Social Organization of Knowledge

Scholarly Definition

The concrete, reflexive coordination of people’s practices, as observable and reproduced across time, space and place, is the social organization of experience. This approach to studying the social builds from the assumption that our lives are socially organized to happen as they do.

Artistic Statement

We do not create ideas or use knowledge in a vacuum. This image is about social relationality and questions of epistemology. How is what we know socially organized? What are the relationships between knowledge and action? Here I evoke relations between being, feeling and thinking through an oversized brain in vivid azure technicolor, notebooks with a researcher’s field notes, and new ideas manifest as light bulbs. Being, feeling and thinking emerge from and anchor human activities, as seen here. A brain and its neurons firing ascends from an opened book as other associations of the nexus between knowledge and action. I have designed this brain as a cityscape at night, as it would be seen from outer space, to stimulate the viewer to reflect on questions of epistemology.

Digital art © Ujwal Mantha