Career
Mandoki pioneered the systematic research of Everyday Aesthetics coining the term "Prosaics" (1994) for this subfield of Aesthetics. In her book Everyday Aesthetics, the first extended treatment of this subject, she opens up the study of aesthetics –traditionally confined to art and beauty– to encompass all those aspects involving sensibility in common experience using the human body as a starting point for this analysis. Her work covers not only the positive aspect of aesthetics but also its negative side such as cruelty and abuse upon someone"s sensibility, never before thought of in those terms.
She stresses the danger of political manipulation of sensibility illustrated by the propagandistic use of aesthetics specifically during the Nazi regime.
From Mandoki"s work on the negativity of aesthetics Arnold Berleant takes off to analyze this issue in relation to terrorism. The subfield of everyday aesthetics is so fertile that it has been followed and enriched by a number of contemporary aestheticians.
Mandoki has published eight books on this topic, the most recent presenting and developing the concept of bio-aesthetics that traces sensibility not only in humans but in the most elemental creatures from an evolutionary perspective. She has been professor of aesthetics and semiotics at Metropolitan Autonomous University (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana) in Mexico where she established and chaired postgraduate specialization studies in Aesthetics, Semiotics and Theory of Culture, has taught postgraduate level at National Autonomous University of Mexico (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) and given courses for Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes and Universidad Iberoamericana.
Her monumental sculpture Histogram on the distribution of income in Mexico can be visited at the Library Plaza in the Xochimilco Campus of Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana. Mandoki published more than 150 articles on aesthetics and semiotics and presented papers and lectures in 20 countries.
Presently Mandoki serves at the International Association of Aesthetics" Executive Committee (IAA), at the International Advisory Board of International Institute of Applied Aesthetics, Finland, and at the International Editorial Board of various academic journals such as Contemporary Aesthetics, Cultural Politics, and Environment, Land, Society, Architectonics.