Christian Morgner
Biographic Data
| ID | 91438 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Christian Morgner |
| GIVEN NAMES | Christian |
| FAMILY NAME | Morgner |
| SIGNATURE | MORGNER C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Leicester |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2891-0113 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 31 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 25 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 30 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Generative AI as meaning-mediating infrastructure in education
This article offers a critical integrative review of current debates on generative AI (GenAI), educational inequality, and inclusion/exclusion. Rather than treating GenAI as either a neutral access tool or a simple amplifier of disadvantage, it analyses AI as meaning-mediating infrastructure that reshapes the communicative forms through which learners become addressable, recognised, supported, and evaluated. The review synthesises work from inclu…
Comparing Engagement Across Online Arts Forms in Older Adults
This research developed a nuanced video analysis method to evaluate experiences of creative arts workshops. Such methodologies are essential for distinguishing the impact of interventions, allowing for a differentiated approach in prescribing arts interventions for health and wellbeing outcomes
Metamorphosis in Motion
Examining Olympic opening and closing ceremonies from the perspective of relational creativity, this article analyzes the 1998 Nagano Winter Olympics' opening ceremony and the 2016 Rio Games' Japanese closing ceremony-both experimented with transitory meanings exploring alternative representations of Japan. We consider them as cases of relational creativity; the Nagano opening ceremony explored the fusion of local religious traditions and Western…
An alternative theoretical approach to develop a new conception about pain in people with dementia
The theoretical approach presented in this paper describes a novel experimental-theoretical methodology to conceptualise pain in people with dementia. Existing procedures for assessment of pain rely on subjective self-report using pain questionnaires and rating scales that have proven to be highly problematic where a person has dementia. Consequently, pain in people with dementia can be undetected and/or undertreated. To address that, we have dev…
Creative industries in transition
Much of the research on cultural and creative industries has been 'Western-centric', but recent interest into cultural and creative industries in the Global South confirms that this conceptual frame is not always directly transferable. This first comprehensive analysis of the last three decades of cultural and creative industries in Santiago de Chile is based on detailed participant observations and multiple in-depth interviews with cultural prof…
Symposium Introduction
This symposium centers on the English translation of sociologist Niklas Luhmann's 1991 article “Das Kind als Medium der Erziehung”1 (“The Child as a Medium of Education”), which is being published for the first time in this issue of Educational Theory. This work forms part of Luhmann's broader long-term project — to develop a general theory of society — which included numerous writings on education. Although well-known in German-speaking countrie…
The Medium in the Sociology of Niklas Luhmann
In this paper, Christian Morgner provides a critical reading of Niklas Luhmann's thinking as ignoring human beings or even as antihumanist. Here, he presents an alternative view that centers on Luhmann's idea of the child or human being as a medium. To explain Luhmann's use of these ideas to conceptualize the child and the consequences for research, Morgner refers to the translation of Luhmann's paper “The Child as the Medium of Education” and to…
Punk Culture in Contemporary China
Since its emergence in London and New York in the late 1970s, punk music has subsequently become a global phenomenon (see In the early 1990s, punk music reached China. This book by Jian Xiao (with some co-authored sub-chapters by Jim Donaghey and Paula Guerra) situates this arrival within a global context, tracing the history of punk, its meanings, norms and identity, and referencing handouts and performances that capture the punk scene. The infl…
The Making of Meaning
For the first time, this publication makes available to Anglophone readers a sociology of knowledge and culture as developed by the sociologist and social theorist Niklas Luhmann. Luhmann is typically described as writing only about systems and as such about a topic that sociologists relegate to the annals of history. However, this publication reveals that sociology has acted prematurely, overlooking the rich and detailed sociology of knowledge a…
Digital heritage politics from the perspective of relational sociology
In proposing a new conceptual framework that systematises and comprehends the complex dynamics of cultural heritage politics in China, the study takes its inspiration from Chinese scholars who have explored the relevance of Guanxi beyond its immediate business context. While current discourse theory acknowledges that heritage-making entails complex relationships that structure this making, there is as yet no systematic theoretical account of how …
John Dewey and the Notion of Trans-action
Meaning-Making and Sociocultural Change from the Perspective of Niklas Luhmann’s Sociological Theory
Der Artikel entwirft einen Ansatz zur Sinngenese und zum soziokulturellen Wandel, basier end auf den Arbeiten Niklas Luhmanns. Obwohl die Kultursoziologie der Sinngenese eine zentrale Rolle beimisst, hat sie sich bisher kaum mit der Frage des langfristigen historischen Wandels auseinandergesetzt, wie er ursprünglich von Max Weber vorgeschlagen wurde. Eine Reihe neuerer Veröffentlichungen kritisiert diese Lücke hinsichtlich eines theoretischen Rah…
Exploring the Dynamics of Social Networks in Urban Informal Settlements
Media events and translation
This article contributes to the growing research on transnational and global media events by focusing on the role of translation in the process of mediated meaning-making of the so-called Arab Spring. Furthermore, the article focuses on the role of traditional media channels (television), and questions conflation of the Arab Spring and the Arab world. Therefore, a database was created of the English television coverage on Egypt’s and Syria’s upri…
Spatial Barriers and the Formation of Global Art Cities
This paper addresses a neglected dimension of global cities research: how the idea of economic concentration, its surplus and consequent global influence can be applied to the art world. The research presented here relates to Tokyo as a well‐known example of a global city, advancing existing understandings of Tokyo from the neglected perspective of the arts. Based on qualitative and quantitative research by the author, including cultural and spat…
Stronger together
Background This paper reports on the learning from a 12-month interdisciplinary project (Dementia, Arts and Wellbeing Network- DA&WN) and its activities. These featured a series of four workshops on dance, visual art, theatre and music. The network was comprised of clinicians, academics, creative practitioners and people with lived experience of dementia and their carers. Methods The workshops were designed to draw out tacit knowledge about well-…
Facilitation of positive social interaction through visual art in dementia
The aims of this exploratory study were: to investigate the process of visual art appreciation in a person with dementia, in real time; and to test the feasibility of using video-analysis as a method to explore this process by and with a person who has minimal verbal expression. Gallery personnel guided a woman with severe dementia around an exhibition. Audio-visual recordings of the interactions were analysed. Patterns were identified, and inter…
Conduct in Dementia
This study applies video analysis to an investigation of interactions among people with dementia in a cultural context, specifically a visual art exhibition in a gallery. The study adopts a sociologically informed approach to explore the role of artworks and how these may be beneficial to dementia care, by focusing on meaning-making conversational practices among people living with dementia. The interactions of different individuals with various …
The Relational Meaning-Making of Riots
Trust and Society
This paper addresses an apparent gap in the work of Niklas Luhmann. While the issue of trust continues to receive widespread attention in the social sciences, Luhmann's interest in this topic declined following the development of his systems theory. It is argued that this decline does not reflect any diminished relevance of trust for systems theory, but rather that the architectural remodeling of theory cannot easily be applied to the issue of tr…
Global media and time
This paper addresses the role of time and meaning-making in the global mediascape. Particular attention will be paid to the role of past and future narratives, connections of messages with a global outreach and time as a topic of communication. The empirical analysis will use a comparative approach to explore these different dimensions by analysing three global media events, such as, the sinking of the Titanic, the assassination US President John…
Fragmentation and solidarity in the artistic milieu of contemporary Paris
Sameness and diversification
Cultural policies and cultural policy-making are closely associated with creativity and cultural innovation. While the festivals, large-scale art exhibitions and literary conferences supported by such policies play a vital part in the cultural landscape, in recent years they have been increasingly criticised as actually preventing creativity and innovativeness. The claim is that they foster a limited number of creative individuals while rejecting…
An Interim Report Compiled by the Creative Industries Internationalization Committee
The Interim Report of the Creative Industries Internationalisation Committee (hereafter the Report) is, to date, the most detailed, governmental account of the creative industries and related polic
Making personas
Hideaki Fujiki’s monograph will be of great interest to a range of scholars and film experts, particularly those interested in transnational cinema, modernist theory, gender, celebrity studies and
Trust and Society
This paper addresses an apparent gap in the work of Niklas Luhmann. While the issue of trust continues to receive widespread attention in the social sciences, Luhmann's interest in this topic declined following the development of his systems theory. It is argued that this decline does not reflect any diminished relevance of trust for systems theory, but rather that the architectural remodeling of theory cannot easily be applied to the issue of tr…
The Art Fair as Network
Although Howard Becker defines art worlds as networks of cooperating people and a broad range of studies has applied this idea of the network to art markets, research on fairs remains a neglected issue. This article aims to advance the idea of the network and the art fair with regard to the art fair boom, the differentiation of art fairs and their interlinking, and the role of networks with regard to the participating galleries and their interlin…
The theory of love and the theory of society
Niklas Luhmann's work has been gaining popularity in the Anglophone world. The reader who is unfamiliar with the overall development of Luhmann's version of system theory is introduced in this review essay to the central theoretical changes in Luhmann's version by way of the author's elaborations on love. The first part of this review introduces Luhmann's reduction of the complexity paradigm, and discusses the importance of one's particular decis…
Creative industries in transition
Much of the research on cultural and creative industries has been 'Western-centric', but recent interest into cultural and creative industries in the Global South confirms that this conceptual frame is not always directly transferable. This first comprehensive analysis of the last three decades of cultural and creative industries in Santiago de Chile is based on detailed participant observations and multiple in-depth interviews with cultural prof…
Digital heritage politics from the perspective of relational sociology
In proposing a new conceptual framework that systematises and comprehends the complex dynamics of cultural heritage politics in China, the study takes its inspiration from Chinese scholars who have explored the relevance of Guanxi beyond its immediate business context. While current discourse theory acknowledges that heritage-making entails complex relationships that structure this making, there is as yet no systematic theoretical account of how …
Media events and translation
This article contributes to the growing research on transnational and global media events by focusing on the role of translation in the process of mediated meaning-making of the so-called Arab Spring. Furthermore, the article focuses on the role of traditional media channels (television), and questions conflation of the Arab Spring and the Arab world. Therefore, a database was created of the English television coverage on Egypt’s and Syria’s upri…
Facilitation of positive social interaction through visual art in dementia
The aims of this exploratory study were: to investigate the process of visual art appreciation in a person with dementia, in real time; and to test the feasibility of using video-analysis as a method to explore this process by and with a person who has minimal verbal expression. Gallery personnel guided a woman with severe dementia around an exhibition. Audio-visual recordings of the interactions were analysed. Patterns were identified, and inter…
Metamorphosis in Motion
Examining Olympic opening and closing ceremonies from the perspective of relational creativity, this article analyzes the 1998 Nagano Winter Olympics' opening ceremony and the 2016 Rio Games' Japanese closing ceremony-both experimented with transitory meanings exploring alternative representations of Japan. We consider them as cases of relational creativity; the Nagano opening ceremony explored the fusion of local religious traditions and Western…
Global media and time
This paper addresses the role of time and meaning-making in the global mediascape. Particular attention will be paid to the role of past and future narratives, connections of messages with a global outreach and time as a topic of communication. The empirical analysis will use a comparative approach to explore these different dimensions by analysing three global media events, such as, the sinking of the Titanic, the assassination US President John…
Trust and Confidence
Weltmedienereignisse als Netzwerke
Der vorliegende Aufsatz beschäftigt sich mit dem Phänomen des Weltmedienereignisses. Die soziologische Forschung hat sich bisher sowohl auf theoretischer wie empirischer Ebene nur zaghaft mit diesem Begriff auseinandergesetzt. Ziel ist es deshalb, anhand einiger empirischer Beispiele (11. September 2001, Attentat auf John F. Kennedy, Untergang der Titanic) entsprechende Begrifflichkeiten zur Beschreibung dieses Phänomens zu erarbeiten. Dabei ist …
Weltereignisse und Massenmedien
Wie lässt es sich erklären, dass die Massenmedien über mehrere Tage hinweg in allen Teilen der Welt über ausschließlich ein und dasselbe Thema berichten? Christian Morgner nähert sich diesen »Weltmedienereignissen« und gibt soziologisch überzeugende Antworten zur Strukturförmigkeit des Phänomens. Durch Auswertung umfangreicher Fernseh- und Zeitungsmaterialien aus verschiedenen Weltregionen, die über das Attentat auf John F. Kennedy, den Unfalltod…
The public of media events
This article focuses on the growing importance of large-scale events and their central role in a globalised media world in relation to public reactions and public involvement. The peculiar structure of such events requires a different understanding of mass communication and its audience. Therefore, the audience is further examined with regard to its impact on and inclusion in the media itself. Consequently, questions are raised as to how the publ…
Trust and Confidence
Making personas
Hideaki Fujiki’s monograph will be of great interest to a range of scholars and film experts, particularly those interested in transnational cinema, modernist theory, gender, celebrity studies and
The Art Fair as Network
Although Howard Becker defines art worlds as networks of cooperating people and a broad range of studies has applied this idea of the network to art markets, research on fairs remains a neglected issue. This article aims to advance the idea of the network and the art fair with regard to the art fair boom, the differentiation of art fairs and their interlinking, and the role of networks with regard to the participating galleries and their interlin…
The theory of love and the theory of society
Niklas Luhmann's work has been gaining popularity in the Anglophone world. The reader who is unfamiliar with the overall development of Luhmann's version of system theory is introduced in this review essay to the central theoretical changes in Luhmann's version by way of the author's elaborations on love. The first part of this review introduces Luhmann's reduction of the complexity paradigm, and discusses the importance of one's particular decis…
Sameness and diversification
Cultural policies and cultural policy-making are closely associated with creativity and cultural innovation. While the festivals, large-scale art exhibitions and literary conferences supported by such policies play a vital part in the cultural landscape, in recent years they have been increasingly criticised as actually preventing creativity and innovativeness. The claim is that they foster a limited number of creative individuals while rejecting…
An Interim Report Compiled by the Creative Industries Internationalization Committee
The Interim Report of the Creative Industries Internationalisation Committee (hereafter the Report) is, to date, the most detailed, governmental account of the creative industries and related polic
Fragmentation and solidarity in the artistic milieu of contemporary Paris
Global media and time
This paper addresses the role of time and meaning-making in the global mediascape. Particular attention will be paid to the role of past and future narratives, connections of messages with a global outreach and time as a topic of communication. The empirical analysis will use a comparative approach to explore these different dimensions by analysing three global media events, such as, the sinking of the Titanic, the assassination US President John…
The Relational Meaning-Making of Riots
Trust and Society
This paper addresses an apparent gap in the work of Niklas Luhmann. While the issue of trust continues to receive widespread attention in the social sciences, Luhmann's interest in this topic declined following the development of his systems theory. It is argued that this decline does not reflect any diminished relevance of trust for systems theory, but rather that the architectural remodeling of theory cannot easily be applied to the issue of tr…
Spatial Barriers and the Formation of Global Art Cities
This paper addresses a neglected dimension of global cities research: how the idea of economic concentration, its surplus and consequent global influence can be applied to the art world. The research presented here relates to Tokyo as a well‐known example of a global city, advancing existing understandings of Tokyo from the neglected perspective of the arts. Based on qualitative and quantitative research by the author, including cultural and spat…
Stronger together
Background This paper reports on the learning from a 12-month interdisciplinary project (Dementia, Arts and Wellbeing Network- DA&WN) and its activities. These featured a series of four workshops on dance, visual art, theatre and music. The network was comprised of clinicians, academics, creative practitioners and people with lived experience of dementia and their carers. Methods The workshops were designed to draw out tacit knowledge about well-…
Facilitation of positive social interaction through visual art in dementia
The aims of this exploratory study were: to investigate the process of visual art appreciation in a person with dementia, in real time; and to test the feasibility of using video-analysis as a method to explore this process by and with a person who has minimal verbal expression. Gallery personnel guided a woman with severe dementia around an exhibition. Audio-visual recordings of the interactions were analysed. Patterns were identified, and inter…
Conduct in Dementia
This study applies video analysis to an investigation of interactions among people with dementia in a cultural context, specifically a visual art exhibition in a gallery. The study adopts a sociologically informed approach to explore the role of artworks and how these may be beneficial to dementia care, by focusing on meaning-making conversational practices among people living with dementia. The interactions of different individuals with various …
John Dewey and the Notion of Trans-action
Meaning-Making and Sociocultural Change from the Perspective of Niklas Luhmann’s Sociological Theory
Der Artikel entwirft einen Ansatz zur Sinngenese und zum soziokulturellen Wandel, basier end auf den Arbeiten Niklas Luhmanns. Obwohl die Kultursoziologie der Sinngenese eine zentrale Rolle beimisst, hat sie sich bisher kaum mit der Frage des langfristigen historischen Wandels auseinandergesetzt, wie er ursprünglich von Max Weber vorgeschlagen wurde. Eine Reihe neuerer Veröffentlichungen kritisiert diese Lücke hinsichtlich eines theoretischen Rah…
Exploring the Dynamics of Social Networks in Urban Informal Settlements
Media events and translation
This article contributes to the growing research on transnational and global media events by focusing on the role of translation in the process of mediated meaning-making of the so-called Arab Spring. Furthermore, the article focuses on the role of traditional media channels (television), and questions conflation of the Arab Spring and the Arab world. Therefore, a database was created of the English television coverage on Egypt’s and Syria’s upri…
Punk Culture in Contemporary China
Since its emergence in London and New York in the late 1970s, punk music has subsequently become a global phenomenon (see In the early 1990s, punk music reached China. This book by Jian Xiao (with some co-authored sub-chapters by Jim Donaghey and Paula Guerra) situates this arrival within a global context, tracing the history of punk, its meanings, norms and identity, and referencing handouts and performances that capture the punk scene. The infl…
The Making of Meaning
For the first time, this publication makes available to Anglophone readers a sociology of knowledge and culture as developed by the sociologist and social theorist Niklas Luhmann. Luhmann is typically described as writing only about systems and as such about a topic that sociologists relegate to the annals of history. However, this publication reveals that sociology has acted prematurely, overlooking the rich and detailed sociology of knowledge a…
Digital heritage politics from the perspective of relational sociology
In proposing a new conceptual framework that systematises and comprehends the complex dynamics of cultural heritage politics in China, the study takes its inspiration from Chinese scholars who have explored the relevance of Guanxi beyond its immediate business context. While current discourse theory acknowledges that heritage-making entails complex relationships that structure this making, there is as yet no systematic theoretical account of how …
Symposium Introduction
This symposium centers on the English translation of sociologist Niklas Luhmann's 1991 article “Das Kind als Medium der Erziehung”1 (“The Child as a Medium of Education”), which is being published for the first time in this issue of Educational Theory. This work forms part of Luhmann's broader long-term project — to develop a general theory of society — which included numerous writings on education. Although well-known in German-speaking countrie…
Sociology (20 works) · Political science (14 works) · Art (11 works) · Epistemology (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Social science (10 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Psychology (8 works) · Computer Science (7 works) · Cultural Industries and Urban Development (7 works)