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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 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]

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]

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]

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]

This article explores Gayatri Spivak's journey of subalternity, demonstrating the empirical and sociological salience of this category beyond its theoretical and epistemic features, by highlighting its potential for increasing our understanding of society and bringing about social change. This argument contests assumptions in the literature about an epistemic/empirical fracture in Spivak's work, recasting her theoretical frameworks as sociologically relevant. Moreover, it demonstrates that this sociological reading, although it goes 'against the grain' of Spivak's own reticence about understanding subalternity sociologically, is well-founded: the theoretical-epistemic aspects of Spivak's subalternity contribute to analyses about the situation of subaltern groups under colonialism and neoliberal globalisation and the means by which that subordination can be challenged. This illustrates that her conceptions of subalternity maintain sociological specificity vis-a-vis vague characterisations of subordination (e.g. oppression). Spivak's later reflections on subalternity then grapple with the sociological deadlocks of her early approach: the disentanglement between subalternity and class exploitation. Her work thus delineates an explanatory matrix, interweaving sociological, philosophical and literary tools to explore entangled aspects of the subaltern condition. This systematic reading of Spivak's approach expands and contests current scholarship, highlighting its sociologically compelling aspects and indicating the analytical and transformative potential of her matrix for future sociological debates on subalternity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whilst work on decolonising methodologies has persisted for more than 20 years, engagement remains uneven. Despite rich discussions of indigenous methodologies and decolonial thinking, the challenge of 'methodological stasis' remains, as Western knowledges, research practices and methods continue to dominate. This article argues for new critiques and concepts to further decolonial efforts. It first situates a discussion of methodological stasis in considerations of social change, arguing we should attend to the diversity of methodologies when evaluating the extent or direction of change. It then asserts that though depictions of methodological fractionation support critiques of dominant Western knowledges, they fail to provide new strategies for change. The concept of methodologies-in/as-practices is thus presented as a novel starting point, drawing from practice theories, which foregrounds the interlinking of diverse researching practices and researchers inside and outside academia. Exploring how methodologies-in/as-practices connects to and contrasts with decolonial, postcolonial and feminist contributions, the article establishes how this concept supports new trajectories for decolonial thinking and methodological change. It demonstrates how discussions of methodological techniques, philosophies and autobiographies can be critiqued and resituated through engagement with this concept, producing openings for new decolonial links and interventions. Furthermore, engaging with the case of practice theory methodologies for this critique outlines crucial steps towards decolonising the tradition of work the concept draws upon. Methodologies-in/as-practices is thus shown to support the spiralling work of undoing and redoing, unlearning and relearning central to decolonising methodologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since intersectionality theory constitutes a critical assessment of the way the social world operates and strives for social justice, it entails an image of how the world is and how things could become. In this article a version of intersectionality with particularly strong counter-cultural tendencies is considered. Drawing on Ruth Levitas's approach to utopia as 'method', it makes explicit pluriversal intersectionality's utopian content. It is shown that the defining features of this intersectionality theory share an elective affinity with the principle of self-management lying at the core of the libertarian strand of socialist thought. But the utopia whose contours are drawn here is not expected to act as a blueprint. Instead, the article aspires to serve as an invitation to dialogue about the kind of future that could lie beyond intersectional oppression and, consequently, help consolidate pluriversal intersectionality's transformative potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among the different theories used to explain social change, the transition theory holds a special place. It has been applied to subjects such as demography, epidemiology, nutrition, etc. and most often from a multidisciplinary perspective. However, beyond the apparent uniqueness of the transition label there are quite different theoretical frameworks and presuppositions, which can be a source of misunderstanding. A first perspective considers change as the transition from one stable state to another and concentrates on the processes at work in the transition phase. It focuses attention on the interactions between cultural and biological variables and tries to take into account the consequences of the fact that they move at different rates. A second perspective conceives change as a series of stages (more or less stable situations) and proceeds to analyse the structural transformation of the organisation at each stage. The emphasis is placed on the transformations that take place during these stages. This brings us closer to the theory of stages. Finally, a third perspective combines stages and transitions. Change is seen as part of an evolutionary and progressive movement and as being reversible or not. This article studies the cognitive organisation of the different theoretical variants of the transition model in which food plays a more or less important role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to analyse how the invention of a national cuisine in the United Arab Emirates takes part in the journey of building the nation, both as a metaphor and as performance of larger political and ideological processes. It analyses the discourses of chefs and professional cooks that are or have been tagged as Emirati food experts. In the Emirati nation building process, the construction of identity is not 'defined by the other' against which the image of a common 'us' should be reflected. This is also mirrored in the national cuisine in the making, which is developing mostly endogamously. Emirati food both participates in and tells the story of nation building in the UAE, through three overlapping stages of development: traditional, modern and fusion food, which correspond to different moments of the perceived nation development and its fit within Western definitions of both national-states and modernity. Emirati food also helps to create identity borders, by defining who is allowed to taste the authentic flavours, through practices of commensality, and who is able to replicate them in restaurants. This article highlights the connections between nation building, social transformation and food, and explores the ways in which constructions of Emirati cuisine reflect discourses and practices of national belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can we break away from a fixation on top-down power dynamics and track the impact of social movements in societies that do not easily fit with Western neoliberal theorisations? Building on Foucault's insights on governance, this article proposes an analytical lens of the 'biopolitics of existence' to address this problem. The term existence refers not simply to the 'corporeal' needs of survival (be it of an individual or an organisation) but also to the freedom to (self-)develop and the ability to interact with others. By examining how the Good Food Movement has transformed the bios of ordinary people into agency and reshaped the governing ethos in China's food system, this article demonstrates that to assess the gravity of social change is to first comprehend how actors calculated their action in a particular socio-political ecology. To speak of the politics of existence is to recognise that existence is simultaneously something to be defended and to be established. A 'biopolitics of existence' lens is instrumental in making visible social actors' logic in (re)forming socio-political norms while keeping in sight the entanglement of different stakeholders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the double burden of 'menstrual etiquette' and the implications for women's inclusion in public spaces in Scotland today. Beginning from Laws' work on 'menstrual etiquette', we explore how menstrual etiquette is characterised primarily by the burden of rendering menstruation invisible, both discursively and practically. However, women not only work to ensure that others remain unaware that they are menstruating; they depend on technologies, such as menstrual product dispensers and bins, to facilitate this process of rendering menstruation invisible. When these technologies are absent or poorly maintained, women experience a double burden: not only must they maintain the social invisibility of menstruation but do so without social or infrastructural support or drawing attention to this absence (for fear of breaching the discursive silence demanded of menstrual etiquette). We locate poor maintenance of facilities within the very same 'civilising process' that has pushed women's bodily management to the furthest reaches of the private sphere. Socially invisible, these infrastructural supports are granted low status and poorly maintained. The pressure to maintain conceptual silence around menstruation limits women's capacity to contest this neglect and, in turn, perpetuates their exclusion from public space. This article, then, exposes the nature and the compounding temporal and affective burden of menstrual etiquette and advocates for breaking discursive silences to facilitate much needed social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parents' values and practices are central to theorising the reproduction of inequality across generations. Where researchers have explored how parental values and practices relate to class circumstances and their combined influence on children's outcomes, the focus has been largely on younger families, with limited evidence on parents' perspectives at the point children approach and pass compulsory school leaving age. The trebling of university tuition fees in England, the insecurity which characterises many non-academic routes into the labour market and concerns about economic recession make this a particularly significant historical moment to investigate parental influences on children's pathways through post-compulsory education and training. This article draws on research into parents' perceptions and practices whilst their children were growing up through their teenage years between 2008 and 2014. In particular, it examines classed differences in how parents frame their young adult children's decision making, assess their pathways and accord markedly differing value to academic and vocational pursuit. It evidences temporal dynamics through showing how diverse values and resources underpin young people's evolving biographical pathways. In these ways, the analysis contributes to theorising parents' values and practices and their complex relationship with social class at a time of some significant social structural changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]