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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]

Recent years have seen an increased epistemological and methodological interest within sociology in participatory research. Seen as one mode by which to upturn the apparent antagonism between 'town' and 'gown', and as a pragmatic way to render sociology more 'public', participatory research seems to offer resolutions to some of the field's more pressing recent concerns. It also appears to provide redress to continuing institutional pressure to establish 'impact' for our research. This article offers a close and theoretically informed examination of the assumptions and practices of youth participatory action research, or YPAR, in order to contribute to deepened disciplinary understandings of the possibilities and limits of participatory approaches. Framed by the reflexive sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, we draw upon cross-national conversations through which we have intentionally reflected on moments of ambivalence or discomfort in our own participatory research practice(s). We utilise these to engage critically with some recurring problems in YPAR, suggesting these also have relevance to sociological enquiry more broadly. Our collaborative process of mutual reflexivity, developed through walking and talking together, writing individually and then providing feedback and clarifications, has allowed us to deepen our understanding of the power dynamics at play in participatory sociological enquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article outlines a novel conceptual framework to examine English society's ruling institutions. Usually called 'The Establishment', the term has been a thorn in the side of analyses of class, status and power in British sociology as it stands between polemic and an explanation for England's peculiar exaggeration of status over class. Drawing upon Lévi-Strauss's concept of a 'house-society', the article rethinks how England's ruling institutions are called upon to do two things at once: disguise political-economic interests through the language of kinship and naturalise status and belonging. English society's ruling institutions are overdetermined in the call to create legitimate and exclusive membership to something, perhaps anachronistically, called ' Great Britain'. Tracing this to the origins of English class nomenclature in early modern political thought, the article applies this framework to a discussion of Eton College and the Etonians' relationship to our present political crisis. [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]

This article outlines the collaborative process of making a watercolour animation drawn from research with women who swim wild in rivers, lakes and seas. Discussing graphic storytelling in sociology, anthropology and related disciplines, we share our experiences of creative collaboration, describing in detail the practical process of making a research-led animation to share with the wider swimming community and situating the project within a larger discussion of graphic and public ethnography, live methods and the possibilities of representation. The article contributes to the ways we can make methods lively and shows how we can both literally and metaphorically animate sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we tentatively plot the coordinates of a sensory sociology approach for empirically investigating how the popular culture genre of climate fiction operates affectively within environmental activism. We begin by theorising the genre of climate fiction as an affective potentiality capable of stimulating the imagination of hopeful climate futures and energising imaginactivism, that is the activist quest for the attainment of better climate alternatives. In this theorisation we draw on McKenzie Wark's account of ecological speculative fiction, Elizabeth Grosz's bioaesthetics and Bernard Stiegler's 'neganthropology'. We outline a range of speculative, inventive, utopian, atmospheric, enactive and sensory methodologies for the sociological study of climate fiction as an affective potentiality. By employing these methodologies, we argue, researchers will be better attuned to the affective intensities and atmosphere of anticipation, speculation and collective enactment of dreams of better climate futures that climate fiction is poised to catalyse in social settings of environmental activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Du Bois's work, especially his early work, was explicitly concerned with morality, including dedicated studies into the moral lives of black Americans and their perceived moral standing in American society. His wider oeuvre was also regularly concerned with the role of stratified moral status and power-laden judgement as instruments of oppression. Yet, the long-overdue revival of Du Bois's contribution to sociology has given little credence to his work on morality. Likewise, the resurgent sociology of morality has scarcely engaged with Du Bois's work at all. The primary intention of this article is thus to introduce and explore Du Bois's work on morality. In so doing, the article sets out the aims of Du Bois's work on morality, explores his empirical investigations into the topic, and argues that recognition of Du Bois's ongoing concern for the relationship between racialisation and moral status allows the moral content of his more familiar writings and concepts to come to the fore. Throughout, it is argued that Du Bois's work on morality anticipates many of the features of contemporary sociologies of morality in its emphasis on moral contestation and power, in its focus on practices and care, and in its intention to use the study of morality for the purpose of social reform. But his work also goes beyond current approaches in its recognition of the significance of moral judgement to processes of racialisation. How Du Bois's work contributes to the future of current sociologies of morality is the focus of the conclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this piece we reflect on the tensions and complexities of drug use that narcofeminism has prompted us to grapple with in producing this collection. Narcofeminist approaches challenge us to move beyond simplistic, moralistic frameworks that pathologise and stigmatise those who use drugs, and instead seek more nuanced understandings of the social, cultural and political forces through which drug use materialises. By foregrounding the experiences of women and other marginalised groups who use drugs, narcofeminism highlights the ways in which drug consumption is always already gendered, racialised and classed. Narcofeminist approaches insist on a double vision attuned to violence and suffering as well as the possibility of alternative realities. This dual vision recognises a historical and contemporary context of dehumanisation while embracing and reclaiming new forms of humanness that challenge the figure of Enlightenment Man; it insists on the complexities of drug use that are all too often elided by singular stories of pain/pleasure and benefit/harm. Ultimately, narcofeminism challenges us to rethink our assumptions about drug use, and to recognise the voices and subjectivities of people who consume drugs, even in the face of intense hostility and oppression. By doing so, narcofeminist approaches have the potential to enrich and expand the sociological study of drug use and to contribute to drug policies that prioritise care and community over punishment and control. [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]

Modern societies, and the modern knowledge that was seen to be both an emblem and a precipitating cause of their modernity, have long been seen as marking a great historical advance. Modernity, we have been assured, by the social sciences in general and sociology in particular, is not only different from premodernity and contemporary nonmodern societies, these differences are also signs of intellectual, moral and material progress. In recent times, however, there have been a chorus of criticisms of the core presumptions that undergird modern knowledge. Such criticisms are sufficiently widespread and intellectually serious that the superiority and universality of modern western Reason, which could previously be taken for granted, now have to be argued for. Such defences of the universality of modern knowledge invariably draw on Kant and/or Hegel, as in the case of the two contemporary defenders of modern western knowledge, Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas, whose arguments this article will outline and evaluate. It argues that neither convincingly shows that there are transhistorical and transcultural standards by which we can uphold the superiority and universality of modern knowledge, and concludes that there are no grounds to cleave to the idea of 'progress'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Embracing the manifesto for a 'live' sociology, I included portraiture into the research design of an ethnographic study into women's lived experiences of French suburbia and organised an exhibition entitled Habitantes d'Hier and d'Aujourd'hui: exposition sociologique et photographique. This was a personal project in the neighbourhood of my youth and was motivated by the intention to shine some light on the invisible stories of women living in lower-middle and middle-income suburbs in France. In this article, I reflect on the use of portraiture for the possibility it offers in capturing the ethnographic encounter as well as in giving saliency and offering a visual representation of the sociological analysis. I also discuss the exhibition of these portraits as a moment of conviviality grounded in the endeavour of writing differently from hegemonic modes of academic communication and dissemination allowing for a sharing and sharpening of the sociological imagination. It represents an opportunity to think beyond some of the more neoliberal imperatives that govern academia today and shape our sociological craft. I argue for the value of creating a moment of conviviality, that is a space challenging modes of dissemination, engagement and even impact to some extent, as well as modes of knowledge production: broadly opening up more possibilities for a truly public sociology to continue to exist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the cultural imaginary of death and dying, the felt contours of grief are still often taken for granted. Grief is predominantly understood as sadness at loss; as melancholia at the finitude of relationships. Grief is conceived as a temporally-bound affective period in which one processes the pain of loss – that is, gets used to absence and works toward ‘moving on’. In this article, we centre the accounts of people caring for the dying, or recently having experienced the death of a loved one to cancer, to advance a sociological analysis of grief that untethers it from this normative environ. In the lives of those living with death, we argue, grief evades social conventions and temporal limits. It is a spectral presence that shows little concern for expected affective crescendos (being at death’s door/just departed). In its unruliness, grief reveals and resists the normative scene of death and dying, as collective pressure – for closure, for forgetting, for moving on – amplifies rather than ameliorates its felt experience. Centring the experiences of carers, we thus argue for an enlivened sociology of grief that illuminates its disruptive temporality, its haunting spectrality, and its propensity to instigate both affective refusals and (attempted) moments of collective catharsis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]