Existing research on the platform economy highlights a contradiction between autonomy and control. Based on an analysis of online chats and in-depth interviews with food delivery couriers in Riga, the capital of Latvia, we theoretically deepen the explanation of the sense of autonomy identified in algorithmically managed workplaces by analysing how workers’ identity is related to the other identities

There is a growing heterodoxy of sociological social mobility scholarship which offers an alternative to dominant research and policy paradigms. This article aims to develop this body of literature through qualitative case study analysis of two young women – one upwardly mobile, one socially stable – and their classed and gendered trajectories into (and potentially out of) the nursing profession. Bourdieu’s

The call to revisit Live Methods prompted us to consider the legacy of this text at Goldsmiths college, where the editors and many of the contributors were writing from in 2012. We are PhD students in the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths, a space where Live Methods has left a marked influence through practices of teaching, learning and research. At Goldsmiths, the 2021–2023 academic years saw

This article focuses upon unnoticed objects in the home, such as those stuffed in a junk drawer, to explore how we can be attentive to the everyday in cultivating a ‘live sociology’ which illuminates the close at hand, locating the shared, public and moral in the everyday. I argue that attentiveness to the vibrancy of everyday things can expand the possibilities of a vital sociology. Attentiveness

The Covid-19 pandemic made the liveness of the social world readily apparent. Everyday rhythms and routines were, for many, upended and new and uncertain ones were rapidly and repeatedly re-made. A plethora of intense and flattened feelings – from anxiety to depression to pleasure – were generated. This article considers our collaborative research project on everyday experiences of time during the

Live Methods argued that there is an ethical imperative for sociologists to really listen to what precariously positioned people say. Research methods can be exploitative in how they render people’s presence. This paper discusses how I practised Live Methods in one ethnography conducted with young migrants in London over 15 years. This research was meant to last two years, but continued on the basis

When Tina Turner sang ‘What’s love got to do with it?’ she could have been singing about live methods . This article reflects on my experience as a reluctant ethnographer with children during COVID-19. I argue that it was ‘love’ for the community I was researching with that led me to use live methods . In this article I reflect on how love is the driving force in live methods . Taking inspiration from

In this introduction to Live Methods Revisited, we reflect upon the conjuncture in which Live Methods was originally published as a way of contextualising and appraising its legacy. In doing so we focus on an aspect of Live Methods which has had less attention – the politics of methods. Live Methods offered a reassertion of the promise and potential for sociological practice through reimagining methods

Rooted in a three-year (2018–2021) research collaboration between Indigenous and white settler researchers in Canada, this article asks: how do we use, adapt and remake methods developed in Euro-western contexts for very different geopolitical contexts, specifically Indigenous ones? How do we do this without minimizing the harms caused by Euro-western methods and epistemologies (some of which are ongoing)

Strong welfare states are often assumed to be lacking in intergenerational family care engagements. This article challenges this narrative by putting conceptualisations of individualisation and autonomy into conversation with theories on relationality and care, relating this to biographical narratives of intergenerational care practices during the expansion of the Swedish welfare state. The research

This article explores how young people reimagine social relations and negotiate difference within a deeply divided context in a period of increasing national contention. It explores if and how they combine an ethno-national situatedness and wider shared horizons. It uses a ‘situated cosmopolitan’ frame as a heuristic and shows how the case illustrates the difficulty of this stance. The article reports

The Covid-19 pandemic created extraordinary conditions for social protection systems globally, with both material and discursive implications. In the UK, these unprecedented circumstances led to an influx of (first-time) social security claims, expectations of increased social solidarity and more positive public discussion around benefits. One might expect this to affect attitudes towards claiming

Food and eating are critical sites for analysing everyday life and social change. Amid growing concerns about health, sustainability and neoliberal pressures for individual responsibility, there is increasing pressure to reshape how individuals relate to food. This study addresses the evolution of food practices across the life course, examining how social class and trajectories shape food-related

The article delves into the governance of urban marginality, focusing on the interplay of the Wacquantian distinction between the left and right hands of the state in governing urban marginality and the gender dimension of this governance. Studies of state involvement in managing urban marginality have concentrated on the content of policies and services, neglecting their modes and forms. Our research

Drawing on research mapping the commodity chains associated with beauty salon consumption, this article examines the subtle yet pervasive ways in which oil works to make and maintain hairless ‘feminine’ bodies. Developing a methodological approach focused on the liveliness of depilatory wax, which included fostering a close attention to how wax behaves and asking Beauty Therapists to narrate what they

Sociological literature increasingly turns its eye towards the colonial entanglements of British welfare state institutions. Nevertheless, mass higher education in the 1960s and 1970s tends to be considered as a universal service, unconnected to processes of racialisation and bordering. Sociologists discussing the neoliberal marketisation of higher education tend also not to draw connections between

This article contributes to a sociology of time and rhythm as well as a sociology of human–plant relations. It argues that sociology should take an interest in houseplants because studying human-plant relations in the domestic sphere offers novel possibilities for exploring wider sociological themes such as multispecies interactions, intimacy and identity as well as time and everyday life. The article

This article explores how Uber drivers in Dhaka exercise agency to earn and sustain their livelihoods. Uber drivers not only experience extortion by Uber, but also face various challenges, such as precarious working conditions and algorithmic control of their activities. In most Global South countries, the regulatory practices are not in favour of Uber drivers either. Within this context, drawing on

In this article, we offer one example of what attending to race can bring to sociological analyses of parenting. We draw on literature from two fields, Parenting Culture Studies and Black Feminist scholarship, to bring their insights to bear on a project that examines black mothers’ engagements with attachment parenting. In addressing an analytical lacuna in the work on Parenting Culture Studies, we

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