and the Lewis Coser awards from the American Sociological Association.

📅 Date: Wednesday, 11 February, 2026

🕑 Time: 3:00pm – 4:00pm

📍 Venue: CJT-9.29

🗣️ Language: English

🔗 Register here: https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_hdetail.aspx?guest=Y&ueid=104670