Democratic politics in many parts of the world seems increasingly characterised by intense emotions, bitter divisions and growing polarisation. Amidst this charged political atmosphere it is a common refrain that an emotional politics forfeits rational dialogue and threatens our democracy. In contrast to such claims this article argues that emotions are central to citizenship and political participation

In this case study, we examine a UK-based anti-halal consumer activist campaign called the Boycott Halal Campaign (BHC). Using critical discourse analysis applied to online data, we show how, by framing halal-certified products as an existential threat to the UK, BHC drew from and contributed to the institutionalized ideology of Islamophobia. Given the potential of markets and consumptionscapes in

Drawing upon ethnographic research with families as they navigate a year in ‘Brexit Britain’, this article explores how people live with Brexit, examining the effect of Brexit politics on everyday personal life, particularly relationships with family. In order to examine how macro-political events and timescapes interact with the quotidian, the article explores interactions between ‘Brexit time’ (including

This article addresses a prominent gap in sociological studies of consumption and disposal. Whilst waste and disposal studies have traditionally focused on the production of waste or its subsequent treatment at municipal disposal facilities, little has focused sociologically on waste outside of these confines, such as littering and fly-tipping. Focusing on the latter, this article makes an original

What happens after rescue from modern slavery, the third largest organized crime in the world? The mainstream perspective suggests that people can be rescued and set free from slavery. This article challenges this assumption by arguing that rescue inflicts more violence and sends workers back to exploitative labour. Based on a multi-sited ethnographic study of 31 workers in the informal sector (and

Discussions about epistemic inequalities have for several years highlighted the need to engage critically and reflexively with the politics of citation. Many authors have called for colleagues to correct longstanding epistemic and material injustices by proactively citing scholars and scholarship from marginalised groups, thereby producing radical knowledge that disrupts power. Analysing the epistemic-political

This article sheds new light on the history of French feminism during the crucial period between the 1960s and 1980s, and it does by so opening up the range of actors as well as the geography and chronology considered. More specifically, it reconsiders the battles for reproductive rights: the liberalisation of contraception in 1967 and of abortion in 1975. Focusing on the perspective of those sitting

A central theme of this article is the developing tension between art specialists and non-specialists as a function of complex, differentiated figurations. Bourdieu’s sociology of symbolic revolutions is allied to Elias’s model of the relative autonomy of the artistic figurations within lengthening relations of interdependencies and shifting cognitive-emotional tension balances of feeling and reasoning

This article draws on evidence from a qualitative study of working-class readers in order to reflect on the ways in which readers can lay claim to, or can affirm a particular kind of meaningful relationship with, poetic texts. Drawing a lesson from the example of Bridget Fowler’s account of the reading of popular romances, it argues for the need to take seriously the question of the ‘uses’ of literary

Many sociologists drink wine, but hardly any write about it professionally, and the putative scholarly field of the ‘sociology of wine’ remains inchoate, the study of wine mostly being ceded to other disciplines. This is strange, as wine is crucial to a host of phenomena, such as national and regional identities in winemaking countries, as well as identity construction and class-based distinction dynamics

This article embarks on a sociological explanation of the genesis of talent as an embodied experience and as bodily hexis generated within a system of social and aesthetic relations which are characterised by symbolic oppositions. Using Bourdieu’s theory of artistic production, I argue that talent in theatrical dance constitutes an ideal type materialised through the construction of the dancing body

Bourdieu (et al.’s) Photography contends that it is the fate of photography to remain for ever ‘a middlebrow art’. This is partly because its technological character is held to be inimical to canonisation as a high art-form, but also because it lacks a class willing to invest time in its reception. Here, I argue, Bourdieu has been proved wrong: photography has now been consecrated, including, ironically

Informed by Irving Horowitz’s view of the Festschrift, this article adopts both a retrospective and a prospective approach to the work of the sociologist Bridget Fowler. On the one hand, it assesses some of the key characteristics and contributions of her three single-authored books: The Alienated Reader: Women and Popular Romantic Literature in the Twentieth Century (1991), Pierre Bourdieu and Cultural

This article has its starting point in an apparently marginal undertaking: Bridget Fowler’s translation of Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘Comprendre’, a methodologically oriented chapter which appeared at the end of the collectively authored book La Misère du monde. Its objective is to show how translation, beyond its apparent marginality, is in fact a key component of sociological practice, and inseparable from

Bridget Fowler’s work develops the topic of social transformation in Bourdieu’s writing – how it comes about, how it is to be framed theoretically, and who the agents of that change may be. This article continues this important line of thought by looking at one group that (sometimes) does contribute to social transformation. I call this group parvenus: ascendants from lower positions that move into

While anxiety is generally explained using an individualistic and biological framework, this article contributes to sociological approaches to emotions, considering anxiety as being triggered by social structural conditions, such as, in the case studied here, an outcome of precariousness faced by musicians in the music industries. Confronted by unbearable forms of anxiety triggered by an uncertainty

This article uses critical reflexivity as a method to document and analyse the ethical dilemmas that emerge when researching academic precarity across the permanent/precarious divide. With our project on long-term academic precarity as a case study, and as people who experienced long-term academic precarity, we take as the starting point other researchers’ silences on their positionality and about

The lungs serve as a site of interchange between the bodily and environmental, an interface between the internal and external world, enacted through breath. We draw on the primacy of this exchange to explore the complexities of living with lung cancer amidst the enduring social challenge of stigma and the advent of ‘targeted therapies’ at the cutting edge of precision medicine. Lung cancer’s association

Discussions on the Anthropocene have called for increased attention to how the effects of human actions on the planet are accounted for. While much of this debate remains at a theoretical level, more studies on situated Anthropocene realities have been called for. Contributing to the latter, this article explores how experimental and clinical interventions are being accounted for in life science laboratories

This article probes the crucial role of the body, embodiment, and sensation in the way people encounter large-scale processes of climate change in the city of Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Exploring how urban denizens in one of the more temperate regions of the world come to know, speak, and conceptualize climate change in their everyday life, we aim to revitalize a conceptual engagement with embodiment

We argue youth-led social justice movements are key sites for building collective hope in the face of the existential threats of colonisation, climate change and sexual violence. Building on the concepts of projective agency and affective scaffolding, we create an analytical framework to understand how collective hope was created and challenged in the work of six activist groups in Aotearoa New Zealand

This article advances literature on reflexive habitus in relation to LGB people by demonstrating empirically that habitus and reflexivity can coexist, albeit in very complex ways. The analysis offered relies on interview data with self-identified lesbian women, gay men and bisexual people in Cyprus – a context that is undergoing social change while however preserving its core heteronormative and conservative

Work within the sociology of the family and personal life has tended to proceed with little or no recognition of non-human members of the household. In the sociology of human–animal relations, however, ideas of multispecies families, multispecies households and animal companions (pets) as kin have been proposed in attempting to capture the close bonds between people and the animals they share their

Online and offline spaces where victims shared their experiences with street harassment were instrumental in putting this issue on the political agenda around the world. However, one question in particular sparked uneasiness among French activists: how to deal with stories that, in their view, reproduced stigmas about racialized men or disadvantaged areas? Existing scholarship addresses how people

Can utopian realism constitute an antidote to today’s ‘pervasive atmosphere of capitalist realism’, as defined by the late critical theorist Mark Fisher? Through this article, a collaboration between a sociologist and a literary scholar, we argue that the answer to this question is a resounding yes. To substantiate our thesis, we conduct a ‘sociological exegesis’ of the best-selling science fiction

This article focuses on embodiment and the centrality of embodied methods to multi-species research. We argue that taking the body as our methodological starting point is essential to researching human–animal relations but that bodies engage with and are engaged by the research process in a multiplicity of ways. In this we follow Vinciane Despret’s analysis of the partial affinities between animal

A vast literature on the home across sociology, human geography and cognate disciplines has mapped out home as a messy conceptual terrain. Critical perspectives have theorised home as simultaneously imaginative and material, and argued for the importance to pay attention to both dimensions. Following in this tradition, empirical research has explored how ‘home’ is understood, imagined and experienced

This article problematises the usage of the term ‘BAME’ (Black Asian and Minority Ethnic) and considers its limitations as a diversity intervention. It draws on sociolinguistics, critical race theories and poststructuralism and is based on interviews with 21 British South Asian people working at senior and executive levels of the professional football industry in England and Scotland. Our analysis

This article shows that organised transphobia is promoted using similar strategies and politics as the wider reactionary movement which has become increasingly mainstream. In particular, we outline the transphobic process of ‘othering’ based on moral panics, which seeks to construct, homogenise and exaggerate a threat and to naturalise it in the bodies and existence of the ‘Other’. Reactionary politics

This article unpacks the concept of rendering to explain how disposal produces value out of waste materials. Rendering draws attention to the management of meaning attached to waste materials, showing how cultures of environmental sustainability and market capitalism shape their valorisation during disposal. To illustrate this, I draw on ethnographic data from research on the operation of corpse disposal

In England, unaccompanied child migrants who seek asylum are the responsibility of the local state, who acts as their ‘corporate parent’. While these young people are ostensibly supported by children’s services in keeping with responsibilities under the Children’s Act 1989, in comparison to ‘local’ children unaccompanied children are disproportionately placed in unregulated, outsourced accommodation

Multiculturalism (MC) and interculturalism (IC) as approaches to governing ethnic diversity have developed an often antagonistic relationship, borne out through scholarly as well as political debates. Yet, increasingly, scholars have begun to note that while IC-consistent policies have gained some prominence, they have done so alongside MC policies. This suggests the possibility of complementarity

Young adults’ lives are increasingly characterised by uncertainty, which has heightened since the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as an expectation that they transition into adulthood as entrepreneurial, responsible subjects. In this context, greater numbers of young people are participating as retail investors, motivated by the growing accessibility of financial technologies, including digital brokers

This article explores narrative practices of reverse biographical identity work: how people compose and present accounts of non-identity formation. When asked to reflect upon a lost, unlived experience, participants drew upon shared discursive resources: in particular cultural scripts. They performed aligning actions to position their individual tale in relation to dominant, preferred versions of these

In 2017 Ghassan Hage published Is Racism an Environmental Threat? The book’s question misleads. For Hage does not seek to show that the former leads to the latter, rather, he elucidates the logics of domination that are common to both. Hage states that ‘generalised domestication’ is the clearest optic through which to see both racism reproducing and revitalising itself and violence towards the environment

This article considers Dave Eggers’ 2013 dystopian novel The Circle, which critically explores digital surveillance, alongside Georg Simmel’s social-theoretical writings on the secret, social distance and proximity, and the intersection of social circles. The article shows how Simmel’s social theory illuminates important aspects of secrecy and surveillance in The Circle, including the secret’s constitutive

Critical sociologists have been conspicuous by their absence in theoretical debates about free speech in everyday life. The aim of this article is to address this missing gap in critical sociology by making some tentative suggestions about how such a theory might advance. Drawing mainly from the ideas of Pierre Bourdieu and Judith Butler, the article suggests that free speech occurs when coalitions

This article analyses working-class young people’s perceptions of and resistance to place-based stigma, through a case study of a youth-led theatre project in the East End of Glasgow, UK. The impact of stigma on working-class communities is well-established; through the effects of poverty and inequality people and places are stigmatised. Although existing literature emphasises that we must recognise

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

Over the past two decades, recognition of same-sex relationships and non-normative families has increased alongside greater access to reproductive technologies. Despite this progress, surrogacy, a potential path to parenthood for gay couples, remains banned in many countries. Research indicates that gay couples, facing legal restrictions, often seek reproductive services abroad, navigating complex

This article contributes to research on citizenship and belonging in the post-Brexit white East European migration to the UK. It explores wearing a garment as an act of citizenship and an embodied methodology. It is formed of two interrelated parts: the first presents the argument that wearing a particular garment at a specific spatio-temporal juncture can be considered an act of citizenship. The second

This article considers the interface of taxonomies of race and migration crystallised through the materialities of the contemporary city in the shadow of the 7th anniversary of the Grenfell Tower fire. It draws on multi-method empirical research that interrogates the notion of the open city. The article proposes that ‘entanglement’ and ‘contaminations’ of material and cultural formations confound some

On the night of January 29, 2017, six Muslim worshippers were killed, and many others severely injured when a white man opened fire at a mosque in Québec City (QC, Canada). This article is based on a collective ethno/graphy of the assailant’s trial, from its beginning in March 2018 until the verdict in February 2019. During this period, our research group – formed of three sociologists and a visual

Echoing the recent revival of elite studies, we ask how financialization shapes the composition of contemporary elites and how organizational mechanisms transform its characteristics in terms of class, gender and race. We ask whether the bureaucratization of finance contributed to a ‘purge’ of particularisms. Or to the contrary, whether class, race and gender have become more salient criteria of elite

This article explores the relevance of intersubjective recognition and the ‘recognition theoretical turn’ to our understanding of nonsuicidal self-injury. While previous research has demonstrated that self-injury possesses an important social dimension alongside its intrapsychic characteristics, a major challenge for any social approach to self-injury has been to find a way to describe and analyse

This article explores our sense of stability and instability. For example, is contemporary life governed by uncertainty, fluidity and sociotechnical acceleration, or do relative stability or inertia still represent the predominant experience in many domains? In particular, can stabilities and instabilities represent symbiotic processes, the one interwoven with the other? Furthermore, are theories conventionally

What Really Counts? was a sound art installation created in 2019 through a collaboration between a sociologist and a multidisciplinary artist, working with in-depth interviews with young men recorded as part of a British feminist social research project in 1990, exploring sexualities and the threat of HIV/AIDS. In this article, we describe the evolution and staging of the sound art installation project

This article explores the decision amongst the children and grandchildren of Auschwitz survivors to replicate the concentration camp number of their survivor family member on their own body. The article sheds new light on the complex intergenerational legacy of the Holocaust and on memorial practices. By focusing on the tattoo as a form of memorial practice, the article captures the intersections between

Although advocacy is central to cultural transformations, claims makers are social actors who struggle for meaning and power. This article focuses on Global Athlete (GA) to analyse the stakes behind advocacy. This sports advocate has engaged a frame keying, even fabrication, to gain recognition in the global sport landscape. GA’s activity is examined on two levels. First, the article analyses how,

Sociological research on suicide has tended to favour functionalist approaches, and quantitative methods. This paper argues for an alternative engagement - drawing on interpretive paradigms, and inspired by 'live' methodologies, we make an argument for a haunted sociology of suicide. This approach, informed by Avery Gordon's haunted sociological imagination and Lauren Berlant's concept of slow death

Emotions play a role in drawing people into activism and are a key dimension of activist experiences. However, although researchers have examined the political significance and ethical imperative o...

Can visual data provide insights that words do not reveal? Meanings of objects in visual studies are usually captured through elicitation meetings. In this article, we propose to explore them from ...

Though the 2011 ‘riots’ attracted a huge amount of political, media and academic attention, the state’s punitive reaction to the unrest received far less analysis, despite being characterised by ex...

In recent years, there has been a revived sociological interest in assessing the lived experience of upward social mobility. Several qualitative accounts have highlighted the negative emotional imp...

Toilets are political spaces: inadequate toilet access means limited access to wider space and community. Between 2015 and 2018 I led a series of interdisciplinary research projects collectively kn...

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, celebrities occupied a highly contested space within the popular and political imaginary. Whilst the mass suffering unleashed by the pandemic led some to herald th...