Sociological Review最新文献

How to move against the rise of the far-right and seemingly unstoppable autocratic leaders in many Western liberal democracies? Antifascism’s interest in the built environment is often limited to the collection of address data of right-wing extremists with the aim of locating its enemies. In this piece, I write with fascism and violence through vignettes of urban situatedness. I adopt an eclectic approach, engaging with diverse theories of violence and establishing loose connections between classical sociology and fascist urbanisation, liberalism in practice and historical fascism, and material aesthetics and right-wing spaces. In so doing, I highlight endemic forms of state and capitalist violence and their spatial manifestations of ghettoisation, beautification and overcoding. Acknowledging the limits of factual knowledge and liberal appeals to the truth in breaking through fascist worldviews of domination, the architecture of the text uses a circular infrastructure that connects various parties: ‘they’ (Twitter users), ‘I’ (author), ‘you’ (Walter Benjamin), and numerous ‘we’ who are thrown together in urban environments. Rather than developing a linear argument that tries to persuade fascists, I explore writing as a collective political practice that refutes totalising accounts. With the aim of opening meaning-makings through returning to and reworking numerous views, I respond to a spiral of violence with a movement that is organised around a shared commitment to an anti-oppressive, non-hierarchical world; a movement that is out of someone’s control and that spirals towards collective liberation.

In public and private sectors alike, decision-making is increasingly carried out through the employment of ‘algorithmic actors’ and artificial intelligence. The apparent efficiency of these means in the eyes of politicians and the public has made recourse to them possible. Along with this belief in their efficiency, however, fears emerge that nonhuman actors have displaced judicious human decision-making. This article examines this belief and its contestation, drawing on overlapping notions of ‘delegation’ in the political sociologies of Bruno Latour and Pierre Bourdieu. We undertake two case studies of attempts to delegate decision-making to algorithms: the 2020 UK ‘A-level’ grade determination and the Australian ‘robodebt’ welfare funds recovery scheme. In both cases, the decision-making delegated to algorithms was publicly discredited as critics invoked a different form of fairness than the one used by those deploying the technology. In the ‘A-level’ case, complainants drew on a grammar of individual merit, while complainants in the ‘robodebt’ case made a technical critique of the algorithm’s efficiency. Using a theory of delegation, we contribute to understanding how publics articulate resistance to automated decision-making.

In this article, we develop the concept of affective infrastructure as the entanglement of affects, meanings and materiality to analyse protest camps as a specific organisational form of social and political movement. Drawing on two ethnographic research projects investigating an asylum seekers’ protest camp in Helsinki, Finland, we argue that affects can be understood as having an infrastructural quality. The article contributes to research on affective politics by empirically studying the affective infrastructure of a protest camp. We distinguish between three interrelated dimensions of the affective infrastructure of a protest camp. First, affects are mobilised to mediate place-related meanings, the alteration of which is crucial to all protest camps. Second, affects are involved in creating the social space and atmosphere necessary to sustain a long-lasting protest. Third, affects impress themselves on abstract objects and ideas that must be managed as a part of the protest’s political message. Affects not only join subjects and objects together but also divide them, illustrating that an infrastructure becomes visible when it staggers or fails.

Social movement scholars have increasingly examined how political intersectionality helps reveal and explain whose issues and interests are marginalised or privileged within particular activist spaces and discourses. Hitherto, much of the intersectional analysis into social movements has interrogated questions of sameness, difference and power in relation to feminist, anti-racist and queer organising; this article builds upon our knowledge of social movements and intersectionality by exploring the perceptions and experiences of disability activists in the UK. The research draws upon 24 semi-structured interviews undertaken with disability rights activists, finding that a traditional emphasis on unity means that those who are multiply marginalised still experience a silencing of issues and interests of importance to them; moreover, while there is a recognition of difference, this is principally understood in relation to impairment or social class. Simultaneously, the research finds evidence of an increasing tendency amongst disability activists in the UK to engage with intersectionality, both in how they understand disability but also in terms of how they organise.

Relationships between occupational membership and personal consumption have long been an important area of social analysis. Occupational groups represent important contexts of consumption, where individuals’ advantages and resources are accumulated and often impose reproduction of field-specific practices and patterns of behaviour. Drawing on Bourdieu’s conceptualization of capitals and using the British family expenditure survey, we explore consumption of capital-signalling goods across particular occupational groups within the professional-managerial ‘class’, associated with different capital structures, and demonstrate distinct spending strategies geared to the pursuit of occupational advancement. We examine consumption behaviours for six managerial/professional groups – business professionals; technical professionals; educational professionals; higher, and lower, private sector management; and public sector management. We test whether distinct patterns of ‘capital-signalling’ consumption can be identified and find significant effects of capital composition on presentational, socialization-related and informational expenditure, consistent with our hypotheses. We argue that consumption is a part of the signalling strategy of career agents, and between-occupational contrasts in capital-signalling expenditures are important but overlooked measures of capitals in cultural class analysis. We conclude that granular analysis of consumption patterns is important for revealing differences in accumulation of non-economic capitals across occupational groups, with significant implications for understanding inequality and class divisions.

The scholarship on institutional racism has emerged from contexts such as Australia, the UK or the US. Less is known about how racism operates within institutional settings elsewhere. What is more, our understanding of Whiteness is shaped by this Anglocentric literature. In this article, I explore the contextual features of Whiteness in residential care in Germany. More specifically, I trace how institutional routines shape affective subjectivities and thereby develop material effects. The study draws on 17 expert interviews and 20 interviews with managers of care homes run by the two largest providers, the Christian welfare associations Caritas and Diakonie. Respondents frequently highlighted their organisation’s commitment to equality, which they saw grounded in its Christian ethos, their professional self-understanding as carers, or Germany’s post-racial nationhood. Paradoxically, however, my analysis shows that respondents also deployed these ‘representations of self’ to justify access and service quality differentials. On this basis, I argue that Whiteness materialises via self-ascribed civility, ‘goodness’ and egalitarianism in the German welfare state. Signified by visual markers, Whiteness emerges from projections of purity, innocence and good intentions. In varying ways, groups distinctively racialised as ‘Other’, notably as ‘Black’, ‘Muslim’ or ‘Eastern European’, are placed outside this notion of Whiteness.

Festivals have been conceptualised as serious leisure activities as well as arenas for cultural capital acquisition and embodiment. However, there is still theoretical confusion surrounding the process of cultural embodiment, especially in leisure practices. This article suggests that the serious leisure perspective, in combination with cultural capital ideas, offers a means of deepening understanding of how cultural capital can be embodied in festival settings. To make its arguments, the article draws on qualitative data collected at two long-established literary festivals, one in Ireland and one in Italy. Observations and interviews with festival participants were used to develop an understanding of participants’ cultural capital embodiment. The article suggests that the serious leisure perspective is a valuable theory to throw light on three elements of cultural embodiment at festivals: (1) body; (2) pre-existing cultural resources; (3) time. Interlinking serious leisure with cultural capital leads to an in-depth analysis of how culture is embodied during festivals. This article demonstrates the value of using serious leisure and the embodied state of cultural capital ideas in tandem to further understand cultural embodiment in festivals. The study concludes by suggesting potential future studies and areas of research.

While Stuart Hall is often acknowledged as a public intellectual, it is argued here that a better way of understanding his practice is as an interventionist, whose public engagements are always set in a specific context. This way of seeing Hall is draws on his own words and from approaches to intellectual work that foreground how scholars present themselves. Combining this approach with Hall’s own reading of Gramsci as a grounded intellectual, this article then illustrates the idea of Hall as an interventionist sociologist through three examples of his public works on race and racism, exemplifying his well-known use of conjunctural analysis. Thus, the purpose of this article is twofold: first it seeks to ‘disambiguate’ Hall from the public intellectual label; and secondly in resituating him it highlights his public engagements on race as interventions in and as sociology.

We write to conjure a poetics of scenes at once social, dreamy, mattering, and incidental. Our collaborative project is about feeling and testing out the moments we move around in and the speculations we bring to them, generating scenes of life that are ideas of life. We try out practices of looser and sharper processing what we’ve seen, smelled, overheard, conjured. To move and conceptualize from within worlds is preferable to drawing a plane above them. Toggling across what’s starting up or falling away in a present closely noted creates a fractal, fractious narrative, if there’s a narrative at all. It might produce a story sense that stretches the social and political into a resource for living.