British Journal of Sociology最新文献

Like adults, children also provide care. This article explores the emotional labour of young carers who care for ill or disabled family members in China, a context where children's caregiving remains largely invisible in both policy and scholarship. Drawing on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork with 30 young carer families in both urban and rural China, this study investigates how children manage, suppress, and perform emotions to sustain family life in the absence of formal welfare support. Building on Hochschild's (2012) concept of emotional labour, the analysis reveals how culturally embedded scripts, such as filial piety, operate as 'feeling rules' that legitimise and normalise children's affective contributions. Findings demonstrate the ambivalent nature of children's informal caregiving: while caregiving can foster pride, maturity, and recognition, it also generates exhaustion, guilt, and role confusion, extending beyond conventional notions of parentification. Situating these dynamics within the political economy of care, the study shows how children's emotional labour operates as an unacknowledged subsidy to social reproduction, masking structural inequalities and welfare retrenchment. By recognising children as consequential emotional actors, the article reconceptualises care as both a moral practice and a site of inequality, advancing young carers scholarship beyond Global North contexts.

This study employed ideas from narrative sociology to investigate how 31 Norwegian Muslims make meaning of ascriptions by mainstream society. Previous research has addressed the causes and consequences of Muslims' racialisation. However, little attention has been paid to how Muslims derive understanding from ascriptions made by others and how this process influences their self-formation. The participants made meaning by drawing on personal and cultural stories relating to their racialisation and recognition. Interestingly, they merged stories that contextualised their experiences in relation to other Muslims, defined and strengthened a collective identity and blurred essentialised images of Norwegian Muslims and mainstream society. These meaning-making processes illustrate that the self-formation of racialised minorities is shaped by storytelling across different levels of social life and is both constrained by and emerges from social contexts. The findings emphasise the benefits of moving beyond singular voices and ideal types, particularly when studying categories of difference.

Given the markedly disruptive and subversive tendency of education and the irrefutable political basis of knowledge acquisition and dissemination, scholarship, since the beginning, was meant to be a struggle of a specific kind. However, scholarship as struggle in our times suggests worryingly fresh territories of concern pertaining to the broader operational domain of the academic community. In this piece, we intend to reflect on scholarship as struggle via dwelling on (a) caution and risk-taking in academia, (b) 'sanctity' of code of conduct, and (c) the academic being. Our engagement with these themes is informed by personal experiences both within and outside the academy, and the broad frame of political ethics that informs our scholarship.

In Sweden, as in many countries, immigrant youth tend to exhibit higher educational aspirations than native-born youth, yet their attainment often falls short of their greater ambitions. This study, resulting from a research project focused on educational transitions in two Swedish municipalities, explores two mechanisms that help explain the aspirations-attainment paradox among immigrant youth. The first mechanism, "cooling out," involves a lowering of aspirations as youth encounter barriers-either structural or personal-within the educational system, leading them to adjust their goals downward. The second mechanism is "branching out," which refers to situations arising when immigrant youth become aware of new career paths and educational opportunities as they progress through their schooling. This leads them to adjust their aspirations based on a broader understanding of the possibilities available to them. Using qualitative data gathered through interviews with immigrant students, this study sheds light on how cooling out and branching out unfold as these students reconcile their initial educational ambitions with the realities they encounter. Contributing to a broader understanding of how immigrant youth navigate educational trajectories and transitions, the study reveals that many students actively resist being cooled out by pursuing alternative pathways to their goals and working independently to sustain high ambitions despite discouragement and institutional constraints.

This article rethinks meritocratic ideology as practical knowledge that transforms through biographies of social and geographical mobility. Drawing on 37 interviews with Black and Muslim Italians living in Britain or returned to Italy, the article shows that meritocracy is rarely invoked as a coherent ideology but works as practical, embodied commonsense about the world order, with Britain leading a hierarchy of European societies. The article explores three dimensions of meritocratic commonsense and racialised minorities' double-consciousness (Du Bois). First, 'meritocratic Britain' is not simply a neoliberal narrative, but draws from postcolonial, intergenerational histories of family migration that include desires for equality and security. Second, participants' encounters with British racism do not necessarily challenge beliefs in meritocratic Britain, as being racialised as 'foreigners' in Italy leaves deeper scars on their sense of identity, belonging and recognition. Third, meritocratic Britain can lose emotional resonance when participants feel desires for connectedness and home that are not satisfied by occupational and educational mobility. By centring racialised minorities' double-consciousness, practical knowledge and struggles for recognition, the article highlights the limitations of false consciousness, misinformation and psychological compensation as explanations for meritocratic belief. Moreover, it unravels how meritocratic narratives transform across life stages.

This paper argues for a re-enchantment of studies of contemporary climate change activism. It focuses upon Christian climate activists in the UK and how they are reinterpreting their theological beliefs in ways that mobilise religious communities. We employ a social movement framing perspective to discover the nature of this 'interpretative work' using data from a survey (n = 319) and in-depth interviews (n = 62) with Anglicans and Catholics in three church dioceses, a Christian aid agency, and two Christian social movement groups. We found that familiar 'stewardship' framings of Christian climate activism dominated in institutional contexts but gave way to 'prophetic' framings in Christian social movements. Prophetic framings of climate activism have received very little attention compared with stewardship, but they provide strong theological justification and a distinct emotional inflection to Christian participation in climate protest, and form a bridge to groups like Extinction Rebellion. Prophetic framings were, however, open to prognostic disputes, and remained within an anthropocentric discourse on climate change. With Christians comprising about one third of the world's population, it is of global significance to the environmental movement that in certain enclaves and across denominations, Christian beliefs are being reinterpreted in ways that can lead to their mobilisation not just as 'climate stewards' caring for creation, but as 'climate prophets' engaged in political protest.

In Australia, ideals of fairness, merit, and inclusion are said to be reflected in national identity through the concept of the fair go. While the fair go embodies the right to fair opportunities for success, regardless of personal background, its application to migrants remains a politically and socially contested issue. In existing international scholarship, the exclusion of migrants is often associated with ethnic and economic nationalist beliefs or the anti-elite sentiments of right-wing populists. However, there is little extant research on the way these beliefs sit alongside egalitarian and meritocratic discourses of fairness in a society. This paper explores whether commitment to the fair go influences public opinion on migration more strongly than established sets of beliefs. Drawing on a new module of fairness beliefs within the nationally representative Australian Survey of Social Attitudes (AuSSA), we explore whether individuals who endorse the principle of equal opportunity are also more likely to hold positive attitudes towards migration. We find that diverse beliefs about the fair go cluster around egalitarian, meritocratic and redistributive ideas of fairness. Our findings have implications for fairness-based arguments in favour of migrant inclusion in Australia and around the world.

The article is concerned with an issue which is not comprehensively covered in the broad 'living with difference' literature on encounters in public places: What makes the city's diverse strangers actually interact face-to-face? Drawing on long-term urban ethnography in Oslo, Norway, the article explores 'contact-supporting circumstances' in urban public space: basic circumstances that authorise or encourage convivial chance interactions among diverse strangers. The research reveals that a wide range of circumstances support such interaction, principally 'exposed and openings positions' and 'mutual openness'. In categorising and empirically substantiating these circumstances, which mostly have been investigated as individual material or social factors, the study adds to existing work in the fields of everyday multiculturalism, conviviality and their like. It does so by expanding upon a lesser-known part of Goffman's pioneering interactionist work, demonstrating how Goffmanian microsocial concepts can help portray diversity or multiculturalism as an interactional reality and thus open up original perspectives to 'larger' societal issues.

In this article, I propose and define the concept of medical domination by combining insights from political sociology, Bourdieu's theory of domination, and intersectional perspectives. Drawing on a multi-sited ethnographic study of abortion services in France, I analyse how a set of legitimised and institutionalised power practices shape access to care despite growing emphasis on patient autonomy. This conceptualisation helps explain disparities in healthcare access and quality, showing how medical interactions reproduce social hierarchies beyond the clinical setting. The paper contributes to political sociology of health by examining both structural foundations of medical power and the socialisation processes through which professionals learn to exercise authority and patients learn to submit to it.

Sociologists of knowledge production have long explored how scholars tackle empirical, methodological, and theoretical challenges. This article highlights a parallel process: the accumulation of moral justifications for pursuing knowledge in specific fields, which we term normative cumulation. As researchers face normative objections and dilemmas, they develop new moral justifications for their work. Researchers' interpretive work leads some justifications to institutionalize and accumulate over time. These justifications may continue to coexist within the same scholarly community. We examine 20^th-century American family demography as a case study, tracing historically how scholars justified their nascent scholarship through moral arguments linked to perceived social goods that demography produces. Over the history of family demography's development, diverse moral frameworks emerged, coexisting to justify family demographers' work. The article analyzes how shifting moral justifications in twentieth-century American family demography diversified the field's approach, influencing its research agendas and potential societal roles.