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The sociology of personal life (SPL) has been largely untouched by sociology's ontological turn. A few scholars have attempted to retrofit SPL and new-materialist ideas, but these limited attempts have overlooked the potential for SPL to furnish its own definitive ontological contributions in dialogue with the wider turn. In response, I offer an SPL-centred ontology: the 'connective ontology' of facet methodology. Introduced in 2011, facet methodology was originally supported by 'connective ontology', briefly outlined in a preliminary text, but as facet methodology has gained popularity, connective ontology has not been explicitly discussed. I argue that, while never mentioned outright, Jennifer Mason's 2018 Affinities is about connective ontology and therefore offers an extensive, albeit tantalisingly implicit, ontological thesis, which I attempt to develop. In my interpretation, the world is made up of fluctuating layerings of vitally animated connection units. This connective ontology resonates with contemporary new-materialist sensibilities, but is from and of SPL. It also speaks to broader theoretical traditions, offering provocations for ontologically-minded, live, post-humanist, vitalist and biosocial sociologies, especially regarding longstanding critiques of apoliticism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Belonging is a fundamentally temporal experience that is anchored not only in place but also time, yet this dimension of belonging has so far remained under-researched. Based on an analysis of 25 British Mass Observation Project accounts I argue that a focus on the temporal location of belonging contributes to our knowledge about how memory is used to create a sense of belonging, and the consequences this has for the self. The paper is structured around two interrelated arguments. First, that the temporal location of belonging - either in the past or the present - has consequences for how time is experienced and how memory is utilized in creating a sense of belonging. Second, that nostalgic belonging from afar, of which three types are identified in the MOP accounts, should not be understood merely as a way of disengaging with the present. Past sources of belonging can endure in a virtual sense through the act of nurturing the connection in memories and can be used to 'warm up' and give vitality to the present. Thus this paper contributes to our understanding of how people can creatively use different forms of temporal belonging to create a sense of a continuous self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper concerns the ways in which futures are enacted, and thus mobilized, by publics, participants and practitioners, and especially by social scientists. In particular, the paper is interested in the assortment of futures within which we are seemingly embroiled, and how we analytically deal with the proliferation of futures. This is approached through the dramatization of futures as ‘Big’ or ‘Little’ in which change is more or less widespread and far-reaching. The aim is to chart some of the ways in which Big Futures are analytically or rhetorically transformed into Little and vice versa, and thus to throw into relief the mutability of futures per se. This discussion is developed by drawing on a particular area of social scientific inquiry, namely the ‘public understanding of science’ (PUS) which also includes the field of ‘public engagement with science and technology’ (PEST). The role for Big Futures (indexed by ‘controversiality’) in this field, and the Big Future claims made by PUS/PEST practitioners are contrasted to the Little Futures of everyday life. With the aid of a ‘speculative’ sensibility, Little Futures are then shown to be potential sources of Big Futures. The paper ends with a preliminary attempt to theorize the complex interactions of Big and Little Futures through Isabelle Stengers’ (2010) notion of an ‘ecology of practices’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces the Great British Class Survey and describes how it came to be, providing an insight into the work that has led to this special issue on the contemporary British elite. We discuss initial work with the BBC Lab UK team, the construction of the web survey and its launch. We also consider the response rate and how an additional face-to-face nationally representative survey was then commissioned to deal with sample skew. The way in which subsequent analysis addresses this challenge is also addressed, along with how this 'problem' has provided rich, granular data on the most privileged and powerful inUKsociety. Wereflect on a piece of research which enjoyed considerable attention, and how we might interpret this in terms of public engagement. We also acknowledge some of the immediate academic responses to this innovative collaborative adventure. Finally, we indicate how the GBCS team will be developing this work in the future, before outlining how the papers in this special issue offer insights into the anatomy of power and privilege in modern Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the Bourdieusian concepts of capital and relational configurations of positions and position-takings have recently been fruitfully employed to theorize global fields, this paper argues that the concepts of illusio and doxa are especially conducive to analyzing the globalization of a field as an expansion into and transformation of formerly independent national arenas. In deploying the concept of illusio as a (quasi-libidinous) investment in the game, globalization is here first and foremost framed as a process in which more and more actors in various contexts ‘succumb’ to specific field logics that orient them to transnational structures. By emphasizing the concept of doxa as the taken-for-granted fundamentals of a field, the paper furthermore calls attention to the mechanisms that help forge and globalize the tacit presuppositions and shared ontologies on which such logics build. Focusing on a field of global Christian missions that emerged during the nineteenth century, the paper illustrates how its competitive logic of proselytization was introduced into the religious arena of India. It highlights how Western notions of religion gained ground among local traditions and pulled them into a game in which numerical relations of adherents mattered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how understandings of community and belonging have shifted in relation to rapid deindustrialization and subsequent waves of redevelopment in East Manchester. Drawing on ethnographic research, it focuses on two social settings which are under threat of closure - a coffee morning and a market place. In these settings, long-standing residents make community, paradoxically, by sharing narratives about the loss of social ties. Drawing on relational approaches to place, the discussion sheds light on the disruption between place and identity in post-industrial localities which have been reshaped by drastic physical regeneration. The paper argues that in order to understand the apparent contradiction between narratives of social decline and observations of abundant social relations, it is necessary to extend existing sociological and anthropological approaches to community and belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper thinks about ourselves as communal beings, tied together and created by common actions of sociality. The perspective presented here stems from what Wills (this issue) terms the Aristotelian position that community is always with us, but it tries to move beyond that simple statement, to ask questions, and propose answers to the question of how: how is community always with us? Embedded in that question of course are others: what are the implications of such an investigation for a discipline tasked to investigate the social? How do we investigate the social of which we are both observer and act-or? What does thinking differently about community mean? What would such a different approach to community look like and finally, how does community work? To confront these questions the paper proposes an investigative analytic which positions communal being-ness as the source of ontological meaning. It proposes that the 'who' we are, our being-ness/identity, is the outcome of constant sociality enacted in common and created and sustained in common through the inter-relational linking of action, materiality, subjectivity, speech and the world of accepted meanings. It proposes a social science means for the investigation of this sociality, this communal being-ness of ours: that is a method for studying the social not built upon concepts borrowed from other fields, but particular to the task at hand. It argues that Hannah Arendt's (1958) account of the creation of our human being-ness as a temporary outcome held in common, provides the foundation for thinking inter-relationally about our communing, and about the social world, to which that thinking must be inexorably bound. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that we should think of community as being about social relationships rather than a 'thing' that is 'lost', 'found' or 'made'. The paper draws on the philosophy of Roberto Esposito and the sociology of David Studdert to highlight the overlaps in their approaches to community. Both argue that community is ontological, as unavoidably 'with us'. The paper then draws upon two empirical examples to argue that this approach could enable a different kind of public policy in relation to community. Policy would focus on existing relationships as the starting point for any efforts to effect social change. The implications for contemporary debates about localism are explored at the end of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is about the relationship between cities and brains: it charts the back-and-forth between the hectic, stressful lives of urban citizens, and a psychological and neurobiological literature that claims to make such stress both visible and knowable. But beyond such genealogical labour, the paper also asks: what can a sociology concerned with the effects of ‘biosocial’ agencies take from a scientific literature on the urban brain? What might sociology even contribute to that literature, in its turn? To investigate these possibilities, the paper centres on the emergence and description of what it calls ‘the Neuropolis’ – a term it deploys to hold together both an intellectual and scientific figure and a real, physical enclosure. The Neuropolis is an image of the city embedded in neuropsychological concepts and histories, but it also describes an embodied set of (sometimes pathological) relations and effects that take places between cities and the people who live in them. At the heart of the paper is an argument that finding a way to thread these phenomena together might open up new paths for thinking about ‘good’ life in the contemporary city. Pushing at this claim, the paper argues that mapping the relations, histories, spaces, and people held together by this term is a vital task for the future of urban sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the construction and contestation of moral distinctions as a dimension of contemporary structural inequality through a focus on the subjectivities constructed by young people who have experienced homelessness. Empirical material from two research projects shows that in young people's narratives of homelessness, material insecurity intertwines with the moral economies at work in neoliberal capitalist societies to construct homelessness as a state of moral disgrace, in which an ungovernable experience is experienced as a moral failure. When young people gain access to secure housing, the increasing stability and security of their lives is narrated in terms of a moral adherence to personal responsibility and disciplined conduct. Overall the paper describes an economy of worth organized around distinctions between order and chaos, self-governance and unruliness, morality and disgrace, which structures the experience of homelessness. As young people's position in relation to these moral ideals reflects the material conditions of their lives, their experiences demonstrate the way that moral hierarchies contribute to the existence and experience of structural inequalities in neoliberal capitalist societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how charitable giving offers an example of lay morality, reflecting people's capacity for fellow-feeling, moral sentiments, personal reflexivity, ethical dispositions, moral norms and moral discourses. Lay morality refers to how people should treat others and be treated by them, matters that are important for their subjective and objective well-being. It is a first person evaluative relation to the world (about things that matter to people). While the paper is sympathetic to the 'moral boundaries' approach, which seeks to address the neglect of moral evaluations in sociology, it reveals this approach to have some shortcomings. The paper argues that although morality is always mediated by cultural discourses and shaped by structural factors, it also has a universalizing character because people have fellow-feelings, shared human conditions, and have reason to value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses nihilism as it relates to contemporary urban multiculture in outer East London. It addresses how contemporary discourses on, and performances of, nihilism signal shifts in the constitution of urban multiculture. Attention is paid to acts of anti-sociability (and sociability) for what they reveal about contemporary urban rearrangement, and in particular the re-formation of urban multiculture in a moment defined by globalization, virtual communication, ethnic diversity and neoliberal marginalization. Through addressing discourses on, and performances of, nihilism the overall argument of the paper is for a renewal of the terms on which we understand and engage with urban multiculture, and for an appreciation of how relations between class, race and culture have shifted since key texts on the subject were published. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Consumers play an integral role in societal divisions of labour. Rather than simply consume, they frequently perform labour. Incorporating consumers into the division of labour poses a challenge to this foundational and enduring concept, given its traditional focus on the technical division of tasks/skills within a labour process. Yet, insofar as completion of a circuit of production, distribution, exchange and consumption is predicated on consumers undertaking work in order to/after they consume, analysis of the division of labour would be incomplete without their inclusion. This paper uses the case of household recycling to demonstrate the importance of 'consumption work' for the organization of the waste management industry in England. By sorting their waste, consumers initiate a new economic process, providing feedstock (such as metals, plastics and paper) which in turn creates jobs/profits within the recycling, processing and manufacturing industries. Consumers also reconfigure public and private sector responsibilities when they sort their recyclable materials from general household waste, revealing the interdependency of consumption work with labour conducted under different socio-economic relations and across differing socio-economic domains. This paper makes the case for a renewed conception of division of labour to account for transformations and interconnections between work of different forms within contemporary society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diagnosis in paediatric genetics involves a combination of technologies able to display variation in DNA and clinical discussions with families that concentrate on retrieving family histories. This paper explores the significance of the family tales that genetics brings to the fore. Through discussion of an ESRC-funded ethnographic study of families referred to a paediatric genetic service, the paper explores how genetics and family history intersect in 'relations of exchange' ( Latimer, 2013). It draws from sociological work on family that emphasizes the importance of narrative to the formation and maintenance of family ties and the importance of broader social contexts to the kinds of stories that can be told and recognized by others. The paper emphasizes the significance of claims to respectability and value to the narratives people provide of family ties; particularly in contexts where such ties, in the past or the present, are thought of as 'troubling'. Making reference to research by Skeggs and Loveday (2012), it is argued that an important narrative that is drawn upon, in order to claim respectability, is that of being a good parent who protects their children from socially 'risky relations' so that a positive future as a 'subject of value' may be possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introductory paper argues that it is vital to reorient class analysis away from its long term preoccupation with class boundaries in the middle levels of the class structure towards a focus on the class formation at the top. This will permit sociological analysis to engage more effectively with concerns about the '1 percent' and accentuating wealth which are increasingly evident. Accordingly I sketch out the persistence of the 'problematic of the proletariat' in sociological analysis before considering theoretical resources which might permit an engagement with the 'wealth elite'. This paper serves to introduce the other papers of this special issue which use the GBCS to explore different facets of the wealth elite in Britain today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws together elements of cultural sociology and theoretical psychoanalysis in order to address the creation and enactment of a particular form of violent subjectivity. Its primary concern is the experience of traumatic events and prolonged periods of insecurity during childhood. The paper argues that the experience of trauma, when set against a particular cultural background, can act to create a subjectivity characterized by a deep commitment to physical violence. The principal original contribution of this paper is to claim that guilt and shame play a crucial role in the creation of this violent subjectivity, and that these affects are, for the most part, unconscious. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a response to the notion of 'live sociology' and its call for new forms of attentiveness to the social, which also involves cultivation of time. Picking up from this observation, the paper asks: how can we find a way of using temporality systematically and routinely in our research practices? The argument concentrates on the concept of the past, and proposes a model for how the past can be reactivated and used analytically to deepen our understanding of contemporary life. To do this, the paper recovers and deploys the ancient technique of enargeia/vividness, and reconsiders Weber's sociology based on ideal-types, all in the effort to show how a special kind of a surrogate temporality/past could serve as a point of contact with things not directly observable. The aim is to show how vivid, enlivened past can be readapted for use as a type of method that triggers the release of new forms of sociological imagination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reflects on the different futures and imaginaries constructed through the politics and policy of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). We examine the role of catastrophism, trauma and notions of ‘resistance’ expressed at different moments in the development of the AMR debate. The paper focuses on a number of imaginaries in the politics of AMR, particularly a characterisation of Britain as the ‘sick man of Europe’ or the ‘British disease’ and, more recently, the catastrophist prospect of a ‘return to the dark ages of medicine’. We draw upon recent writing in biopolitical philosophy on immunity and autoimmunity, particularly in the work of Derrida and Sloterdijk, to interrogate immunitary politics of AMR at the intersections of the human and the microbial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introductory essay reflects on the continuing relevance of Ray Pahl's Whose City? It reassesses the original urban managerialist perspective, developed in the Europe of the late 1960s and early 1970s. When large-scale public institutions dominated access to scarce urban resources, Pahl argued that urban managers played a crucial role in the shaping of life chances. But with the emergence of Marxist perspectives on the city under capitalism, urban managers receded from view as minor players within overarching structures of exploitation and inequality. This was only reinforced by the neoliberal transformations that started to take hold after the late 1970s. We are now living in a very different world of global financialized capitalism in which the relevance of various radical theorists is being reassessed. Have new urban managers emerged? Who are they and what do they do? Should we modify the urban managerialist perspective for the post-privatized city, the city of 'governance', the city of choice in which interests and responsibilities appear to have become more fragmented and less transparent? The essay concludes with a discussion of the other papers in this special section and their contribution to a reassessment of Ray Pahl's urban managerialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the role of privileged research objects (‘model systems') in producing patterns in transnational knowledge production. In its approach it follows Bourdieu's call to focus on contexts of production and forces internal to disciplines as well as his insistence on practice. Learning from work in science and technology studies it also considers material objects of knowledge and spaces of knowledge-production. It discusses the case of sociology and argues that conventions surrounding privileged research objects matter relatively independently of authors’ national origin or field-position. Examining model systems, I argue, can contribute to our understanding of how some well-established inequalities are produced and reproduced. This focus adds specific stakes to the debates about global knowledge production: we can discuss the problem of neglected cases in ways that are not always included in current reflections that draw on general political – rather than specifically knowledge-political – categories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While torture and assassination have not infrequently been used by states, the post 9/11 ‘war on terror’ waged by the US has been distinguished by the open acknowledgement of, and political and legal justifications put forward in support of, these practices. This is surprising insofar as the primary theories that have been mobilized by sociologists and political scientists to understand the relation between the spread of human rights norms and state action presume that states will increasingly adhere to such norms in their rhetoric, if not always in practice. Thus, while it is not inconceivable that the US would engage in torture and assassination, we would expect these acts would be conducted under a cloak of deniability. Yet rather than pure hypocrisy, the US war on terror has been characterized by the development of a legal infrastructure to support the use of ‘forbidden’ practices such as torture and assassination, along with varying degrees of open defence of such tactics. Drawing on first-order accounts presented in published memoirs, this paper argues that the Bush administration developed such openness as a purposeful strategy, in response to the rise of a legal, technological, and institutional transnational human rights infrastructure which had turned deniability into a less sustainable option. It concludes by suggesting that a more robust theory of state action, drawing on sociological field theory, can help better explain the ways that transnational norms and institutions affect states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since Granovetter's path breaking work in the 1970s, there has been much discussion about the relevance of weak ties in finding new jobs and generally getting ahead in society. Subsequent research has found evidence to both support and challenge his original theory. However, concerns have also been expressed about the meaning of this concept. What exactly are 'weak ties', how are they created and what resources flow through them? In my previous work, I have distinguished between horizontal and vertical ties and the relationships and resources available within them. This paper goes further; drawing on new, mixed methods research with Polish migrants, I explore what types of social ties are useful in contexts of deskilling and finding jobs commensurate with qualifications. Interrogating the concept of 'weak ties', I argue that tie strength and ethnic composition are less important than relative social distance and willingness to share valuable resources. I propose that 'strong ties' can also act as vertical bridges (or ladders), while ties which are too 'weak' may lack necessary trust to share latent resources. I consider the importance of a temporal perspective to explore the dynamism and life cycle of ties over time - as some lapse while others strengthen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the face of increasing calls for sociology to demonstrate its public relevance, it is necessary to question cherished understandings of what so-called Public Sociology should look like. This paper advances an understanding of sociology that is ontologically oriented toward a world of rapidly emerging and often unfamiliar social realities, with an eye to producing new ways of understanding the discipline's authority vis a vis 'the public.' In experimenting with alternate conceptualisations of sociology, its public and their relation, I turn to a social, and specifically artistic, event for inspiration; namely, Marina Abramović's performance of The Artist is Present at the Museum of Modern Art. While the artist and the social scientist clearly work with differing possibilities and constraints, the performance indicates a novel way in which authority might be mobilised. Wheras the debate around public sociology normally centres on the figure of the expert, Abramović's performance give rise to a new authority, intimately bound up with the age old sociological concepts of charisma and the gift. This highly experimental performance points the way toward a more affectively open and productive relationship between author and public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes and critically assesses the use and development of a model of participatory theatre to reappropriate the ways in which a place in the deindustrialized south Wales valleys is represented. Neo-liberal policies which focus on individual responsibility, conditionality, sanctions and incentives frame the production of statistics on health inequality and deprivation in particular ways. While 'place' can be a resource for expressing positive identities this presents people living in economically under-resourced areas with a problem if that place-based identity is also subject to vilification. In this paper we focus on three objectives: to explore negative stereotypes of a post-industrial community; to describe the methods and process of working alongside local people to offer alternative ways of understanding place; and to discuss the implications of using community theatre for policy and practice. We argue that theatre-based forms of place-making and dialogue can create spaces where policy issues, such as health and well-being, can be discussed in the context of everyday local concerns. Meanings in common are generated in ways that create affective understandings of place and the impact of economic change and crisis (Jones et al., 2013). These co-productive processes are uncertain, emergent, and risky and need to be managed carefully in the context of trustful relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article improves upon our current understanding of the Sociological Society's contributions to the development of sociology in Britain. It challenges the assessment of the Society's legacy made by Philip Abrams in 1968 and the more recent conclusions reached by scholars who contributed to a debate published in The Sociological Review in 2007. The article is built on original findings garnered from empirical research undertaken at The Sociological Review 's archives in Keele. It shows that, despite achieving some results in its attempts to introduce a particular type of sociology into Britain, the influence of the Society in establishing, both institutionally and intellectually, a sociological tradition was largely unsuccessful. A limited legacy, however, does not mean that the history of the Society is of little importance in the history of sociology in this country; on the contrary, as this article attempts to highlight, the Society deserves a critical examination precisely because of its limited legacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Memory is an enormously important resource for the social sciences. This paper takes the subject of maternal memory to examine a corpus of work in the sociology of childbirth concerned with how women remember the experience of childbirth. It suggests that the sociology of memory has been more concerned with collective than individual experiences, and that women's memories of childbirth have generally been treated as a special case, rather than as a route to enhanced understandings of how memory works in relation to the all-important topics of time, identity and social change. Drawing on data from a 37-year follow-up to a study of childbirth conducted in the 1970s, it argues that maternal memory shares key characteristics with other kinds of memory, but can be significant in allowing women to reposition themselves as active social selves in a process that is remembered as not allowing much agency or autonomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a meta-literature review, this paper examines the changing contours of Chinese sociology of homosexuality in contemporary China. It unfolds the different theoretical orientations and methodologies that construct the modern male homosexual subject under major socio-economic and political changes. Chinese sociology of homosexuality started in the reform era and has been dominated by Western knowledge production and the political ideology of the communist party-state. Fused with the bio-medical model and the state's modernization project in the 1980s-1990s, the sociological study adopted a functionalist and positivistic approach with survey-based methodology in the main which focused on the etiology of homosexuality. A new transnational knowledge production of sociology of homosexuality has formed since the 2000s which has shifted towards a constructivist/ post-structuralist approach and reflexive qualitative methodology. The new sociological study examines the rise of male (as well as female) homosexual identity in China, questions the hetero/homosexual binary and discusses how an individual makes sense of homosexual identity to form same-sex intimate relationships. By tracing the epistemology of homosexuality in contemporary China, this paper rethinks the dominance of the Western construction and the role of the state in shaping the knowledge of homosexuality and proposes alternative spaces for theorizing Chinese sexual identities, desires and practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we focus on highly skilled migration from Zimbabwe to the UK, exploring these migrants' social capital sources/structures and content. In doing so we pay attention to routes of migration and how they shape migrants' networking capabilities and patterns. We further take a Bourdieusian perspective and explore the intersection between social capital and cultural capital in the process of migrants' negotiation of employment opportunities, giving closer attention to how the distinctive habitus associated with being highly skilled migrants from Zimbabwe shape migrants' attitudes towards work. By exploring the interplay between external processes and internalised structures, we bring to the fore the multiple positioning of our participants, who we see not as simply depending on social networks, but as complex actors whose negotiation of employability in the UK is shaped by various factors including intersecting aspects of differentiation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although sociologists in Britain have debated the nature of their field's relationship with biology since the late nineteenth century, interest in the full range of responses has only grown in recent years. This paper contributes to the spirit of historical revisionism by turning to the work of the biologist and first director of UNESCO, Julian Huxley (1887–1975). Paying particular attention to the doctrine he called ‘scientific humanism’ and his ideas about a biosocial agenda separate from the priorities of biology itself, the paper uses historical tools to address a concern that has frequently cast a shadow over debates about biosocial science: does it interfere with the progressive agenda sociologists have traditionally seen themselves as contributing to? The paper argues that Huxley's work is evidence that biosocial science is compatible with progressive goals and that recent developments in biology mean it may be the ideal time to reconsider long-standing attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a contribution of a set of interrelated innovative thinking to revitalize the sociological understanding of the notion of the habitus. It discusses contributions by sociologists exploring the sources of Bourdieu's inspiration from psychology and psychoanalysis to the development of the concept, and brings in new thinking inspired by authors and frameworks that branch out of sociology to bring into sociology fresher thinking. Three areas of concern about habitus are focused on: firstly, the objectivism and subjectivism dichotomy; secondly, the plasticity or rigidity of the concept; and thirdly, the implications of intangibles attached to the notion. The paper introduces a Special Section including five articles on theoretical and empirical explorations bringing exciting perspectives to creative and critical sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines a unitary notion of the habitus present in Bourdieu's early works and its transformation along his sociological career, to later conceptions of a fragmented habitus concept to examine contemporary relationality and social change. The career of the concept of habitus in Bourdieu shows that interplays of habitus and fields are seen to demand increasing labour of integration from individuals as social life becomes more differentiated. The paper claims the need for sociology to engage with field analyses to advance explorations of the habitus and to acknowledge the potential pliability of the concept. It is suggested that sociology may adopt the psychoanalytic notion of 'standing in spaces' (and associated notions of 'liminality' and experiences in interstitial positons) for a productive development of the notion of fragmented habitus, and to enhance proposals that view the social with a history that is made available to humans to change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to elucidate some of the similarities between the Bourdieusian and a psychoanalytical approach to understand the individual and the social, and to describe Bourdieu's relation to psychoanalysis. The paper begins by reflecting upon the way a research on anorexia was received and perceived by some psychiatrists and psychoanalysts. Such a case study puts into light several analogies between Bourdieu's theoretical position, his epistemological style and psychoanalysis. Then, some texts by Bourdieu, especially a discussion with the psychoanalyst and sociologist Jacques Maître, are analysed in order to further explore Bourdieu's position vis-à-vis psychoanalysis and to assess the influence of psychoanalysis on his conception of the individual habitus. Finally, the paper discusses the possible contradictions arising between these borrowings and the principles of Bourdieusian epistemology. The paper thus suggests that the Bourdieusian approach is better analysed as a 'sociologization'of psychoanalysis rather than as an approach complementing or integrating psychoanalysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces a distinctive approach to methods development in digital social research called 'interface methods'. We begin by discussing various methodological confluences between digital media, social studies of science and technology (STS) and sociology. Some authors have posited significant overlap between, on the one hand, sociological and STS concepts, and on the other hand, the ontologies of digital media. Others have emphasized the significant differences between prominent methods built into digital media and those of STS and sociology. This paper advocates a third approach, one that (a) highlights the dynamism and relative under-determinacy of digital methods, and (b) affirms that multiple methodological traditions intersect in digital devices and research. We argue that these two circumstances enable a distinctive approach to methodology in digital social research - thinking methods as 'interface methods' - and the paper contextualizes this approach in two different ways. First, we show how the proliferation of online data tools or 'digital analytics' opens up distinctive opportunities for critical and creative engagement with methods development at the intersection of sociology, STS and digital research. Second, we discuss a digital research project in which we investigated a specific 'interface method', namely co-occurrence analysis. In this digital pilot study we implemented this method in a critical and creative way to analyse and visualize 'issue dynamics' in the area of climate change on Twitter. We evaluate this project in the light of our principal objective, which was to test the possibilities for the modification of methods through experimental implementation and interfacing of various methodological traditions. To conclude, we discuss a major obstacle to the development of 'interface methods': digital media are marked by particular quantitative dynamics that seem adverse to some of the methodological commitments of sociology and STS. To address this, we argue in favour of a methodological approach in digital social research that affirms its maladjustment to the research methods that are prevalent in the medium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasing social mobility is the 'principal goal' of the British Government's social policy (Cabinet Office, 2011: 5). However, while policy perspectives present mobility as an unambiguously progressive force, there is a striking absence of studies looking at the impact of mobility on individuals themselves. Drawing on 39 lifecourse interviews with upwardly mobile respondents drawn from the UK Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion Project (CCSE), this paper examines how mobility affects the psychic and emotional life of the individual. More specifically, it examines how mobility influences social, familial and intimate relationships, as well as the ontological coherence of the self. Following Bourdieu's (2004: 127) description of his own upward trajectory, the paper argues that the concept of a divided habitus, or habitus clivé, may be particularly useful for understanding some iterations of the contemporary mobility experience, particularly its most long-range forms. Such a concept, it argues, helps explain how the emotional pull of class loyalties can entangle subjects in the affinities of the past, and why - despite prevailing political rhetoric - upward mobility may remain a state that not everyone unequivocally aspires to. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a recent paper in The Sociological Review, Atkinson and Deeming argue that tastes in food are homologous to the social space, exactly as it was in Bourdieu's Distinction. This would involve differences in food tastes not only along the class hierarchy, but also a clear-cut divide by the relative weight of cultural and economic capital. However, Atkinson and Deeming base their claims on insufficient data analysis: They misinterpret their own correspondence analysis and the additional tables, which they in turn fail to subject to even the most basic statistical analysis. We show that the results they present are actually at odds with their own interpretations and main conclusions. It is not just that Atkinson and Deeming's arguments lack support; their proposition about a culinary division between cultural and economic class fractions is contradicted by their own data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The focus of this paper is young people's participation in the Occupy protest movement that emerged in the early autumn of 2011. Its concern is with the emotional dimensions of this and in particular the significance of emotions to the reasoning of young people who came to commit significant time and energy to the movement. Its starting point is the critique of emotions as narrowly subjective, whereby the passions that events like Occupy arouse are treated as beyond the scope of human reason. The rightful rejection of this reductionist argument has given rise to an interest in understandings of the emotional content of social and political protest as normatively constituted, but this paper seeks a different perspective by arguing that the emotions of Occupy activists can be regarded as a reasonable force. It does so by discussing findings from long-term qualitative research with a Local Occupy movement somewhere in England and Wales. Using the arguments of social realists, the paper explores this data to examine why things matter sufficiently for young people to care about them and how the emotional force that this involves constitutes an indispensable source of reason in young activists' decisions to become involved in Local Occupy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores practices that produce and reproduce domination in and through organizational hierarchies and shows how high levels of employee turnover were managed within a UK-based call centre through the use of culturally bound employment practices. Using ethnographic methods the paper explores the experience of managerial retention strategies from the perspective of employees and draws upon some of the theoretical resources employed by Pierre Bourdieu, specifically in relation to his concern with structures of subordination, and with the ways that processes of symbolic violence appear legitimate. The paper therefore makes three contributions to our understanding of the sociology of work generally and the management of labour turnover in service industries specifically; first, it extends understanding of the cultural basis of retention strategies. Second, it explores the 'lived experience' of these strategies. Finally, it considers the relevance of Bourdieu's analysis for making sense of these practices in action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The night-time economy is often described as repelling consumers fearful of the 'undesirable Others' imagined dominant within such time-spaces. In this paper we explore this by describing attitudes towards, and reactions to, one particularly contentious site: the 'lap dance' club. Often targeted by campaigners in England and Wales as a source of criminality and anti-sociality, in this paperwe shift the focus from fear to disgust, and argue that Sexual Entertainment Venues (SEVs) are opposed on the basis of moral judgments that reflect distinctions of both class and gender. Drawing on documentary analysis, survey results and interview data collected during guided walks, we detail the concerns voiced by those anxious about the presence of lap dance or striptease clubs in their town or city, particularly the notion that they 'lower the tone' of particular streets or neighbourhoods. Our conclusion is that the opposition expressed to lap dance clubs is part of an attempt to police the boundaries of respectable masculinities and femininities, marginalizing the producers and consumers of sexual entertainment through 'speech acts' which identify such entertainment as unruly, vulgar and uncivilized. These findings are considered in the light of ongoing debates concerning the relations of morality, respectability and disgust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociology is just as much an art form as it is a science. And while sociologists and those in cognate disciplines have long experimented with their writing, the search for new academic forms and practices has acquired new urgency and potentiality. How we write up our research is of paramount importance: our language can be used in experimental and innovative ways to offer nuanced, critical commentary without foreclosing alternative viewpoints, and without excluding others from dialogue. Sociography offers spaces for new sensibilities and sensitivities; unresolved or incomplete argument; multiple, multi-dimensional and multiplying possibilities: for writing differently. As an intervention in writing the social, our collection works to resist the ideological promotion of dry, dispassionate, and seemingly 'objective' discourse, one which has traditionally upheld a set of dominant, privileged voices. And in so doing, our collection explores the potential of new ways of writing the social for both a trans- and post-disciplinary academy and a wider reading public; and seeks forms of writing that do justice to the critical curiosity that animates sociology. In sum, the challenge embraced by this collection is to argue for and showcase a praxis that activates sociological knowledge and enlarges the sociological imagination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We write to conjure a poetics of scenes at once social, dreamy, mattering, and incidental. Our collaborative project is about feeling and testing out the moments we move around in and the speculations we bring to them, generating scenes of life that are ideas of life. We try out practices of looser and sharper processing what we've seen, smelled, overheard, conjured. To move and conceptualize from within worlds is preferable to drawing a plane above them. Toggling across what's starting up or falling away in a present closely noted creates a fractal, fractious narrative, if there's a narrative at all. It might produce a story sense that stretches the social and political into a resource for living. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces Intimate Entanglements by proposing three interrelated shifts that result from juxtaposing experiences with different world-making practices at the intersection of care, technoscience and theoretical engagements with affect theory and Science and Technology Studies (STS). The first shift positions intimacy as not only relevant in STS but also as a more general epistemic concern of social scientific enquiry. The second shift is an exploration of the heterogeneous materiality of the intimate and, in particular, of its more-than-human constituencies. The third shift both reclaims and speculates about other politics of relations, including practical challenges (not only conceptual) to the way we do research. The article shows that the beings entangled, the materialities involved, the affects conveyed and the extension of the intimate all come to matter when science and technology is critically analysed, and that they challenge the traditional limits and geographies of the intimate. The paper also argues that this has important political implications for science and technology studies. By countering the invisibilisation of 'intimate work' through its usual association with the emotional and the domestic, the article contests the ready-made framing of the intimate as bound to the interpersonal, corporal and private. In so doing, the authors make visible the politics of relations that scientific and technological settings silently enact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper interrogates the relationship between working-class participation in higher education ( HE) in England and social and cultural mobility. It argues that embarking on a university education for working-class people has been construed in governmental discourses as an instrumental means of achieving upward mobility, or of aspiring to 'become middle class'. Education in this sense is thus not only understood as having the potential to confer value on individuals, as they pursue different 'forms of capital', or symbolic 'mastery' ( Bourdieu, 1986), but as incurring a form of debt to society. In this sense, the university can be understood as a type of 'creditor' to whom the working-class participants are symbolically indebted, while the middle classes pass through unencumbered. Through the analysis of empirical research conducted with staff from working-class backgrounds employed on a university Widening Participation project in England, the article examines resistance to dominant educational discourses, which understand working-class culture as 'deficient' and working-class participation in HE as an instrumental means of securing upward mobility. Challenging the problematic notion of 'escape' implicit in mobility discourses, this paper concludes by positing the alternative concept of 'fugitivity', to contest the accepted relationship in HE between creditor and debtor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper engages with an emergent literature on multiculture and concepts such as conviviality and negotiation to explore how increasingly ethnically diverse population routinely share and mix in urban places and social spaces. As part of a wider ESRC funded, two-year qualitative study of changing social life and everyday multiculture in different geographical areas of contemporary England, this paper draws on participant observation data from three branches of franchised leisure and consumption cafe spaces. We pay particular attention to the ways these spaces work as settings of encounter and shared presence between groups often envisaged as separated by ethnic difference. Our findings suggest that corporate spaces which are more often dismissed as commercial, globalized spaces of soulless homogeneity can be locally inflected spaces whose cultural blandness may generate confident familiarity, ethnic mixity, mundane co-presence and inattentive forms of conviviality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper employs a Bourdieusian conception of class and attempts to illustrate the power of such an approach via an analysis of the contemporary Brazilian case. Initially, the paper describes the main dilemmas and disputes in the field of class analysis in Brazilian sociology. Then, the paper presents an empirical investigation on the role of culture in the shaping of class relations in Brazil, based on the analysis of survey data containing information on social agents' cultural participation and uses of time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses the salience of class in Britain in relation to the experiment of the BBC-academic partnership of the Great British Class Survey (GBCS). It addresses the claimed inauguration of a third phase in class analysis in the UK sparked by the experiment. This is done by considering three main issues. First, the GBCS experiment is situated in the context of various explorations of cultural class analyses, and chiefly in relation to the Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion (CCSE) project (ESRC funded 2003-6). Secondly, the focus is on the influence of the academic turn to big data for the procedures and claims of the project, and some implications of the methodological choices. Thirdly, attention is turned to the deleterious effects of commercial and institutional pressures on the current research culture in which the experiment exists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]