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Critical theory has already marked that technology often threatens civil liberties, personal autonomy, and rights. Heidegger, later Marcuse, emphasized how technology is not value-free in its own revealing power of the surrounding environment, external and inner nature. Throughout this paper, I explore how the aesthetic approach engages with critical theory and contributes to the sociology of media and communication. For this, I will theoretically survey the terms of sociality under the forces of immediate communication, ubiquitous surveillance, and the compression of time and space that Baudrillard and Virilio once problematized through the lens of critical technology theory to adapt it to media and communication studies. I contend that techno-aesthetics that converge with Rancière's dissensus can provide practical suggestions on an updated vocation of critical sociology. This article discusses the potential of aesthetic and social criticism of media for democratizing technology that Feenberg inserted. It is urgent to acknowledge the changing spatio-temporal aesthetic regimes that affect the societal imagination and limits of sociality and action to determine the next steps for achieving a commons-based society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces the notion of taste for teaching a subject, especially science, as a conceptual framework to analyse the aesthetics of teacher development as a lifelong process. We draw on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and John Dewey in order to account for how teachers distinguish admirable practices and, in doing so, distinguish themselves as inspiring professionals. In order to illustrate this framework, we report a narrative inquiry on the life story of Tomas, a white man nationally prized for his science teaching. This inquiry was inspired by sociological portraits recommended by Bernard Lahire. Results indicate how a practical disposition (as opposed to a theoretical one) played an important role in developing Tomas's individual taste for science teaching, producing a strong continuity between his early experiences as a masculine boy raised in a family of construction workers, on the one hand, and his later experiences as a biologist and a science teacher enacting inquiry-based activities. The significance of the findings for science education is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper proposes a Reading of Schillers' letters On the aesthetic Education of Man from the viewpoint of the concept "sociability" with which Schiller situates, in the last letter, the territory where the aesthetic way towards "freedom" would break through. It is pointed to the propagation of the sociability concept via the kantian anthropology and the sociology of Simmel. It is postulated the affinity of this approach with the contemporary thinking of the event. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to analyze the process of (dis)legitimacy of artistic-sociological consciences in Russia during the early years of Stalinist rule, in order to recover the history of language studies and the context of production of Bakhtinian writings. The method that underlies the reflection undertaken is based on the theoretical-methodological assumptions of Bakhtin (2006 [1979]; 2010 [1920-24]), Medviédev (2016 [1928]) and Volóchinov (2017 [1929], 2013), among others, which present criticisms of the formalist model, prevailing in Stalinist Russia. Historical sources are also used (Deutscher, 2006; Fitzpatrick, 2017) to investigate the political-ideological context of the post-revolution of 1917. The relevance of this manuscript is realized in the contribution of a contemporary but not anachronistic look, which brings to light a critical reading about the construction of philosophical and ethical (aesthetic) approaches on artistic-sociological consciences in Russia. The results show that, despite the execrable situation to which the members of the Bakhtin Circle were subjected amid attempts to (un)artistic legitimacy by the Russian state, researchers and intellectuals resisted and proposed to (re)think the aesthetic object (literary) as conceived by Stalin, whose primary proposal was the unification of the Russian language. Thus, this is not only language movements for the implementation of a linguistic system conception, but also a sociohistorical-cultural reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]