Jeffrey Alexander and Peter Beilharz have been in conversation for thirty years. Drawing on a friendship that spans the personal, sociological and theoretical, this year’s Thesis Eleven Annual Lecture, “How Did We Get to Here? A Conversation with Jeffrey Alexander and Peter Beilharz,” will bring these discussions into a public forum. Together and in person, it will be an opportunity for Jeff and Peter to pick up on the themes that have evoked their mutual interest over the years. Their discussion will address issues of continuity and change since the nineties, glance back to the sixties and take time for serious engagement with the present. This will involve reconsidering hopes and expectations over the past decades and provide the opportunity to revisit the research programs that have emerged to mediate these. The conversation will take several slices of Jeff’s work as a way to open these issues up. They will discuss Jeff’s most recent work, on objects, icons, performance; his momentous work from 2006, The Civil Sphere; and glance back to where all this began.
Jeff and Peter are currently working on a project that will endeavor to coalesce their thirty years of dialogue and conversation into publication form.