Israel’s deadly 2023 military assault on Gaza – recognised as genocide by humanitarian organisations – is at the heart of this article. We now know much more about the political economy of Israel’s settler colonialism, in which leading institutions in North America and Europe, including universities, are embedded. And yet our anticolonial solidarity remains at best glitchy and unreliable. Rather than

How does affectivity align with the practice and experience of unfree labour? Recent studies have examined unfree labour as a political economic problem; however, the scholarship has largely overlooked the involvement of affect and social obligations in labour unfreedom, inadvertently constructing an imaginary of an insentient labouring body. I apply the case of au pairing to consider the affective

Therapeutic culture has penetrated several spheres of social life, offering concepts, categories and metaphors to make sense of selfhood and the social world. This article contributes to sociological discussions of therapeutic culture by exploring children’s diverse therapeutic engagements through an investigation of support groups for children of parents with mental illness. Empirically, the article

Using the changing image of British celebrity and Great British Bake Off winner Nadiya Hussain as a catalyst for exploration, we consider young British Muslim women’s attitudes and practices towards the turbanisation of the hijab and the politics of respectability. Drawing on focus group data with young Muslim women based in London, England, we examine this sartorial practice, which Nadiya Hussain

The essay begins with the question of neutrality: why might sociologists keep silent on the question of Palestine? On the other hand, if they are to speak out, then why specifically support the Palestinian cause and what could be the distinctive sociological stance? The essay claims an historical approach is necessary to understand competing narratives and the linkage between twists in the past and

This article introduces the Special Section Revisiting Formations of Class and Gender (Skeggs 1997). It considers the legacy and continuing influence of this landmark work on scholarship around the world and across a wide range of disciplines, including media and cultural studies, human geography and social anthropology alongside sociology. Further, it celebrates the work of someone who has been instrumental

The ongoing destruction in Gaza demands urgent academic and ethical reckoning, exposing the complicity of universities and scholarly disciplines in sustaining settler-colonial violence. This essay interrogates the role of Sociology as a discipline and academic institutions in shaping, legitimising, or resisting systemic oppression, with a focus on institutional neutrality as a mechanism of erasure

This article explores the value of Skeggs’ Formations of Class and Gender for the study of changing social relations amidst rapid socio-economic change in post-liberalisation India. The article is based on insights and reflections from long-term ethnographic research with young lower middle class women in Delhi, employed in the emerging services sector. For these young women, ‘working’ is not merely

This interview, sees Chantelle Lewis and Michaela Benson in conversation with Bev Skeggs as she reflects on her landmark book Formations of Class and Gender (1997). Twenty-five years on from its publication, we speak about the women and the empirical research at the heart of book; its central arguments, contributions to a range of fields, and its location in the longer trajectory of Bev’s intellectual

Since its publication in 1997, Formations of Class and Gender has become a touchstone for research in sociology and feminist media and cultural studies due to the precise, evocative and generative way it pinpoints and theorises class and gender. Skeggs’ careful ethnographic work – listening to 83 women training to be carers in the north of England over 12 years – provides tangible evidence of classed

Beverley Skeggs’ first book ( Formations of Class and Gender [ FoC&G]) has been central to the study of class and culture, pushing it towards a more sustained consideration of intersections with gender and, to a lesser extent, race. Yet, some tensions within Skeggs’ work remain unrecognised, and hence unresolved, in recent debates about class, culture and their link with intersecting inequalities.

Beverley Skeggs’ landmark text Formations of Class and Gender was at the forefront of identifying how gendered and classed subjectivities are produced. This work changed the landscape of sociology, and it continues to open up opportunities for sociologists to consider how intersectional privileges and oppressions are instrumental in subjectivity construction. Building on Skeggs’ legacy, this article

Sociological research demonstrates the persistent lack of sociocultural fit the upwardly mobile face within elite settings and how this negatively affects them in numerous outcomes. By contrast, how class mistreatment is (re)produced in routine cross-class interactions within elite settings has received far less empirical attention. Building on 60 interviews, in this article I study how the upwardly

Despite growing mainstream familiarity with the practice of consensual non-monogamy (CNM) in the US and similar countries, CNM is still largely considered non-normative. With this comes the risk of reifying it as a ‘kind’ of sexual activity and its practitioners as ‘types’ of subjects. We explore CNM through assemblage theory, which aims to decenter the subject and emphasize affective relationships

Erving Goffman’s scholarship has been subject to intense critique in disability studies. Goffman’s account of ‘stigma’, in particular, is viewed as being antithetical to its driving principles, namely: to depart from deficit configurations of disability; to define disability as embedded in rigid and oppressive social structures; and to recognise more positive accounts of disability. In this article

This article contributes to the growing everyday financialisation literature by exploring how motherhood shapes financial practices and household financial management. Existing literature on finances in different-sex partnerships has identified gendered practices, echoing the unequal gendered division of labour. We contribute to this literature by demonstrating that it is not simply gender but more

While much sociological research suggests that gender dynamics can make alcohol and other drug consumption settings potentially unsafe, these practices can still be highly pleasurable and meaningful for young people. Analysis of influential understandings of young people’s alcohol and other drug consumption highlights how the notion of ‘harm’ is gendered, with men and masculinity rarely addressed,

Storying – processes of (re)making meaning with and through stories – helps to make sense of experiences of self-belonging. We draw on our experiences as five Indigenous and non-Indigenous self-identifying women who took part in a story-based meaning making project about longing and belonging. The heart of the project is a four-day residential storytelling research retreat that took place on Darkinjung

There is a long history of investment in solidaristic stories in the face of social upheaval, threat or conflict, and this was especially evident in relation to Covid-19. This article examines the way that one such narrative – the idea of kindness – was drawn on by Twitter users during the pandemic. Setting it in the context of a wider cultural preoccupation with kindness that both predates and continues

What does it mean to ‘put principles into practice’? As machine learning algorithms and Artificial Intelligence are given increasing control over our lives (delivering credit scores and welfare risk assessments and monitoring borders with facial recognition), public, private and civil society organisations have proliferated numerous guidelines foregrounding different ethical principles (e.g. – fairness

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among young Ukrainian nationals in Warsaw from 2020 to 2023, the article examines how the labour of social reproduction is placed on Ukrainian migrant workers, who are confronted with the responsibility of ensuring care for their families and communities in the context of forced displacement. The analysis puts the concept of ‘crisis ordinariness’ in dialogue with social

This article investigates the modalities through which Internet memes are involved in the process of generational othering. Existing research has emphasised that taking the distance from other cohorts is central to the reinforcement of generational cohesion. Nonetheless, studies empirically observing how generational categorisation occurs remain scarce. Internet memes, i.e. images or videos created

An avid supporter of Liverpool Football Club, geographer Doreen Massey was known to sing the club’s anthem, ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’, on her hikes in the Lake District. In this article, we propose to take the song title quite literally – as a definitive statement rather than a promise – because, for us, walking is never a solitary activity, it always happens together with others. We revisit Massey’s

The development of direct-to-consumer genetic testing (DTCGT), in conjunction with social media, has had profound consequences for the management of information about donor conception. One outcome is that it is now possible to circumvent formal age-restrictions on accessing information about people related through donor conception. Consequently, many donor conceived people and their parents face questions

There has been a dramatic surge in uses of big data analytics and automated methods to detect and remove hate speech from social media, with these methods deployed both by platforms themselves and within academic research. At the same time, recent social scientific scholarship has accused social media data analytics of decontextualizing complex sociological issues and reducing them to linguistic problems

Decolonial theorists have frequently employed dichotomies such as North–South, East–West, White–Black and Metropole–Periphery to characterise the exclusion of knowledge produced by marginalised populations around the world. This article argues that such dichotomies overlook a body of knowledge that lies in the liminal space between these polarities: the Third Space of ideas. It proposes that a more

Based on qualitative research into formal volunteering in semi-rural towns in the north-east and south-west of Germany, this article analyses the consequences of a turn to volunteering in the German welfare regime. The article explores the meaning and function of volunteering for volunteers, organisations and the welfare regime, and identifies a series of conflicting goals. While fiscal pressures and

Policymakers across Europe proclaim that citizenship should be earned and deserved. States have raised the bars for naturalization and lowered the threshold for denaturalization, creating new hierarchies of deservingness. While researchers have studied how prospective citizens navigate these hierarchies, the experiences of to-be-denaturalized individuals have remained nearly untouched. Based on interviews

This article puts translation at the centre of an understanding of science, culture and politics and their interrelations in the face of anthropogenic climate change. It argues for an integrated approach to these traditionally separate knowledge domains in the form of a translational sociology that is centred on the politics of translation across languages, disciplines and knowledges, as well as practices

This article foregrounds the role of secrets in creating, maintaining and disrupting intimacy. We extend sociological theorising on secrecy by demonstrating the operative role of secrets, across the entire relational spectrum within the non/monogamy system. The focus on non/monogamy is particularly revealing, as questions about secrecy and deceit are intensely charged with moral meanings. Ultimately

Some media and political science narratives suggest post-Brexit Britain is locked in a culture war epitomised by the differences thought to divide Leavers and Remainers in terms of their national values, classed and racialised identities. This article sets out to provide a more complex depiction of reality. To do this, we draw on in-depth interviews with individuals across Leave, Remain, national,

Bureaucracy has been a core sociological concern since the discipline’s inception. While sociologists have explored the impact of bureaucracy on many areas of social life (from work to immigration policy), less is known about how bereaved individuals navigate the bureaucracy of death. After a loved one dies a range of time-consuming and time-sensitive hidden bureaucratic tasks must be completed – such

The ‘globalization turn’ in the sociology of class has led to the resurgence of studies comparing social classes in Europe over the past 20 years and to question the methodological nationalism of the class analysis. But it has also paid little attention to the selection of the most appropriate empirical tools for quantifying class in a comparative approach. This article explores the links between occupations

This article brings together a theorisation of hope with the everyday practices of participatory research against a difficult – often entrenched – policy context. We posit that ‘hope-labour’ can characterise engagement in participatory research, which can itself be generative of hope as part of resistance to the status quo. This novel analysis links, and is relevant to, broader theorisations of resistance

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