Research Louis Volont

Research team

• Centre for Research on Environmental and Social Change

Expertise

My research is situated in the fields of art sociology and cultural sociology, with a specific focus on cultural life in the late-modern European metropolis. I analyze for example the symbolic dimension of architecture, but also common spaces, free spaces and artistic activism through a cultural sociological lens. I’m equally interested in the relation between the urban experience and the formation of social theory: Simmel in Berlin, Lefebvre in Paris, Marx in London. More recently I started a multi-year project concerning the social phenomenon of ‘the future’. Building on Durkheim’s insights on secular sacrality, I attempt to show how contemporary forms of ‘future-making' – from techno-optimist to eco-apocalypticism – are intrinsically permeated by elements of prophecy, eschatology and ritualism.