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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 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 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]

While sociology has historically not been a good interlocutor of war, this paper argues that the body has always known war, and that it is to the corporeal that we can turn in an attempt to develop a language to better speak of its myriad violences and its socially generative force. It argues that war is a crucible of social change that is prosecuted, lived and reproduced via the occupation and transformation of myriad bodies in numerous ways from exhilaration to mutilation. War and militarism need to be traced and analysed in terms of their fundamental, diverse and often brutal modes of embodied experience and apprehension. This paper thus invites sociology to extend its imaginative horizon to rethink the crucial and enduring social institution of war as a broad array of fundamentally embodied experiences, practices and regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Google Books N-gram corpus contains an enormous volume of digitized data, which, to the best of our knowledge, sociologists have yet to fully utilize. In this paper, we mine this data to shed light on the discipline itself by conducting the first empirical study to map the disciplinary advancement of sociology from the mid-nineteenth century to 2008. We analyse the usage frequency of the most common terms in five major sociology categories: disciplinary advancement, scholars of sociology, theoretical dimensions, fields of sociology, and research methodologies. We also construct an overall index deriving from all sociology-related key words using the principal component method to demonstrate the overall influence of sociology as a discipline. Charting the historical evolution of the examined terms provides rich insights regarding the emergence and development of sociological norms, practices, and boundaries over the past two centuries. This novel application of massive content analysis using data of unprecedented size helps unpack the transformation of sociocultural dynamics over a long-term temporal scale. [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]

There is a degree of consensus among scholars that the character of warfare has substantially changed over the past three decades. However, there is no agreement about the direction and causes of this change. Some argue that 'the new wars' have become more brutal, more chaotic and decentralized. These wars are linked to the globalization processes emphasizing that as the unrestrained proliferation of globalized economy intensifies so will these new wars. In contrast others insist that all forms of organized violence are on the wane: there are fewer wars, they are less lethal, more localized and shorter than in previous historical periods. Moreover they argue that the very institution of warfare is gradually but definitely becoming obsolete. This paper challenges both of these perspectives and articulates an alternative interpretation. The aim is to develop a longue durée sociological analysis that focuses on the macro-organizational social context and explores the dynamics of the war-state-society nexus over the past centuries. I argue that warfare is not becoming obsolete and that 'new wars' are unlikely to completely replace inter-state warfare. Instead my analysis indicates that there is more organizational continuity in the contemporary warfare that either of the two dominant perspectives is willing to acknowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]