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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 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 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 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]

Violence has been a central preoccupation for political and social scientists, and this paper begins with a critical appraisal of the classical approaches to the phenomenon of violence, showing how despite their considerable differences, they are not necessarily contradictory. Via engagement with the recent work of Randall Collins, the paper pays particular attention to the limits of symbolic interactionism. The paper then places the subject central to sociological analysis, showing how it is possible to avoid the determinism of classical sociology by exploring the meaning of violence for the subjects who use it, and how these meanings relate to the processes of subjectivation and desubjectivation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While many accounts of gendered embodiment focus on transformation, this article examines how normative gendered identifications are reinforced among middle-class young people playing classical music. Drawing on an ethnographic study of young people in youth orchestras and a youth choir in the south of England, it examines how the authority of the male conductor is constructed and experienced. It explores the construction of the charisma on which this gendered authority is based, through embodied craft, sexualization and humour, showing how conductors cultivated this mode of authority, which relied on the embodied intimacy of classical musical practice. As a consequence of these gendered power dynamics, young women talked about their conductors differently from the young men. Despite the discomfort or resistance that some of the young women voiced in private, they approached rehearsals with a willing trust which gave the public appearance of their consent to his authority. Against the ways in which participants emphasized agency and choice in interviews, observations of rehearsals revealed young people's conformity to this gendered authority. This paper therefore contributes to theorizing gender among the middle classes by demonstrating how the affective power of the conductor in youth classical music ensembles produces conformity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the formation of political subjectivity in times of neoliberalization and crisis. It does so by following the meaning-making practices of Penelope, a participant of the 2011 Syntagma Square occupation in Athens. The Syntagma Square encampment was at the heart of Greece's anti-austerity movement. Prior to this experience, Penelope says she 'wasn't the most sophisticated person' politically, yet that she 'changed' for the better precisely because of her participation. What does Penelope aspire to and what does she demarcate her self from against the backdrop of austerity neoliberalism, crisis, and her experience in the square? And what remains of her participation experience years on with regard to subjectivity? This article claims that the relationship between subject formation and emancipation under neoliberalism is paradoxical: in her effort to overcome neoliberal rationalities in Greece, Penelope is also unwittingly reproducing them. In disentangling this paradox, this article concludes with a theorization of what I call 'alter-neoliberal critique': against and beyond neoliberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores ethnographically the ways in which working-class elderly and mature women position themselves in class and gender terms through the cleaning practices they carry out in their own households. Following contemporary research, it understands domestic labour as a site of production and negotiation of classed, gendered and 'raced' subject positions. Scholars researching on paid domestic labour have emphasised cleaning labour as devalued; however, this article argues that the unpaid cleaning labour the women carry out in their own households might become a source of self-worth. It does so by briefly depicting how the twentieth-century Chilean modernisation and processes of class formation were coupled with an emphasis on hygiene and cleanliness. It also provides an ethnographic description of working-class women's cleaning practices, attending to the classed and gendered meanings and value the women attach to these practices, and discussing their negotiation of expected standards in relation to material conditions and the multiple demands and values of everyday life. It shows that the margin of negotiation is much reduced when the results of cleaning practices are more open to public view. It also argues that the women not only express their subjectivities through everyday negotiations of cleaning standards, but also produce particular modes of being working-class women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Michel Foucault's concept of governmentality has been hugely influential in sociology and other disciplinary fields. However, its application has been criticised by those who suggest it neglects agency, and gives overwhelming power to governmental discourses in constituting subjectivities, determining behaviour and reproducing social reality. Drawing on posthumously translated lecture transcripts, in this article the authors suggest that Foucault's nascent concept of pastoral power offers a route to a better conceptualisation of the relationship between discourse, subjectivity and agency, and a means of understanding the (contested, non-determinate, social) process through which governmental discourses are shaped, disseminated and translated into action. The authors offer empirical examples from their work in healthcare of how this process takes place, present a model of the key mechanisms through which contemporary pastoral power operates, and suggest future research avenues for refining, developing or contesting this model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article demonstrates the sociological possibilities of using affect. In particular the discussion rises to the methodological challenges posed by affect theories when attempting to undertake empirical research. Drawing on ethnographic data from a study of Brian Lobel's Fun with Cancer Patients art exhibition, it is argued that the development of critically entangled methods, attentive to fleeting, partial, complex and often 'inaccessible' knowledge and experiences, is necessary. In Fun with Cancer Patients the aesthetic event offered opportunities for art participants and visitors to engage with different discourses and subjectivities around cancer. An affective lens makes this engagement intelligible. The analysis contributes to 'live sociology', demonstrating that developing live methods attentive to affect can provide insight into the political potential of aesthetic encounters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his later works, Bourdieu draws extensively on psychoanalytic approaches in accounting for his concept of socialized subjectivity as bound to the social world by an intense affective grip. This emotional turn holds potential for further developing Bourdieu's account of subjectivity as a formation of socialized desire. However, in accounting for this socialized desire, Bourdieu relapses into a dualism of subjective and objective structures, incompatible with the Merleau-Pontyian roots of his practice theory. Tracing this problem to the antagonism between desire and culture in the psychoanalytic accounts that Bourdieu draws on, I propose that the psychoanalytic scholar Hans Loewald's account of Eros may enable a move beyond this impasse, offering a promising conceptual basis for taking further the account of socialized subjectivity and socialized desire in Bourdieu's practice theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After many decades of neglect, sociologists have in recent years been giving renewed attention to violence and the problem of how to develop theoretically informed approaches to questions of definition, understanding and explanation. This volume is part of this ongoing project, which has an urgency generated both by the reality of violence and suffering and the need to address previous lack of sociological engagement. Violence is a complex phenomenon that involves violation, trauma and loss, which requires sociologists to contemplate the antithesis of the social, which is not anything as simple as 'antisocial behaviour'. While violence is a negative phenomenon that has no obvious antonym, it is clearly part of social life, social structures and institutions. It is at times also an agent of social and political change. In many ways confrontation with violence takes sociology to its limits and as both literary writers and sociologists have claimed, the attempt to understand it will ultimately lead us into the dark. A new sociology is one committed to imaginative, innovative ways of exploring violence, with inspiration sought from cognate disciplines and from art and literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]