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The concept of relationality has recently found widespread favour in British sociology, particularly in the emergent sub-field of the sociology of personal life, which is characterized by its attachment to the concept. However, this ‘relational turn’ is under-theorized and pays little attention to the substantial history of relational thinking across the human sciences. This article argues that the notion of relationality in the sociology of personal life might be strengthened by an exploration of the conceptualization of the relational person and relational processes offered by three bodies of literature: the process-oriented thinking of American pragmatism, specifically of Mead and Emirbayer; the figurational sociology of Elias; and psychoanalysis, particularly the object relations tradition, contemporary relational psychoanalysis, and Ettinger’s notion of transubjectivity. The article attends particularly to the processes involved in the individuality, agentic reflexivity and affective dimensions of the relational person. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on a European cross-national biographical-narrative study of intimate life, this article discusses the complexity of experiences of ‘togetherness’ and ‘apartness’ amongst people in living apart relationships. We explore the five main ways in which interviewees spoke about and understood their current living apart relationships (as: chosen; temporary; transitional; undecided; and unrecognisable), which we argue shows the need for a broader conceptualisation of this form of intimate relationship than is suggested by the established notion of ‘living apart together’. The article points to interviewees’ varying experiences of receiving or being denied recognition and acceptance by others as belonging to a couple, as well as to their differing degrees of desire for, or rebellion against, expectations that living apart relationships should ‘progress’ towards cohabitation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper begins with an 'experience-near' account of the author's encounter with a woman she met whilst walking her dog in an east London park one winter afternoon. The woman was lying on the ground amongst the trees and, when approached, talked with the author about her feelings of isolation from family and community, about her alcoholism, suicidality and unsuccessful attempts to access help from the welfare state, and about the connections to animals and nature that kept her alive. The paper goes on to offer a psychoanalytically informed psychosocial commentary on this meeting and on the human relational vulnerability of which it speaks, exploring what we might learn about belonging and not belonging in the contemporary conjuncture, as welfare spending is cut, economic inequalities increase, and the 'social investment state' targets the 'worthy' welfare subject at the expense of people like Linda. The paper discusses the resonances between Linda's life as glimpsed through this encounter and the author's recent psychosocial research on intimacy and care under conditions of individualisation and detraditionalisation. Through this, the paper explores the practices of ethical relationality that are at the heart of the individual's struggle to belong and through which social belonging is created. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research note aims to extend the discussion on the methodological implications of doing research on intimacy and personal life. Drawing on a comparative study concerned with the intimate lives of those who live outside the conventional, modern western nuclear family, it reflects on the processes of gaining access to often hard-to-reach populations which informed and influenced the empirical work that we carried out in four European countries. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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In an era of powerful processes of individualization, issues of intimacy and care have assumed a renewed importance for sociologists. The article recognizes that the idea of family retains an almost unparalleled ability to move people, both emotionally and politically. However, much that matters to people in terms of intimacy and care increasingly takes place beyond the family, between partners who are not living together as family and within networks of friends. The article proposes an extension of the framework within which contemporary transformations in the realm of intimacy may be analyzed and suggests that there is a need for research focusing on the cultures of intimacy and care inhabited by those living at the cutting edge of social change. In the context of individualization, increased reflexivity, detraditionalization and the destabilization of the homosexual/heterosexual binary, practices of intimacy and care can no longer, if indeed they ever could be understood solely through a focus on families and kin.