Sociology

This article presents insights from a classroom exercise in an undergraduate Applied Social Research course, in which students explored how their lived experiences shape the ways they make sense of qualitative data, becoming aware of the situated nature of research. Through collective zine-making, they engaged with visual and narrative empirical material from earlier research on how young people’s daily experiences were reconfigured amid major changes in everyday routines and emotional life. By cutting, arranging and annotating fragments, students encountered interpretive tensions and the affective dimensions of working with qualitative data. Drawing on classroom observations and students’ reflections, the article explores how zine-making as a creative practice has fostered situated reflexivity. The article contributes to wider conversations on the teaching practices of sociology, showing how tactile, collaborative and imaginative engagement with research materials can encourage thoughtful engagement with data.

Survey items that capture attitudes towards gender roles in the private and public spheres typically only measure agreement with a traditional gender role attitude. Respondents who disagree with such items may hold egalitarian views – favouring either equality or role-reversal – or may endorse pluralist beliefs. Using data from the ESS CRONOS Survey, we contrast a conventional measure of gender attitudes with an alternative version that clearly distinguishes between traditional, equality and role-reversal positions. Analysing responses to the question of whether men make better political leaders than women, we find that most respondents support gender equality, with only 15% favouring male and 10% female leadership. Notably, nearly half of the respondents classified as traditionalists based on agreement with the conventional item report equality beliefs when offered distinct egalitarian response options. These findings underscore the limitations of conventional scales in capturing the diversity of gender role attitudes.

This article examines how the COVID-19 pandemic brought to the fore the disruption of temporal and rhythm norms among dating app users. Based on 53 retrospective interviews, the study found a transformation from short and quick interactions aimed at finding ideal partners to ‘slow intimacy’ characterised by deeper, prolonged conversations. As restrictions lifted, there was a return to previous dating habits, highlighting how what was experienced by many as a transformative moment in online dating was undermined by the resilience of established social rhythms despite temporary disruptions. The study underscores the complex interplay between individual agency, social norms and constraints in online dating practices associated with what we term neoliberal temporal normativities. It reveals that dating rhythms are influenced by interactions with other users and the app, rather than being determined by individual preferences, as users navigate their desires within the temporal constraints of the platform and prevailing social norms.

This research examines how the co-existence of work and play can lead to meaningfulness and what this might mean sociologically. Drawing upon 40 qualitative interviews with autonomous neo-craft workers in Italy, we contribute the concept of playful work as a voluntary and subjective framing of autonomous work entailing the simultaneous interplay between the extrinsic material goals, utilitarian planning and outcomes that characterise work, and the intrinsic experimental purpose and focus on place and process that typify play. The experience of playful work is challenging and tensional due to the interaction between individual agency and broad structural forces. Autonomous neo-craft workers manage these tensions by ascribing worth and significance to neo-craft’s aesthetic ideals and to care and (com)passion values. This contribution is significant in that it expands sociological imaginaries and the potential for future research by framing playful work as a tensional pathway to meaningfulness.

Based on a year-long ethnographic fieldwork at a well-established Waldorf school in Sweden, this article explores the production of practical belief through the lens of ritual theory. The school in focus is a socially dense environment in which an incarnated orientation is cultivated through boundary work and shared ritual forms. The article examines how pupils, through ritualized practice, incorporate the school’s aesthetic and moral order in ways that not only enable them to act in accordance with the educational programme, but also allow them to perceive meaning and purpose in doing so. While order is incorporated through the rituals, by the flesh, the lived body also serves as a mediator for new inscriptions of meaning, sometimes challenging the traditional Waldorf instruction. Thus, rituals not only reinforce and stabilize order but also disturb it.

Disasters rupture everyday social orders and relationships, including the experience of time. This article examines social narratives of time in the context of multiple disasters in rural and regional Australia. It presents findings from semi-structured interviews with community-based disaster recovery workers who were deployed in places that experienced multiple disasters between 2017 and 2022. We explore the interviewees’ own experiences of work and time, as well as their perceptions of how communities understand and negotiate time in the context of multiple disasters. The findings demonstrate community experiences of a stagnant ‘present’, where the impact of multiple disasters stalls their sense of moving towards the future and is simultaneously dislocated from experiences of the past. In engaging with these communities, interviewees’ experiences of work time in the context of multiple disasters highlight difficulties in relation to the structures of their work, and the stresses of supporting communities through multiple disasters.

This article explores how young people use vocational narratives to make sense of their Post16 educational choices. Based on 97 qualitative interviews with students from Barcelona and Madrid, the analysis examines the vocabularies of motive – such as personal fit, passion, interest, ability and future projection – that students use to legitimise their choices, revealing the symbolic hierarchies shaping these accounts. The study also analyses the timeframes employed in these narratives, illustrating how past experiences, present realities and future aspirations interweave to inform educational trajectories. By conceptualising vocation as a socially and historically produced repertoire rather than an inner inclination, the article explains how young people mobilise inherited cultural meanings within unequal fields of possibility. In doing so, it offers a relational approach that foregrounds the narrative practices through which aspiration, legitimacy and vocation are constructed, highlighting the dynamic interplay between habitus, social fields and the temporal structures organising students’ trajectories.

Public visibility plays a crucial role in how inequality becomes publicly recognised and debated. Yet we know little about how often the very wealthy appear in the public sphere. This study examines the public visibility and invisibility among Germany’s 1718 richest individuals using Manager Magazin rich lists and a unique corpus of 143,774 press articles from eight German outlets (2001–2023). Nearly one-quarter of the rich remain entirely invisible, and most others are mentioned only sporadically. Visibility varies systematically with the historical origins of wealth. While the press more often features owners of old dynastic fortunes and newly accumulated wealth, those owning fortunes rooted in the interwar and National Socialist periods remain largely invisible. Such selective invisibility shapes what aspects of wealth become publicly knowable, thereby limiting the societal scrutiny and debate through which inequality can be recognised, discussed and politically challenged.

This article calls for a critical reimagining of sociology teaching in today’s political climate, where post-pandemic learning, rising inequalities and institutional power demand urgent reflection. Inspired by bell hooks’ question – what truly matters most? – it asks: what does an ethical praxis of teaching sociology entail, and how do we navigate its politics? I foreground positionality, care and epistemic justice as normative commitments to guide ethical pedagogy, acknowledging they are deliberate choices rather than historically universal ethics. Using the concepts of pedagogic discomfort and doing good harm, I propose interventions that foster ethical reflexivity – an orientation grounded in responsibility, attention to power and relational accountability. The article explores what it means to teach ethically, not the teaching of ethics, considering how classroom decisions reproduce or resist inequalities. Ultimately, it advocates for a sociology classroom of hope: critical, reflective and transformative, ethically and politically engaged, and committed to social justice.

This study examines everyday fashion sharing through the lens of Erving Goffman’s concept of the sheath. Drawing upon 40 qualitative interviews, we extend the concept generatively, beyond its egocentric function as a personal bodily territory encasing the body, by establishing its social, utilitarian and hedonic functions in the social order of everyday fashion sharing. These functions enable consumers to express, strengthen, explore and perform the self in daily social situations. We thereby contribute the novel concept of the porous sheath for shared fashion items, characterised by additional functions, other-orientation and permeable co-territorialisation. We also contribute the concept of self-blending, which occurs when the porous sheath enables fashion sharers to assimilate perceived aspects of another’s self into their own. These concepts are significant in that they expand fashion sharing vocabularies and imaginaries beyond the sharing economy through a return to the dynamics of fashion sharing in everyday life.

Synthesising the sociology of futures and the literature on employment management, this article examines how precarity disrupts workers’ senses of futures and their responses. Using interview data with online freelance workers in Japan – a context characterised by strong cultural expectations of linear and stable time but undergoing condensed precarisation of labour – the article argues that workers’ strategies to navigate precarity and secure employability are shaped by their perceptions about the future. Three forms of future-making in response to precarity are identified, revealing how workers’ varied temporal beliefs mapped onto the strategies of managing employability and enactment of futures: entrepreneurial propelling, reactive retaining and alertive guarding. The workers’ emphasis of the need to ‘think ahead’ and roll out prospective strategies to secure employability is particularly striking. The findings underscore how future-making operates as a mechanism that normalises and reproduces precarity, reinforcing the wider neoliberal imperatives of the individualisation of futures.

This study theorises taste labour to examine how sensory practice becomes a form of labour in the specialty coffee industry. Drawing on 14 months of multi-site ethnography with baristas and farmers in the Alishan region of Taiwan, it analyses how bodies are disciplined, trained and valorised through the institutionalisation of sensory expertise. This study demonstrates how baristas and farmers calibrate perception, translate flavour into data and cultivate taste as a measurable and tradable quality. Situating taste within labour relations distinguishes taste labour as more than performing or mediating taste. This sensory regime offers possibilities for craft-based autonomy while simultaneously reproducing gendered, classed and regional inequalities across both cafe and farm settings. Therefore, this study positions taste beyond a matter of preference into an embodied mode of knowledge production central to contemporary labour regimes.

This article examines how digital infrastructures mediate the production and circulation of gendered harm through the cultural prominence of Andrew Tate, a controversial online figure associated with misogynistic rhetoric. Drawing on Ulrich Beck’s theory of the risk society, Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of liquid modernity and feminist critiques of platform governance, the study introduces the concept of the platformed risk society to theorise how digital systems amplify symbolic and epistemic threats to women. Based on qualitative survey data from 110 self-identifying women, the analysis identifies three interrelated themes: symbolic threat, epistemic injustice and feminist resistance. Participants describe Tate as a figure of moral contamination whose visibility destabilises gender norms and undermines women’s credibility in both online and offline discourse. Their responses reveal that misogyny is not only a cultural discourse but a platformed phenomenon: amplified, monetised and at times normalised through algorithmic infrastructures that reward provocation and suppress dissent.

Sociologists have long observed that living in a disadvantaged neighbourhood commonly means facing a moral and practical dilemma; the place one calls home is both good and bad, as it is a source of both support and social suffering. Based on five years of ethnographic research in a marginalised neighbourhood of Helsinki, I demonstrate how welfare professionals, in their efforts to mould local youth into ideal (middle-class) citizens, inadvertently reproduce this cross-pressure. Welfare professionals expect young people to be(come) both communitarian citizens rooted in their ‘home area’ and entrepreneurial citizens capable of leaving the ‘risk environment’, translating the current ideals of good citizenship into everday practices. The article argues that the simultaneous enactment of citizenship ideals that directly oppose each other increases the cross-pressure that young people experience, thereby contributing to their marginalised position.

Existing scholarship on colorism has made significant contributions, but to continue exposing the legacy of colorism in the USA, more research is needed that explicitly and empirically investigates the finer operations of colorism during the era of slavery. Through a scoping review, I draw from 6589 hand-coded colonial-era advertisements documenting enslaved runaway individuals to detail the various “color names” enslavers used to describe skin color. First, I underscore an enduring transmission of color terminology inherited from the period of slavery to contemporary society. Second, my review indicates an extensive documentation of color terminology for both light- and dark-skinned individuals. These findings provide initial insights into definitions of medium skin while supporting notions of a three-tiered structure. Overall, this study contributes significantly to shedding light on the historical tracings of colorism and the importance of studying the era of slavery to understand consequences of living in the afterlife of it.

There is a growing literature that has explored the dynamic intersections that exist between research and teaching in higher education institutions. However, there is also a paucity of research that has explored how this research/teaching nexus is realised within sociological practice. Drawing on comparative data from Norway, Hungary and England, this article explores how the research/teaching nexus is viewed by sociology academics (N_staff = 30) and students studying at Bachelor, Master’s and Doctoral levels (N_student = 38). While the findings identify common concerns over the fragmentation of the discipline, the article also demonstrates how sociological practice can produce transformative experiences that help to shape students’ possible sociological futures. The article argues that further attention to the nexus could help to articulate what is sometimes termed ‘a provincialised sociology’. Further examination of how the nexus is realised beyond university is warranted.

This article provides a sociological analysis of (the absence of) political protest among Russian migrants following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. We compared the narratives of Russian migrants in Norway who participated in anti-war protests with those who identified as ‘outside of politics’ [внеполитики]. The study anchors the interviewees’ narratives about their reactions to the war by typologising two frames of reference: a frame of ‘avoiding politics’ that considers politics useless and dangerous and a frame of ‘democratic ideals’ that renders political activity relevant and important. However, several interview narratives oscillate between these two frames, indicating an ambivalent relation to political involvement, their stories forming a tapestry of both legitimation and rejection of political participation. We posit that such oscillation between available frames of interpretation is an important aspect of individuals’ responses to shocking political events.

Sexual health has always been a social matter. While the science of disease transmission remains a focus for public health stakeholders, for social scientists, the sociality of infections, both enduring and emerging, remains central. That is, friendships and relationships are core to health, risk and illness. Yet, there has been virtually no work on how friendships and their varying contours are interplaying with (increasingly) antibiotic resistant STIs. Drawing on 49 interviews with sexuality and/or gender diverse people in Australia, we argue that the sociality of sexual health is central to the development of antibiotic resistance. Our analysis highlights the importance of friends to this, including de(stigmatising) STIs, deployment of humour to regularise important meanings, striking a balance between autonomy and mutuality, and role of friends as sexual health educators. These hitherto under-recognised relational dimensions of sexual health are critical to working with communities in addressing the rise of resistant STIs.