Hegemony and Fields. Working with the concepts of Gramsci and Bourdieu

Within the disciplinary fields of the humanities and social sciences, several well-established and globally flourishing research traditions have produced, and continue to produce, exegetical and theoretical studies on both Antonio Gramsci and Pierre Bourdieu. Alongside these lines of research, various attempts have been made to extend and empirically apply elements or aspects of each author’s intellectual oeuvre, taken separately. However, the fact is that research practices inspired by the convergence of the two authors have frequently circulated loosely, leading to questionable conflations and parallels between their respective conceptual devices. The two scholars have also been used by researchers attempting to distance themselves from them to promote their own theories. We now need to move beyond these approaches and create the conditions for a structured epistemological, theoretical and methodological dialogue. This certainly means systematically identifying points of convergence and divergence; but not exclusively so. This conference is, therefore, an opportunity to outline a dialogic space between Italian and French scholars, and between France and Italy as the national fields that produced Gramsci and Bourdieu as intellectuals of their times, but whose social trajectories and histories of critical reception and circulation display significant connections and homologies. The primary aim of this initiative is to illustrate the operativity and the potential uses in the social sciences of certain nodes, conceptual tools, epistemological and methodological perspectives drawn from a close dialogue and interaction, not so much between Gramsci and Bourdieu’s works (opus operatum), but more specifically between their respective modus operandi – that is, their thought styles and interpretative and analytical perspectives on the production and reproduction of the multiple articulations of what we call society, culture, and power – mainly through a discussion of the complementarity between the epistemological framework of Hegemony and the analytical infrastructure of the Field. To this end it is vital, due to the very nature of the two authors’ methods of conducting social and cultural analysis, to contextualize the resources and lessons drawn from their respective experiences and test them in specific cases and historical conjunctures, with a view to devising a conceptual toolbox of “thinking tools” that are concretely useful only if placed within a precise and circumstantial heuristic framework