The Sociological Review

Discussions about epistemic inequalities have for several years highlighted the need to engage critically and reflexively with the politics of citation. Many authors have called for colleagues to correct longstanding epistemic and material injustices by proactively citing scholars and scholarship from marginalised groups, thereby producing radical knowledge that disrupts power. Analysing the epistemic-political grammar of these calls, I note that they often assume that resistance and disruption are intrinsic to corrective citation – i.e. that citing names understood as marginal will by default undermine relations of power. But is that always the case? Drawing on three sets of empirical examples, I demonstrate that citation often does not have the epistemic and material effects we predict, or hope, it will, and may reinforce some inequalities at the same time as it disrupts others. I show that the effects of citation are complex and contingent because they are shaped by unpredictable interactions between different structures of power, unexpected (dis)connections between global and local inequalities, and dynamic relationships between injustice within texts and inequalities beyond them. I argue, therefore, that we must question the more binary and reifying logics of contemporary conceptualisations of citation and attempt to think about corrective citation differently. To contribute to this rethinking, I draw on several authors to propose an approach that celebrates the potential of corrective citation, but remains attentive to its limitations, foregrounding complexity and opacity, recognising the possible failures of radical epistemic practices, and probing our affective investments in them.

Scholars have diagnosed widespread class disidentification among working-class citizens in contemporary Britain despite high and sustained levels of inequality. Everyday narrations in working-class communities, however, reveal deeply classed accounts of politics and society, even if not expressed in the formal idiom of class. Across our field sites, practices of corruption talk were rife and aided citizens in making sense of their experiences of political powerlessness and economic dispossession. Drawing on political ethnographic studies from working-class areas in Oxford, Corby and Mansfield, and buttressed by survey data, we find that corruption talk can act as an informal political ontology. An analysis of international survey data on corruption perceptions and class identification further substantiates our ethnographic findings about the resonance and character of corruption talk. Following the Marxist historian E. P. Thompson, we argue that corruption talk reveals the complex and at times contradictory ways in which marginalised citizens define and narrate their relationship to politics and state power under conditions of class fragmentation. These findings highlight, we argue, the importance of paying attention to vernacular discourses and call into question straightforwardly teleological accounts of the decline of class consciousness in the past 50 years.

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, migrant, racial, ethnic and class identities to trace how they articulate ideas of Empire and nationhood when they discuss Brexit and the legitimacy of statues linked to British histories of colonialism and enslavement. We explore the contrasts and complexities in the ways in which individuals supporting Leave or Remain mobilise what we call their ‘Brexit biographies’ when they think about questions of Brexit, Empire and nationhood. On the one hand, our Remain interlocutors articulate more politically progressive racialised and classed articulations of Brexit, Empire and nationhood compared to some Leave supporters. However, on the other hand, when we switch context to examine the legitimacy of statues commemorating histories of colonialism and enslavement with some of the same individuals this distinction in the values of Leave and Remain supporters begins to break down. Our contention is that detailed sociological attention to the connections uniting Leavers’ and Remainers’ reflexive worldviews is required to properly comprehend how individuals experience, as well as reproduce and dislodge, racial, class and national inequalities that underpin the fabric of British society.

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 with 28 individuals who had immigrated to Norway from Somalia, Palestine, and various Asian countries and were accused of ‘cheating’ their way to Norwegian citizenship, this article examines how they respond to this accusation and (re)position themselves vis-a-vis the law, the state, and the national collective. Analytically, I use the concept of interpellation, which captures how individuals are transformed into subjects through being named by social institutions. I argue that citizenship revocation functions by calling naturalized citizens to become foreigners through the accusation of cheating. Rather than seeing it as a mechanical process, I highlight how the interviewees actively positioned themselves in it. The analysis distinguishes between three positions: (1) the sinners, who expressed guilt and submitted to the authority of the immigration law; (2) the saints, who admitted to minor wrongdoings but felt mis-interpellated, as they aligned themselves with welfare state virtues; and (3) the racialized scapegoats, predominantly Somali interviewees who refused to accept the premises of the interpellation, situating citizenship revocation within Norway’s history of minority scapegoating and expulsion. The article argues that these subject positions speak to different facets of Norway’s history as well as the hierarchical and racialized contours of citizenship.

In this case study, we examine a UK-based anti-halal consumer activist campaign called the Boycott Halal Campaign (BHC). Using critical discourse analysis applied to online data, we show how, by framing halal-certified products as an existential threat to the UK, BHC drew from and contributed to the institutionalized ideology of Islamophobia. Given the potential of markets and consumptionscapes in increasing the visibility of ethnoreligious markers, we show how the far right has used these mundane arenas as fertile grounds on which to reproduce its discourse through banal nationalism and exclusionary civilizationism. We argue that beyond public protests, the far right has used consumer activism as a powerful tool for recruiting members and mobilizing different groups against Islam and Muslims. We contribute to the sociological accounts of inter-group identity dynamics by showing how activists can leverage the securitization discourse to mobilize different groups for their political ends. We argue that such mobilization (aimed at reproducing a collective identity) becomes possible when a social group perceives its collective identity to be under threat by another social group. The study calls for more research on how and why different forms of exclusionary ideologies can arise and evolve over time and what tools and mechanisms they can use to transmit their agendas and recruit members.

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 mobile experience class mistreatment at selective universities and professional workplaces in Chile. Findings substantiate the continuity of class mistreatment the upwardly mobile face in such elite settings, including various and repeated forms of discrimination and stigmatisation. Findings also show that such class mistreatment is strongly inflected by gender and ethnicity, and plays a key role in shaping the lack of fit the upwardly mobile confront in those elite settings.

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 theory of practice provides a framework for understanding the temporality and the intersectionality of these trajectories. Data are drawn from a project on the experiences of final year BSc Nursing students in England during the 2020 COVID-19 outbreak. The narratives presented in this article are drawn from two interviews which included the production of a ‘lifeline’ to prompt the story of the participants’ lives so far, and their hopes for the future. Employing this tool as part of a case study approach offers an appreciation of the temporal ordering of a biography, as well as highlighting key life events in the context of an overall trajectory. The analysis highlights the workings of capital, habitus and field in shaping these young women’s lives, along with their investments in the illusio of higher education and experiences of symbolic violence. By exploring their past, present and imagined futures at a time of crisis, the analysis considers the temporality of practice and demonstrates how accumulated intersectional inequalities over the lifecourse shape how individuals can deal with disjuncture.

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, class structures, and countries by applying the French and the Portuguese occupational classifications to both countries. France and Portugal are an especially suitable pairing for comparative study because social class and inequalities are central to sociological research in both countries, and their divergent intellectual histories produced different tools for quantifying social stratification. The Portuguese classification, which attaches great importance to the ownership of capital, helps to understand the diversity of the class position of the self-employed and the structure of the economic elites. The French classification, based on employment status and qualifications, highlights the role of diplomas and the public/private divide. Ultimately, the Portuguese social structure appears to be more polarized than the French one. This cross-national and cross-classification comparison brings to light features of the social structures of the two countries and the contrasts between them that would have remained a blind spot if we had used an international classification. Paradoxically, these national classifications help to overcome methodological nationalism and ethnocentrism.

The last few years have seen the rollout of several generative AI applications. Yet, it is often claimed by commentators and social scientists that these have only been made possible through the extraction of people’s data without their consent. This review article will provide a critical overview of the notion of extraction. It explores how the term is being used in various scholarly fields in relation to discussions of data and algorithms whilst also seeking to do justice to the term’s heterogeneity. The review is structured around three different kinds of extraction: data, human labour, and material resources. It highlights places where the notion of extraction is being used, what it does and makes possible, what it opens up, and what it sensitises us to. By foregrounding the variegated impact of extractive practices and processes, the aim is to continue to lay bare the strategic amnesia on which digital capitalism and the AI industry depends and continues to thrive.

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, accountability, transparency) meant to ensure that these systems do not cause harm to already marginalised groups. Putting these principles ‘into practice’, however, is not as straightforward as it seems. The Algorithm and AI Register, which collects information about algorithms used by city governments (namely Helsinki and Amsterdam), is one recent attempt to make good on these ethical principles, but it has been subsequently criticised for not living up to its own lofty ideals. This article is based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with one of the companies behind the Register. Building on recent work from valuation studies, which studies empirically how abstract values are enacted through mundane routines and procedures, we argue that rather than moving from principles to practices, downstream as it were, the process is more iterative and it is not just practices but also principles which are shaped in the proceedings. We introduce two concepts, valuable action and actionable values, to sensitise researchers to the deeper interrelation of values and actions and argue that in order to make more ‘ethical’ algorithms we need to think more symmetrically about principles and practices.

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 that can be straightforwardly mapped and removed. Intervening in these debates, this article draws on findings from two interdisciplinary projects, spanning five years in total, which generated comparative datasets from Twitter (X). Focusing on three issues that we identified and negotiated in our own analysis – which we characterize as problems of context, classification and reproducibility – we build on existing critiques of automated methods, while also charting methodological pathways forward. Informed by theoretical debates in feminist science studies and STS, we set out a diffractive approach to engaging with large datasets from social media, which centralizes tensions rather than correlations between computational, quantitative and qualitative data.

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, we argue that secrecy is an integral and constitutive part of intimate practice. Building on Simmel’s work on deceit and lying, and its recent adaptations within the sociology of secrecy and critical theory, we assert that practices of secrecy should be central to the study of intimacy and the sociology of personal life. The distinction between consensual non-monogamy (e.g. polyamory) and non-consensual non-monogamy (such as affairs) tends to focus on mutual disclosure and transparency as key markers of difference. We take an important step in challenging the dichotomy of secrecy and transparency, showing that strategies of secrecy are implicated in the production of both monogamies or non-monogamies, whether consensual or not.

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 that operate through lines of force. Assemblage theory proposes that lines of force affect the capacities of persons within an assemblage to create new connections with others, ideas, and, reflexively, with themselves. We ask: how does CNM as an assemblage enhance and/or diminish practitioners’ capacities? Furthermore, we aim to highlight the utility of assemblage theory and its Deleuzo-Guattarian foundations to studying sociological phenomena. To accomplish these goals, we draw on open-ended survey responses from individuals who self-identify as practitioners of CNM.

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 analyses houseplant care practices and their significance for (re)shaping everyday rhythms and routines during the COVID-19 pandemic. First, we discuss plant care as re-making time in lockdown during which new rhythms emerge and plants themselves become temporal devices which structure everyday life. Second, we discuss how affective human–houseplant bonds resulting from routine care-practices lead to a new feeling for time that materialised as an intensification of the present. In the final part, we position our empirical data within the broader literature on the transformative potential of everyday life. This leads us to explore plant care as the making of new habits and routines that can reshape our understanding of the present and future. Overall, this article shows how the practices of domestic plant care in lockdown including recognition of the temporalities and rhythms of the plants themselves reshaped the experience of time of our respondents.

Work within the sociology of the family and personal life has tended to proceed with little or no recognition of non-human members of the household. In the sociology of human–animal relations, however, ideas of multispecies families, multispecies households and animal companions (pets) as kin have been proposed in attempting to capture the close bonds between people and the animals they share their homes and lives with. Drawing on a UK ethnographic study, this article considers the emotional ties and affective relations people have with dog companions. The article argues that the sociological concept of the family is stretched in attempting to capture intra-species domestic relations. Haraway uses kin making to indicate that intimate relationality might be more widely drawn, beyond immediate human relatives to a range of people and beyond the human. Through a critical engagement with Haraway’s conception of ‘oddkin’, the article asks whether kin might be a more productive category in conceptualising intimate relations with animal companions.

What happens after rescue from modern slavery, the third largest organized crime in the world? The mainstream perspective suggests that people can be rescued and set free from slavery. This article challenges this assumption by arguing that rescue inflicts more violence and sends workers back to exploitative labour. Based on a multi-sited ethnographic study of 31 workers in the informal sector (and 10 civil society and state officials) in India who have being rescued (under the Bonded Labour System Abolition Act 1976), this article shows that workers have been stuck/waiting in the legal process for up to 37 years. To demonstrate the same, the article engages with the concept of ‘waiting’. The notion of waiting emerges as a poignant illustration of the profound disjunction between the visions of freedom from slavery held by states (manifested through standard operating procedures) and non-governmental organizations (with their emphasis on rescue and rehabilitation), and the lived experiences of the workers themselves, who perceive the post-rescue process as an enduring state of limbo. By bridging the realms of literature on waiting with that of human trafficking, this article contributes to the field of critical slavery studies, bonded labour and multi-sited ethnography.

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-depth interviews with 27 Uber drivers and one focus group discussion with members of the Dhaka Ride-Sharing Drivers’ Union, this article makes an original contribution to the discussion of the algorithmic governance of labour and how gig workers in the Global South subvert algorithms utilising everyday tactics to earn their livelihoods. While existing literature mostly demonstrates that Uber drivers use bot apps or switch off their app to protest Uber’s algorithmic control, this article shows that Uber drivers in Bangladesh utilise a different strategy known as khep (contractual ride) to subvert the algorithmic governance of labour and increase their income. Through the presentation of Uber drivers’ overt and covert resistance strategies in Dhaka, this article also advances the theories of the labour movement and industrial relations and the gig economy literature by demonstrating that overt and covert resistance strategies can complement each other if workers are unable to legally form unions to bargain with platforms and claim their rights for fair pay and fair working conditions.

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 dimensions of unfree labour embedded in the organisation of reproductive labour. Drawing on interviews with au pairs (N = 26), I ask how the au pairs’ liminal position as a fictive family member and informal labourer relates to their experiences of labour unfreedom. Au pairs’ labour is appropriated and retained via the host parents’ deployment of emotional coercion, which simultaneously frames the labour as family membership. I argue that emotional abuse and coercion configure labour unfreedom, particularly for live-in reproductive labourers, who are bound to their labour by a sense of obligation and whose social-reproductive security depends on their commitment to caring labour. My findings embed labour in an affective-material framework and provide insights into why people remain at work experienced as unfree, even when there are no political or legal constraints involved.