Celia Lury
Biographic Data
| ID | 92062 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Celia Lury |
| GIVEN NAMES | Celia |
| FAMILY NAME | Lury |
| SIGNATURE | LURY C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Warwick |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7630-5597 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 44 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 530 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 41 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1991 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
Seeing Photographically
This Introduction to the ‘Seeing photographically’ special issue begins with four vignettes drawn from (nearly) two centuries of photographic history. These examples are leveraged to pose critical questions about photography’s transformation since the 19th century, and especially in the first decades of the 21st century, as trajectories associated with digitization, networked distribution, the widespread integration of cameras into mobile devices…
Digital Valuation: Lessons in relevance from the prototyping of a recommendation app
This article describes the use of a prototype recommendation app to explore how users are included and/or excluded in categories of various kinds of ‘People Like You’. In the study, interviews with users of the prototype app indicate that the experience of receiving personalized recommendations isroutinely evaluated in terms of relevance, that is, as either of interest to them or as beside the point, as accurate or inaccurate, with accuracy often…
Introduction. Political arithmetic: Old and new
The articles in this Special Issue arose from a workshop in June 2021 (https://peoplelikeyou.ac.uk/activities/people-like-you-a-new-political-arithmetic/) which considered whether we might understand the enormous variety of calculations we encounter today as a political arithmetic. Our proposal was that the term provides a powerful way to understand the political nature of calculations of economic and social value. In this introduction we showcas…
Personalization: A New Political Arithmetic
Scholarship on the history of political arithmetic highlights its significance for classical liberalism, a political philosophy in which subjects perceive themselves as autonomous individuals in an abstract system called society. This society and its component individuals became intelligible and governable in a deluge of printed numbers, assisted by the development of statistics, the emergence of a common space of measurement, and the calculation…
In the picture’: Perspectives on living and working with cancer
We explored working and living with cancer at a large research-intensive National Health Service hospital breast cancer service and adjoining non-governmental organisation (NGO). The project had three elements that were largely autonomous in practice but conceptually integrated through a focus on personalised cancer medicine. Di Sherlock held conversations with staff and patients from which she produced a collection of poems, Written Portraits At…
Thinking the Problematic: Genealogies and Explorations between Philosophy and the Sciences
The notion of »the problematic« has changed its meaning within the history of power and knowledge since the early 20th century, leading up to today's performative, neocybernetic fascination with generalized management ideas and technocratic models of science. This book explores central scenes, conceptual elaborations, and practical affiliations of what historically has been called »the problem« or »the problematic«. By way of considering modes of…
Introduction: The ambivalences of abstraction
No description available
Algorithmic Personalization as a Mode of Individuation
Recognizing that many of the modern categories with which we think about people and their activities were put in place through the use of numbers, we ask how numbering practices compose contemporary sociality. Focusing on particular forms of algorithmic personalization, we describe a pathway of a-typical individuation in which repeated and recursive tracking is used to create partial orders in which individuals are always more and less than one. …
Routledge Handbook of Interdisciplinary Research Methods
Price and the person: Markets, Discrimination, and Personhood
This paper explores how pricing has historically been involved in the making up of persons and how the ability to 'personalize' price is reconfiguring the ability of markets to discriminate. We discuss a variety of contemporary pricing practices, and three types of personhood they produce: generic, protected, and transcontextual. While some contemporary developments in pricing draw on understandings of the person that are quite familiar, others a…
New Technologies of the Observer: BringBack, Visualization and Disappearance
This article explores two examples of non-visibility as a way of describing the specificity of contemporary surfaces of visualization. The two cases are the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, the scheduled passenger flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, which lost contact with air traffic control on 8 March 2014 at 01:20 MYT, and the 276 Nigerian girls who went 'missing' at about the same time. The analysis is developed through an expl…
Postscript
Social media and self-evaluating assemblages: On numbers, orderings and values
This paper takes tools of self-valuation in social media as an empirical focus. By way of a case-study of Klout, an influential measure of influence, we suggest that the forms of reactivity and self-fulfilling prophecy that have been identified as a problem with some forms of measurement are actually an intentional effect of such tools: that is, the measurements that such tools produce are not designed to capture a separate reality, but are delib…
Number ecologies: Numbers and Numbering Practices
In putting together this Special Issue we seek to contribute to the social study of number, a field which has acquired renewed significance in recent years with a revival in forms of self- and coll
Prosthetic Culture
In a fascinating account of how technology is altering our consciousness, Celia Lury shows how the manipulation of photographic images and ways of seeing can so redefine the relation between consciousness, the body and memory as to create a 'prosthetic culture' whose capacities both extend and threaten our humanity.We live in a society in which some memories can be falsely implanted in the individual while others are stored in video archives of i…
Topological Sense-Making: Walking the Mobius Strip from Cultural Topology to Topological Culture
Re-turning feminist methodologies: From a Social to an Ecological Epistemology
This paper proposes an ecological methodology in order to re-think the concept of situatedness in ways that can take into account that we live in relation to, and are of, a more-and-other-than-human world. In doing so, the paper proposes that situatedness should be understood in terms of processes of co-invention that, fractally and recursively, open onto other co-inventions that include the non-human. The paper illustrates this through the conce…
Inventive Methods: The Happening of the Social
Social and cultural research has changed dramatically in the last few years in response to changing conceptions of the empirical, an intensification of interest in interdisciplinary work, and the growing need to communicate with diverse users and audiences. Methods texts, however, have not kept pace with these changes. This volume provides a set of new approaches for the investigation of the contemporary world. Building on the increasing importan…
Bringing the world into the world’: The material semiotics of contemporary culture
This article puts forward the claim that culture is becoming topological. Rather than using topological concepts to analyze and interpret contemporary culture, it is suggested that the distinctively topological ‘abstractions’ of ordering and continuity of transformation now organize the movement of forms of social life such that constant change is normalized. This claim is supported by a discussion of the material semiotics of contemporary cultur…
Going Live: Towards an Amphibious Sociology
In this paper, I outline one strand in a genealogy of 'liveness', exploring the role of media in its emergence as a privileged spatio-temporal organization of experience. In order to consider the opportunities afforded by current developments in 'live methods' I then explore some of the implications for sociology of not simply studying practices of mediation but of inhabiting media, of being in medias res. Here I propose an amphibious sociology, …
Introduction: The Becoming Topological of Culture
In social and cultural theory, topology has been used to articulate changes in structures and spaces of power. In this introduction, we argue that culture itself is becoming topological. In particular, this 'becoming topological' can be identified in the significance of a new order of spatio-temporal continuity for forms of economic, political and cultural life today. This ordering emerges, sometimes without explicit coordination, in practices of…
Introduction: Special Measures
Making and Measuring Value: Comparison, Singularity and Agency in Brand Valuation Practice
This paper explores the use of three different forms of valuation and measurement by or on behalf of brands and branded organizations: financial brand valuation; brand equity measurement; and internal social or environmental evaluations. These systems, it is argued, are sites at which possible relationships between economic and other values are explored, and at which understandings of what is valuable emerge in tandem with the means for acknowled…
Brand as Assemblage: Assembling Culture
This paper draws out the continuities between understandings of mass product as developed in the Frankfurt school with contemporary understandings of assemblage by way of an investigation of the brand. Drawing on recent developments in mathematics, it argues that the space of the assemblage is a space that is simultaneously mapped and brought into being in a logic of complex topological functionalities. It proposes that it is the implementation o…
Postscript: Beside(s) the Empirical
In this postscript, I want to reflect on one aspect of the arguments raised by many of the other chapters included here: what does the study of affect have to do with the empirical? The question ‘What is the empirical?’ is one that I have already posed in a collection with this title that I coedited with Lisa Adkins (Adkins and Lury, 2009). One of the contributions — that by Patricia Clough — provides a helpful starting point for me in returning …
Introduction: The Becoming Topological of Culture
In social and cultural theory, topology has been used to articulate changes in structures and spaces of power. In this introduction, we argue that culture itself is becoming topological. In particular, this 'becoming topological' can be identified in the significance of a new order of spatio-temporal continuity for forms of economic, political and cultural life today. This ordering emerges, sometimes without explicit coordination, in practices of…
The labour of identity: Performing Identities, Performing Economies
Recent analyses of workplace organization have stressed that the self-identify of workers constitutes a key resource in new regimes of accumulation. Morever, this significance of self-identify has been understood to form part of an aestheticization of work since the techniques involved in the performance of identity are widely conceived as aesthetic or cultural practices. However, in this article we suggest that in these assumptions the questions…
Inventive Life: Approaches to the New Vitalism
This book demonstrates how and why vitalism - the idea that life cannot be explained by the principles of mechanism - matters now. Vitalism resists closure and reductionism in the life sciences whilst simultaneously addressing the object of life itself. The aim of this collection is to consider the questions that vitalism makes it possible to ask: questions about the role and status of life across the sciences, social sciences and humanities and …
Algorithmic Personalization as a Mode of Individuation
Recognizing that many of the modern categories with which we think about people and their activities were put in place through the use of numbers, we ask how numbering practices compose contemporary sociality. Focusing on particular forms of algorithmic personalization, we describe a pathway of a-typical individuation in which repeated and recursive tracking is used to create partial orders in which individuals are always more and less than one. …
Price and the person: Markets, Discrimination, and Personhood
This paper explores how pricing has historically been involved in the making up of persons and how the ability to 'personalize' price is reconfiguring the ability of markets to discriminate. We discuss a variety of contemporary pricing practices, and three types of personhood they produce: generic, protected, and transcontextual. While some contemporary developments in pricing draw on understandings of the person that are quite familiar, others a…
Number ecologies: Numbers and Numbering Practices
In putting together this Special Issue we seek to contribute to the social study of number, a field which has acquired renewed significance in recent years with a revival in forms of self- and coll
Social media and self-evaluating assemblages: On numbers, orderings and values
This paper takes tools of self-valuation in social media as an empirical focus. By way of a case-study of Klout, an influential measure of influence, we suggest that the forms of reactivity and self-fulfilling prophecy that have been identified as a problem with some forms of measurement are actually an intentional effect of such tools: that is, the measurements that such tools produce are not designed to capture a separate reality, but are delib…
Re-turning feminist methodologies: From a Social to an Ecological Epistemology
This paper proposes an ecological methodology in order to re-think the concept of situatedness in ways that can take into account that we live in relation to, and are of, a more-and-other-than-human world. In doing so, the paper proposes that situatedness should be understood in terms of processes of co-invention that, fractally and recursively, open onto other co-inventions that include the non-human. The paper illustrates this through the conce…
Brand as Assemblage: Assembling Culture
This paper draws out the continuities between understandings of mass product as developed in the Frankfurt school with contemporary understandings of assemblage by way of an investigation of the brand. Drawing on recent developments in mathematics, it argues that the space of the assemblage is a space that is simultaneously mapped and brought into being in a logic of complex topological functionalities. It proposes that it is the implementation o…
Making and Measuring Value: Comparison, Singularity and Agency in Brand Valuation Practice
This paper explores the use of three different forms of valuation and measurement by or on behalf of brands and branded organizations: financial brand valuation; brand equity measurement; and internal social or environmental evaluations. These systems, it is argued, are sites at which possible relationships between economic and other values are explored, and at which understandings of what is valuable emerge in tandem with the means for acknowled…
Introduction: Special Measures
Cultural rights: Technology, Legality, and Personality
Examines the fate of "originality" and "authenticity" in postmodern culture. Lury compares a regime of cultural rights ordered by copyright, authorship and originality with one defined by trademark, branding and simulation. She also looks at "women" in the cultural reproduction process
Going Live: Towards an Amphibious Sociology
In this paper, I outline one strand in a genealogy of 'liveness', exploring the role of media in its emergence as a privileged spatio-temporal organization of experience. In order to consider the opportunities afforded by current developments in 'live methods' I then explore some of the implications for sociology of not simply studying practices of mediation but of inhabiting media, of being in medias res. Here I propose an amphibious sociology, …
Marking Time with Nike: The Illusion of the Durable
Research Article| September 01 1999 Marking Time with Nike: The Illusion of the Durable Celia Lury Celia Lury Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (1999) 11 (3): 499–526. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-11-3-499 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site C…
New Technologies of the Observer: BringBack, Visualization and Disappearance
This article explores two examples of non-visibility as a way of describing the specificity of contemporary surfaces of visualization. The two cases are the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, the scheduled passenger flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, which lost contact with air traffic control on 8 March 2014 at 01:20 MYT, and the 276 Nigerian girls who went 'missing' at about the same time. The analysis is developed through an expl…
Topological Sense-Making: Walking the Mobius Strip from Cultural Topology to Topological Culture
Contemplating a Self-portrait as a Pharmacist: A Trade Mark Style of Doing Art and Science
This article addresses how it is possible to view Damien Hirst as a brand name. It argues that the brand name is not the mark of an originary relation between producer and product but of a set of highly mediated relations between products. In a discussion of the spot paintings, the process of mediation is seen to contribute to the open-endedness of the relations between products or works established in Hirst's practice. This open-endedness contri…
Feminism and cultural studies: Pasts, presents, futures
Both feminism and cultural studies have complicated and contradictory histories, inside and outside academy. It would be impossible, as well as perhaps undesirable, to map out a comprehensive outline of these developments here, as if there were simply one single, linear or unified account. However, we fell it is important to highlight what we consider to be some of the key issues in these developments in order to consider the nature of their rela…
Personalization: A New Political Arithmetic
Scholarship on the history of political arithmetic highlights its significance for classical liberalism, a political philosophy in which subjects perceive themselves as autonomous individuals in an abstract system called society. This society and its component individuals became intelligible and governable in a deluge of printed numbers, assisted by the development of statistics, the emergence of a common space of measurement, and the calculation…
Bringing the world into the world’: The material semiotics of contemporary culture
This article puts forward the claim that culture is becoming topological. Rather than using topological concepts to analyze and interpret contemporary culture, it is suggested that the distinctively topological ‘abstractions’ of ordering and continuity of transformation now organize the movement of forms of social life such that constant change is normalized. This claim is supported by a discussion of the material semiotics of contemporary cultur…
From diversity to heterogeneity: A Feminist Analysis of the Making of Kinds
This article suggests that at the same time that nature and culture are being produced as isomorphic, any relatedness between nature and culture is disappeared. As a consequence of this shift, relationality, or the production of relations of affinity and difference, is emerging as something that is internal to both nature and culture. This process is described here in terms of the shift from kind to brand, or as the production of diversity, the m…
Introduction: The ambivalences of abstraction
No description available
Feminism and cultural studies: Pasts, presents, futures
Both feminism and cultural studies have complicated and contradictory histories, inside and outside academy. It would be impossible, as well as perhaps undesirable, to map out a comprehensive outline of these developments here, as if there were simply one single, linear or unified account. However, we fell it is important to highlight what we consider to be some of the key issues in these developments in order to consider the nature of their rela…
Consumption, Identity, and Style: Marketing, Meanings, and the Packaging of Pleasure
Cultural rights: Technology, Legality, and Personality
Examines the fate of "originality" and "authenticity" in postmodern culture. Lury compares a regime of cultural rights ordered by copyright, authorship and originality with one defined by trademark, branding and simulation. She also looks at "women" in the cultural reproduction process
Cultural Rights: Technology, Legality and Personality
Consumer Culture
Marking Time with Nike: The Illusion of the Durable
Research Article| September 01 1999 Marking Time with Nike: The Illusion of the Durable Celia Lury Celia Lury Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (1999) 11 (3): 499–526. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-11-3-499 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site C…
The labour of identity: Performing Identities, Performing Economies
Recent analyses of workplace organization have stressed that the self-identify of workers constitutes a key resource in new regimes of accumulation. Morever, this significance of self-identify has been understood to form part of an aestheticization of work since the techniques involved in the performance of identity are widely conceived as aesthetic or cultural practices. However, in this article we suggest that in these assumptions the questions…
Global Nature, Global Culture
This volume is an innovative exploration of understandings of globalisation in relation to the nature, culture and gender concerns of two decades of feminist theory
Real and Virtual Connectivity: New Media in London
This chapter argues that processes going on in the virtual society(?) are to a large extent continuations of those going on in the real society. It thus exem plifies the fourth rule of virtuality (Woolgar, this volume): ‘the more virtual, the more real’. It argues that social processes in ‘the real’ and ‘the virtual’ are increas ingly characterized by the phenomenon of ‘connectivity’. We base this argument on a discussion of case studies of real …
Cultural Rights: Technology, Legality and Personality
Cultural Rights aims to combine sociology of culture and cultural studies approaches to provide an innovative interpretation of contemporary culture. It develops Walter Benjamin's arguments on the effects of mechanical reproduction by seeing what has happened to originality and authenticity in postmodern culture. One aspect of this culture is that reproduction and simulation have become listless, so that distinguishing what is real from what is f…
From diversity to heterogeneity: A Feminist Analysis of the Making of Kinds
This article suggests that at the same time that nature and culture are being produced as isomorphic, any relatedness between nature and culture is disappeared. As a consequence of this shift, relationality, or the production of relations of affinity and difference, is emerging as something that is internal to both nature and culture. This process is described here in terms of the shift from kind to brand, or as the production of diversity, the m…
Feminism and the political: Introduction
The Interface of the Brand: Complex Objects and Partial Solutions
Dieser Aufsatz entwickelt die These, dass die Marke ein komplexes Objekt ist. Es wird argumentiert, dass in der gegenwärtigen Zeit die Marke die temporale Organisation und das Funktionieren eines Bündels von Beziehungen zwischen Produkten ist. Zudem wird vorgeschlagen, dass die Organisation der Marke ein Interface für die Kommunikation von Information zwischen Produzenten und Konsumenten bildet. Das Funktionieren dieses Interface führt Möglichkei…
The Game of Loyalt(o)y: Diversions and Divisions in Network Society
This paper maps the biography of a new media product as a way of exploring how a network society is emerging. While Castells identifies the importance of the spirit of informationalism, he leaves the ethics of this culture relatively under-developed. Focusing on the development of a computer game for employee training purposes, the paper argues that some of the characteristics of play - its holding or hooking power, its ability to break down the …
Brands: The Logos of the Global Economy
Brands are everywhere: in the air, on the high-street, in the kitchen, on television and, maybe even on your feet. But what are they? The brand, that point of connection between company and consumer, has become one of the key cultural forces of our time and one of the most important vehicles of globalization. This book offers a detailed and innovative analysis of the brandIllustrated with many examples, the book argues that brands:* mediate the s…
Transformations: Thinking Through Feminism
Contemplating a Self-portrait as a Pharmacist: A Trade Mark Style of Doing Art and Science
This article addresses how it is possible to view Damien Hirst as a brand name. It argues that the brand name is not the mark of an originary relation between producer and product but of a set of highly mediated relations between products. In a discussion of the spot paintings, the process of mediation is seen to contribute to the open-endedness of the relations between products or works established in Hirst's practice. This open-endedness contri…
Inventive Life: Approaches to the New Vitalism
This book demonstrates how and why vitalism - the idea that life cannot be explained by the principles of mechanism - matters now. Vitalism resists closure and reductionism in the life sciences whilst simultaneously addressing the object of life itself. The aim of this collection is to consider the questions that vitalism makes it possible to ask: questions about the role and status of life across the sciences, social sciences and humanities and …
Inventive Life: Approaches to the New Vitalism
This text demonstrates how and why vitalism - the idea that life cannot be explained by the principles of mechanism - matters now. It guides readers through the introduction of understanding of information, complexity and cybernetics in the economy science and art
Postscript: Beside(s) the Empirical
In this postscript, I want to reflect on one aspect of the arguments raised by many of the other chapters included here: what does the study of affect have to do with the empirical? The question ‘What is the empirical?’ is one that I have already posed in a collection with this title that I coedited with Lisa Adkins (Adkins and Lury, 2009). One of the contributions — that by Patricia Clough — provides a helpful starting point for me in returning …
Brand as Assemblage: Assembling Culture
This paper draws out the continuities between understandings of mass product as developed in the Frankfurt school with contemporary understandings of assemblage by way of an investigation of the brand. Drawing on recent developments in mathematics, it argues that the space of the assemblage is a space that is simultaneously mapped and brought into being in a logic of complex topological functionalities. It proposes that it is the implementation o…
Introduction: Special Measures
Making and Measuring Value: Comparison, Singularity and Agency in Brand Valuation Practice
This paper explores the use of three different forms of valuation and measurement by or on behalf of brands and branded organizations: financial brand valuation; brand equity measurement; and internal social or environmental evaluations. These systems, it is argued, are sites at which possible relationships between economic and other values are explored, and at which understandings of what is valuable emerge in tandem with the means for acknowled…
Inventive Methods: The Happening of the Social
Social and cultural research has changed dramatically in the last few years in response to changing conceptions of the empirical, an intensification of interest in interdisciplinary work, and the growing need to communicate with diverse users and audiences. Methods texts, however, have not kept pace with these changes. This volume provides a set of new approaches for the investigation of the contemporary world. Building on the increasing importan…
Bringing the world into the world’: The material semiotics of contemporary culture
This article puts forward the claim that culture is becoming topological. Rather than using topological concepts to analyze and interpret contemporary culture, it is suggested that the distinctively topological ‘abstractions’ of ordering and continuity of transformation now organize the movement of forms of social life such that constant change is normalized. This claim is supported by a discussion of the material semiotics of contemporary cultur…
Sociology (25 works) · Computer Science (23 works) · Epistemology (16 works) · Philosophy (13 works) · Political science (13 works) · Psychology (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Business (8 works)