British Journal of Sociology最新文献

Cruel Optimism' (Berlant, 2011) sustains neoliberalism by promising freedom and autonomy through adherence to and performance of competitive behaviours. As Brown (2003) observes, neoliberalism is a discourse which operates, not through repression or restriction, but through promising self-fulfilment and happiness. The role of emotion-management in poverty governance has been widely acknowledged. However, this has focused on cultivation of population-level punitive, negative emotions (such as shame, stigma, or resentment). It is widely acknowledged that welfare provision has been specifically targeted by neoliberal discourse, justifying intensifying interventions aimed at reshaping the subjectivities and aspirations of poor and marginalised individuals and households to serve the needs of deregulated markets. However, little attention has been paid to the importance of positive, hopeful emotion management in legitimising and effecting co-operation. Drawing on interviews with 54 workers in the Welsh homelessness system, I argue that workers systematically create and sustain optimism in their clients as a mechanism to enable them to survive within an increasingly hostile housing system, as part of a deliberate, if reluctant, strategy to cultivate empowered, 'ethical' welfare selfhood against a backdrop of citizen abandonment. A three-stage approach deployed by workers includes (1) destabilisation of expectations of state help (2) re-orientation, through cultivation of belief in neoliberal promise (3) development of maintenance strategies. Improving applicant capacity to perform neoliberal welfare citizenship was perceived as an urgent, moral and pragmatic necessity, and justified by care logics. I demonstrate how this extends not only our understanding of welfare implementation, but also shows how positive emotion-management generally, and Berlant's Cruel Optimism specifically, can be used to understand the practicalities of welfare governance.

Drawing on fieldwork data among Syrian refugee women marrying Egyptian men amid forced migration, I explore how displacement reshapes the meaning and purpose of marriage. Many such unions, often customary or polygamous, provoke comparisons to forced marriage and gender-based violence. Bypassing the reductive exploitation and static narratives, I ask: How does displacement alter refugee women's perceptions of marriage's purpose? And can marriage serve as a strategic tool for (self)resettlement? This investigation urges us to reevaluate the existing range of resettlement options and criteria, offering fresh perspectives on marital strategies post-displacement. Rather, similar marriages often stem from both affective and practical considerations, challenging colonial dichotomies (e.g., agent/victim) and reinstating the role of factors such as social capital in the trajectories of the uprooted. This study expands understanding of gendered and Othered refugee experiences, highlighting marriage's transformative role in forced displacement and resettlement. It contributes to ongoing discussions on marriage, displacement, and resettlement, urging a nuanced approach that acknowledges the complexities of refugee agency and adaptation.

This article builds on data and field work notes from two ethnographic studies conducted in two cities: Istanbul and Trabzon, Turkey. It examines the socio-political dynamics behind the prevalence and impact of conspiratorial narratives. We explore the emergence, circulation, and effects of these narratives and how they shape political orientations and mobilisation. We raise methodological questions about these narratives and propose researchers closely scrutinise them rather than dismissing them as illogical or incoherent. Our research reveals three novel relational and methodological insights derived from conspiratorial narratives. First, these narratives serve as sense-making tools during times of uncertainty. They provide accessible explanations for abrupt changes, and they rely and draw upon 'cultural repertoires'. Second, by challenging the mainstream narratives, they shape subjectivities; empowering narrators to act as agents. Third, how conspiratorial narratives circulate has implications for the dynamics of state-public relationships, often following the neoliberal logic, they portray political leaders as central figures in navigating complex decision-making processes. Our case studies demonstrate that actors, even in less powerful positions, may not necessarily antagonise the state. We underscore the methodological significance of these narratives for researchers, to examine actors' agency, group dynamics, and responses to everyday injustices.

For Black, Indigenous, and other colonised peoples, decolonisation and racial justice are urgent imperatives, but their demands are often dismissed as utopian, impossible, or otherwise out-of-time. This article therefore introduces the coloniality of age as a theoretical framework that aims to open up possibilities for otherwise worlds. Departing from established accounts of the coloniality of time, the coloniality of age grounds the analysis of racialised time in the chronopolitical formations of tempus nullius and the paternalistic paradigm. Alongside the doctrine of terra nullius or 'uninhabited land', the doctrine of tempus nullius or 'uninhabited time' works to deny Black peoples the ability to make and remake history on their own terms. Supplementing theories of the barbarian other, the paternalistic paradigm identifies patriarchal father/child relations as a conceptual and historical precedent to race. The coloniality of age directs the analysis to the temporal limits of coloniality. I argue that the temporal limits of coloniality are constituted by Black childhood; the coloniality of age figures Black childhood as an age with no future. This framework is then applied to analyse young Black peoples' counter-narratives of Black childhood. The counter-narratives of being 'stuck', 'growing up', the 'pace' of racism, and 'regressing' centre the temporal agency of Black children as they navigate the chronopolitics of Black childhood. Each of these counter-narratives unsettles the coloniality of age. Read together, the counter-narratives tell a larger story of Black children confronting the temporal limits of coloniality, refusing the terms of White futurity, and instead opting to grow otherwise. The article concludes that Black childhood might be reframed as an age with otherwise futures beyond the temporal limits of coloniality.

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, an Iranian-British dual citizen, was detained by the Iranian state from April 2016 to March 2022 and charged with spying and propaganda activities against the Iranian state without due process. After her release and return to the UK, Zaghari-Ratcliffe criticized the UK government in a press conference, which triggered a Twitter campaign using the hashtags “sendherback” and “ungrateful.” This campaign claimed that she did not show “enough gratitude” to Britain, the country that “saved” her. In this paper, we investigate the content of the Twitter campaign. Using the concept of anti-citizenship, we focus on xeno-racist discourses around Zaghari-Ratcliffe's dual nationality and how her belonging in Britain is challenged. We explore the role Zaghari-Ratcliffe's Iranian background plays in how her Britishness is rendered suspect, which then enables the racialized tropes in the #sendherback campaign.

To the extent that emotions are noticed in consideration of crisis they are typically thought to be negative, linked to the disruptive consequences of crisis. Based on semi-structured in-depth interviews the article shows that crisis precipitates not only negative but also positive emotions and that the complex of emotional experiences that emerge in the COVID pandemic crisis play a significant role in the transformation of outlook and practice persons undergo during crisis. Situating the study of crisis in an emotions-interaction framework the article identifies the properties of relational emotionality inherent in experience of crisis, revealing the nature of ambivalent emotions and identifying other-directed emotional labour. Crisis is not only a social relational but also a collective phenomenon through which actors are embedded in emotional constellations. A study of crisis in relation to emotion contributes to sociological understanding of not only crisis but also emotion.

This paper contributes new understandings of the dynamics and processes of gentrification that contribute to wider transformations of class relations. We argue that the hospitality sector, specifically the tastes, dispositions and practices of young hospitality workers, are central in how gentrification processes currently function. We extend concepts of elective and selective belonging, and reflexive complicity, to analyse how young hospitality workers understand their own labouring practices as contributing to gentrification in their local areas. We show how their aesthetic and ethical orientations to place, especially their workplaces, make their experience of hospitality work more palatable. At the same time, their tastes are ‘put to work’ in venues that contribute to the vibes and aesthetics aimed at middle class consumption practices, while creating symbolic boundaries for long-term residents who are being ostracised in the process. In this way, the high cultural capital bar workers possess thus become spatial bouncers for high economic capital property developers, where reflexive complicity is instrumentalised as a process of symbolic violence. We propose that hospitality labour, and the everyday relationalities and working practices of young workers, are crucial for understanding the contemporary processes of gentrification and class formation.