Following post-EU-accession migration, Poles currently form the largest group of foreign nationals in Norway and the second largest group of foreign born residents in the United Kingdom. Given the considerable volume of new arrivals, there is a growing literature on Polish migration to both countries; however, there is little comparative research on Polish migration across different European settings. By exploring how Polish migrants reflect on the possibilities of settlement or return, this paper comparatively examines the effects that permanent and ‘normalised’ mobility has on Polish migrants’ self-perception as citizens in four different cities. In addition to classic citizenship studies, which highlight the influence of a nation-state based institutionalised citizenship regime, we find that transnational exchanges, local provisions and inter-personal relationships shape Polish migrants’ practices of citizenship. The resulting understanding of integration is processual and sees integration as constituted by negotiated transnational balancing acts that respond to (and sometimes contradict) cultural, economic and political demands and commitments. The research is based on semi-structured interviews and focus groups with a total of 80 respondents, conducted in two British and two Norwegian cities that experienced significant Polish immigration, Oslo, Bergen, Bristol and Sheffield.

The ability to prevent vertical transmission of HIV (where HIV is transmitted from mother to (unborn) baby in utero, at birth or through breastfeeding) is generally considered to be the most successful achievement of HIV biomedicine and care. Indeed if appropriate care and biomedical technologies are available, transmission rates can be reduced to less than 1%. However, there has been very little qualitative research investigating the contingencies and requirements of specialist HIV antenatal care in resource rich settings. Adopting theoretical insights from Science and Technology studies (STS) and anthropology within a broader sociological frame, this research explores the challenges of HIV and the successful prevention of vertical transmission in a specialist antenatal clinic which arguably has access to the most advanced care and biomedical technologies. In doing so, the thesis investigates the way in which the identity of a particular illness — specifically HIV — is maintained in social, clinical and technical domains. Moreover, it explores the requirements of successful specialist HIV antenatal care from the perspective of both practitioner and patient, and it considers how the interests of patients, (unborn) babies and health professionals are reconciled, if at all, within the clinic. The description of specialist HIV and antenatal care provided in this study draws on empirical research conducted in an HIV specialist antenatal clinic housed within an acute National Health Services hospital in London, UK. The research makes a practical contribution to knowledge about specialist HIV antenatal care through theoretically informed reflections on some of the requirements and contingencies of providing and participating in specialist antenatal HIV care in London. Moreover, the research offers an analysis of the clinic that interrogates the relations between social dynamics, (bio)medical practice and technological interventions. In this way, the research also contributes to the social scientific HIV field by explicating how social understandings of HIV and pregnancy are intimately entangled with (bio)medical practice, technological intervention, and what I have called an “HIV diaspora”.

This article argues that anti-corruption is not just a set of technical tools, but a complex political exercise in modernisation that mobilises key resources and different categories of actors. It shows that, historically, the international community's concern with good governance in Ukraine has been materialised in the form of numerous anti-corruption conditions attached to transnational aid flows. Despite important improvements at institutional levels, the local practices and everyday routines have not changed fundamentally. The article develops a more nuanced explanation of the new “war on corruption” in Ukraine by focusing on three main elements: actors, institutions, and practices of anti-corruption.

Background: The inclusion of pupils with special educational needs and disabilities (SENDs) in regular classrooms has been identified as a high priority in many policy documents published by both European and international organisations. Its implementation, however, is influenced by a number of factors, some of which are directly related to the participation and attitudes of different stakeholders, including parents of typically developing children. Parents, as a social group, can act in favour of inclusion or they can support more segregated educational environments.

Purpose: The aim of this study was to explore, in a Greek context, the views and beliefs of parents of typically developing children about different aspects of the education of children with disabilities, with a particular focus on inclusion and inclusive education.

Method: Interviews were held with 40 Greek parents representing 40 typically developing school-aged children who were educated in six different primary education schools, from the broader area of central Greece. All of the children, at the time of the study, were educated in mainstream classes, in which an in-classroom support system was applied. Open-ended interview questions focused on parents’ views and beliefs about the implementation of inclusive educational programmes. Data were analysed according to the principles of an inductive data-driven approach.

Findings: The research findings indicate that most of the participant parents did not feel informed about specific school policy practices relevant to inclusive education; they were not aware of the notion of ‘inclusion’ or approached inclusion from an integrationist point of view. Within this context, they hold positive to neutral attitudes towards inclusion, on the basis that a child with SENDs can cope with the school requirements.

Conclusions: This small-scale, exploratory research study suggests the importance of informing and involving parents of typically developing children in efforts to promote more inclusive practices.

Drawing on the growing literature on Muslim women’s activism, this paper explores grammars of action that frame political mobilizations of Muslim women in the UK. By taking a broad view of political activism, we identify acts and practices of citizenship through which Muslim women activists engage with, reinterpret and challenge social norms. The article critically engages with dominant readings of post-migration minorities’ political mobilization through the lens of citizenship regimes and draws attention to more processual and agency-centred perspectives on citizenship. We focus on two salient themes that Bristol-based Muslim activists were concerned with: mobilizing against violence against women, manifested in the anti-FGM campaign by Integrate Bristol, and attempts to re-negotiate the terms of participation in religious spaces, manifested in claims for more inclusive mosques. In both instances, mobilization was not confined to the local community or national level, but supported by and embedded in related transnational struggles.

This article combines the research agenda of the acts of citizenship literature with reflections on emancipatory theatre. I examine the Centre for Political Beauty’s activity-based artwork ‘The dead are coming’ which problematizes the cruelties of the European border regime in symbolically charged spaces in the German public. Focusing particularly on the roles available to ‘actors’ and ‘spectators’, and the directionality of the message conveyed through the artwork, I examine how the performance subverts the ‘sites’ and ‘scales’ of citizenship. My analysis indicates that the artwork’s subversive potential emerges not only from the political vision conveyed by the artist collective, but also from the way in which others become involved in the performance. Acts of political beauty thus most extensively challenge instituted citizenship’s orientalist anchoring, reverse status-based role allocations and subvert the structural violence of borders when the performance enables the enactment of novel forms of political agency and solidarity.

Politeness rituals can be understood as socially facilitative, performative speech acts that operate at the meso-level of Goffmanian interaction order, translating macro-level cultural scripts into micro-social action. Whereas previous research has focused on individual face-saving, this article examines the implications of politeness for the group face of speech communities, demonstrating the concept of collective facework. Taking Swedish culture as an example, I observe a tension between two sets of rules: the Nordic code of Jante Law, which frowns upon boasting and encourages humility, and the values of honesty and conversational directness. This is dramaturgically resolved through polite forms of talk, such as strategic reticence and sanctioning verbal domination. These interaction rituals perform collective facework to address negative and positive collective face needs.

Architecture is characterised by a lack of women in the profession and a significant drop–out after qualification all over Europe, despite decades of policies of inclusion.
The practice of architecture requires the use of specialised instruments and technologies that often collide with the social assumptions and stereotypes around the conflicted relationship between women and technology. Women are socially perceived as inadequate users of technology in terms of: knowledge of the specific characteristics of objects, ability to use an instrument other than for its basic outcomes, and capacity to use technology in collaboration with co–workers.
What can be done to challenge this widespread social perception? The suggestion offered here is to develop an organic strategy of combined actions able to foster a simultaneous change on different levels: individual, relational, cultural and structural. The paper offers an outline of a possible framework of analysis to be initially applied to the architectural field as a specific case study, with the possibility to subsequently adapt it to other STEM sectors. The framework draws upon the concepts of Technologically Dense Environments and Integral Theory’s AQAL method, used respectively to collect and organise empirical data.

This paper considers the uses and non-uses of a particular class of pharmaceutical - statins - drawing on UK fieldwork. These drugs to lower cholesterol have become widely available on prescription, but may not be accepted by patients. In medical sociology the non-use of medicines has been described through the lens of ‘resistance’, as a counter to medical concerns with adherence, yet these discussions have not referred to STS ideas about the uses and non-uses of technologies. We examine points of articulation and difference between these frameworks. In particular we consider the value of Wyatt’s (2003) taxonomy of non-users for our case. Our analysis draws attention to the potential transience of use and non-use over time and the social relations through which this might be mediated. In doing this, we suggest an analytical shift from the identity of actors as users or non-users to the practices of use and non-use.

This paper argues that critical public health should reengage with public health as practice by drawing on versions of Science and Technology Studies (STS) that ‘de-centre the human’ and by seeking alternative forms of critique to work inspired by Foucault. Based on close reading of work by Annemarie Mol, John Law, Vicky Singleton and others, I demonstrate that these authors pursue a conversation with Foucault but suggest new approaches to studying contemporary public health work in different settings. Proposing that we ‘doubt’ both the unity of public health and its effects, I argue that this version of STS opens up a space to recognise multiplicity; to avoid idealising what is being criticised; and to celebrate or care for public health practices as part of critique. Finally I oppose the view that considering technologies, materials and microbes leads to micro-level analysis or political neutrality, and suggest that it allows us to reframe studies of public health to account for inequalities and to draw attention to weak or retreating states, active markets and the entangled relations of humans and non-humans across the world.

Undoubtedly, the UK’s equalities legislation has become stronger in recent years providing important protection for people who experience discrimination. Nevertheless, this has happened in the context of widening economic inequality, cuts in public services and restrictions on access to justice – all of which make it harder for victims of discrimination to realise the rights that exist on paper. If the UK leaves the EU, the next few years will be a period of great political, economic and social instability when it will be vital to ensure that protection against discrimination is strengthened not weakened and that a culture of support for equality and human rights is promoted throughout the UK. The rights that must be protected benefit everyone in the UK, not only supporting marginalised people and victims of discrimination but also making workplaces fairer for all and underpinning the legitimacy of our democratic institutions.

This article explores the relationship between language, experience,and the body. Employing a phenomenological approach that takes the sensory body as its starting point, it focuses on three instances of ‘divine experience’, looking at the ways in which social actors seek to express that experience through metaphorical translation into more familiar, everyday realms. It argues that within this perceptual process – which starts in bodily experience and ends in words – both bodies and worlds are formed: bodies open to (often sensory) aspects of divine experience, and worlds that include the divine, alongside instances of divine agency. Indeed, such bodily conceptual and linguistic work is, social actors claim, the product of divine agency. At the heart of the three instances of divine experience explored here rests the issue of ‘new birth’, itself a metaphorical move employed to express a phenomenon in which the body appears to be transformed into something new, namely a habitation of divine presence. As such presence ‘bubbles up’ from within, it sometimes ‘overflows’ in words. The body speaks. Alongside exploring the metaphorical moves employed to express this type of bodily experience, this article raises the ontological question of what kind of body it is, in such cases, that is speaking, thus providing a phenomenologically inflected response to recent ‘ontological’ debates within anthropology.

A fruitful direction for research on the European cultural heritage is to adopt a transnational approach. Rather than see cultural heritage as predominantly expressed in national contexts, it could be seen as primarily transnational and as plural. Such a view would also suggest a conception of national histories as themselves products of transnational encounters. In this perspective, the European dimension is not then necessarily something over and above nations, but part of their heritage. Moreover, as fundamentally transnational, the European heritage is not exclusively confined to Europe. Cultural heritage is not something that is fixed or based on an essence; it is produced and reinterpreted by social actors in different but overlapping contexts. This is also an interpretative approach that draws attention to the entangled nature of memories and especially the cultural logic by which new conceptions and narratives of heritage emerge from the encounter and entanglement of different memories. Such an approach offers new opportunities for comparative research on the European heritage as an entangled mosaic of histories and memories. This approach thus rejects not only particularistic but also universalistic ones such as alternative Eurocentric accounts.

The essay seeks to explore the implications of transnational and global history for comparative historical sociology, especially in light of notions of entangled history, postcolonial critiques, theories of the ‘Global South,’ and new interpretations of empire. It offers an assessment of the implications of the transnational turn for comparative history, arguing that, despite some of the claims made, this should largely be seen as a shift rather than a turn and as a corrective rather than a fundamentally new paradigm. Following from a discussion of some of the issues that have arisen from the transnational turn, in particular with respect to the work of a new generation of global historians, such as Bayly, Osterhammel and Pomeranz, the essay then considers the different contribution of comparative historical sociology, including civilizational analysis, as in the work of Eisenstadt and Arnason. The argument is advanced that while comparative historical sociology is today in crisis as a result of being overtaken by developments within transnational and global history, it offers much promise. The two fields cannot be entirely separated, but comparative historical sociology has a strong tradition of comparative analysis that is different from historiographical analysis and which remains undeveloped. The specificity of the sociological dimension is urgently in need of renewal. It is argued that this largely resides in an interpretative approach to social inquiry. However, this has not yet been fully exploited in relation to transnationalism.

This thesis aims to explore the perceptions and experiences of professional women at the University of Sindh, Jamshoro-Pakistan (UoSJP), regarding their respectability and social status in the workplace and in the community. Additionally, the thesis elaborates on professional women’s perceptions and experiences regarding their autonomy and independence, which they have supposedly achieved through their university education and gainful employment. The major contribution of the thesis is that it addresses the lack of feminist research on professional women in the context of the ongoing debate over gender equality in Sindh, Pakistan.
This thesis, by using feminist standpoint theory and intersectionality as theoretical and analytical tools, emphasises multiple identities, rather than focusing on a single dimension of social difference. Additionally, this thesis, by employing a Bourdieusian framework (economic, cultural, social and symbolic capital), explores and examines professional women’s identities in relation to their particular spatial locations, as well as the ways that social capital and institutionalised cultural capital intersect with their social and familial backgrounds to produce complex hierarchies. The research asserts that women’s higher-ranking position (socially accepted) also has a potential influence on their respectability, social status and autonomy in the workplace and in the community. Because it plays a significant role in establishing influential social networking, which further increases women’s symbolic capital. Thus, the thesis explores and establishes links between the respectability, social status, autonomy and independence of these professional women, and the intersection of potential influencing factors (for example, patriarchy, class, caste, familial and educational backgrounds, locale and employment). The thesis, then, discusses how professional women negotiate their multiple identities within certain defined spheres while upholding or regulating the respectability, dignity and ‘family honour’ that is linked to their modesty (sexuality).
The thesis claims that ‘collectivity’ is the social ethic or essence of Pakistani society, while ‘individuality’ has been socially and culturally dishonoured and/or disapproved. Therefore, these professional women, understanding and attributing meanings to these concepts in local context, observed their ‘limited’ or ‘defined autonomy’, which is influenced by many potential intersecting factors rather than their gender and/or patriarchy.

Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) is a manualised psychosocial, group-based 8 week course specifically designed for people with a history of depression. This study responds to the huge growth in the credibility of MBCT as a therapeutic option in the NHS as well as a rise in the popularity and awareness of mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs). This study is based on semi-structured interviews (N=38) with stakeholders in the field of MBIs in Sussex, and an online survey of Sussex NHS Foundation Trust (SPFT) staff (N=203), as part of a wider collaborative ethnography embedded within the Trust. It contributes to existing literature on the efficacy of MBIs by exploring existing provision and follow-up support, reviewing the perceived benefits and costs of embedding MBCT into the health services. This study has a particular focus on participants of a recent SPFT Randomised Controlled Trial (RCT) ‘Mindfulness for Voices’ that investigated the efficacy of this therapy for people who hear distressing voices.

This study brings together both the empirical and theoretical with its focus on mindfulness as a therapeutic technique that epitomises links between the mind, the body and society. This study draws on sociological work on embodiment and emotion in order to understand the experience of innovation as well as of MBIs – starting from the observation that many of those leading this area of research and implementation are also practising mindfulness. Furthermore, this study maps the theoretical shift from a narrow medical model of mental illness to one that characterises emotional health within a holistic and integrated paradigm, and which is influencing and shaping current practice.

Key findings from this study are that MBIs, and MBCT in particular, can be beneficial to a diverse range of stakeholders within Sussex, including patient groups that were previously excluded from ‘talking cures’ such as those with a diagnosis of psychosis. Factors that influence the acceptability, visibility and utilisation of an innovation such as MBCT include the role of opinion leaders and champions in garnering support, as well as the degree to which expectations about the future of this intervention are managed. Drawing on sociologies of knowledge and innovation in the health services, the case is used to show the use of experiential knowledge alongside evidence in bringing about innovation. Clinicians also work to develop accounts of the ‘values’ at stake in MBIs; drawing on both evidence and experiential knowledge. The implementation of MBIs into the mainstream health service helps to illuminate some of these practices through being used to address conditions such as chronic pain and severe anxiety disorders which were hitherto seen as untreatable and characterised as ‘complex needs’, or medically unexplained symptoms (MUS) and which can be stigmatising.

This article evaluates the relative contributions of diaries and interviews in multiple methods qualitative research exploring asexual identities and intimacies. Differentiated by three core differences: reflective time-frame (the day just had/lifetime), context (alone/with researcher) and mode (written/verbal), these methods had the potential to generate a multidimensional view of our topics. Using five cases in which data from both interviews and diaries were collected, this article explores how the intermeshed issues of identity and intimacy were constructed in each method, as well as reflecting on what was gained by their combination. Our analysis leads us to conclude that multiple methods do not always produce a fuller or a more rounded picture of individual participants’ lives. Nevertheless, the decision to collect data using different strategies did increase our chances of finding a method that suited individual participants, whether in style or focus.

Blog to promote second edition of The sociology of globalization, 2017

This thesis is the product of ethnographic research conducted over a period of eighteen months on a council estate, located on the outskirts of a city in Britain. The research explores how the everyday lives of people on The Estate are shaped by their being there. It also examines the material and social conditions, which produce and legitimate knowledges of these people and this place.
A central concern of the research is the exploration of classed identity formations. Conducted in ‘austerity Britain’ it traces the material and social constitution of the council estate at a moment of heightened interest (popular, political and academic) as ‘other’. The thesis aims to develop a theorisation of being placed on the council estate, which maintains sensitivity to the objectifying processes of claiming to know: specifically, a political commitment to representations of ideas of difference and dissensus (Rancière, 1998; 2006).
This work is produced in conversation with class theory; inspired by Bourdieu’s linking of objective structures to subjective experience (Bourdieu, 1977; 1980; 1983) and feminist reflexive writings of the affective in classed beings (Hey, 2006; Walkerdine, 2010; Lucey, 2010). However, crucially, it does not produce a new categorisation of class. Rather I begin from a premise that ‘identity categories are never merely descriptive, but always normative, and as such, exclusionary’ (Butler, 1992: 15-16). In this thesis, I work through a deconstruction of the concepts of class in order to ‘continue to use them, repeat them, to repeat them subversively, and to displace them from the contexts in which they have been deployed as instruments of oppressive power’ (1992: 17).
This work is located within academic debates around identity. Thinking with post-structural conceptualisations of gender (Butler, 1990) and race (Nayak, 1977), I develop these as a way to think class. I build upon conceptualisations of habitus (Bourdieu, 2005) as a starting point for exploring subjectivities. Drawing upon work foregrounding the affective consequences of shifts in circumstances resulting in a habitus ‘out of place’ (Reay, 2007); I explore the moments of negotiation that occur when one is ‘in place’.
Furthering a theorisation of class as a social placing, I bring in conceptual developments within social geography to explore the social constitution of classed places (Massey, 2005; Featherstone, 2013). Through my conceptualisation of ‘being place(d)’ I posit identity formation and place making as intertwined processes. Consequently, identity formation through processes of being place(d) on The Estate is not a simple process of socialisation where one learns to be through being of a particular place; rather it is the positioning in place through being in moments of difference.
Through my analysis, I theorise identity as moments of identification (Hall, 1996), within which aspects of self are formed in proximity and/or distanced with others. This conceptualisation of relational identity construction is heavily influenced by Bourdieu’s thinking, yet moves beyond habitus as ‘forgotten history’ (Bourdieu, 1990: 56) to habitus as ‘foregrounded history’.
Finally, I bring my range of theoretical resources together in my analysis of a Community Centre as a ‘contact zone’ - a social space where ‘cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power’ (Pratt, 1991: 34). These momentary exposures do not occur in isolation and are entangled within histories and processes of domination that reach far beyond the moment of contact. Consequently, analysis of this interaction requires bifocality - at once interested in the moment of construction, whilst exploring the contexts within which this moment is located and thus interpreted. In so doing, I highlight the importance of power in the maintenance of structures, whilst allowing the possibility of subversion and resistance within moments of contact.

This thesis examines sex education in the UK. The project presents an account of current policies and materials in practice, in addition to the primary focus of providing an up-to-date participant account of sex education with specific focus on sexual orientation in English classrooms. This study utilised a multi-method approach comprised of several interlinking parts; a literature analysis of policy and sex education materials, a questionnaire-based survey with sixth form students and interviews/focus groups with LGBT identified young people. These provide a snapshot of current issues surrounding sex education and sexual orientation through experiences in the classroom.
It is shown that a public health discourse, at best, guides the topics that are commonly discussed in sex education, both in policy and practice. At worst, it omits various important and contentious issues such as sexual orientation, which are necessary in ensuring a holistic programme. Guidance at the national level is superficial and open to interpretation - this then filters down to the local level which leads to inconsistencies across policies, though it was found that some policies at the local level were both comprehensive and inclusive. While there were classroom materials found to be inclusive of social sex education, these were reportedly not frequently incorporated into the classroom. In the empirical data, young people commonly acknowledged that sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and pregnancy dominated classroom discussions to the detriment and exclusion of other topics identified as important by the participants. This lack of holism contributed to the prevailing notion that sex education was heteronormative, and was perceived to be the result of social inequalities and past political views.

In Year 9, when boys and girls are expected to make choices regarding what they want to become when they grow up, many take a crucial decision to drop or side-line IT as an academic subject, which in turn steers them away from a possible future IT career. This thesis examines the reasons why IT careers are not well-imagined or popular amongst teenagers at this critical time of their lives. Taking the widely acknowledged ‘women in IT’ problem as a starting point, it focuses specifically on gender differences that exist in relation to how teenagers form their ideas about IT as an academic subject, as a possible career and in everyday life.

79 boys and 85 girls participated in this study from a mixture of 12 state-maintained and nine independent secondary schools (single-sex and co-educational) in Southeast London Borough. This research was exploratory and used an age-appropriate, participatory and mixed-methods framework incorporating: a questionnaire, a creativity map exercise, group and individual interviews, mini-focus groups, and observations. During the interviews, students were also provided with information and opportunities regarding IT careers. I argue this has been of benefit to the students as well as the research, as it has prompted them to think about a career they previously had not even considered.

The findings of my study indicate boys were more likely than girls to say that they liked and enjoyed IT/ICT1 as a subject and would consider IT as a career choice for the future. Evidence throughout the study does not suggest girls lack confidence with regard to their general engagement with and use of technology, compared to the boys. Rather, the findings suggest more needs to be done in the area of role models, mentors and careers advice to inform more girls (and boys) about IT careers. The thesis concludes with recommendations for further research, especially in light of the new computing curriculum, which commenced in September 2014.

It has been common for studies presented as about American sociology as a whole to rely on data compiled from leading journals (American Sociological Review [ASR] and American Journal of Sociology [AJS]), or about presidents of the American Sociological Association [ASA], to represent it. Clearly those are important, but neither can be regarded as providing a representative sample of American sociology. Recently, Stephen Turner has suggested that dominance in the ASA rests with a ‘cartel’ initially formed in graduate school, and that it favors work in a style associated with the leading journals. The adequacy of these ideas is examined in the light of available data on the last 20 years, which show that very few of the presidents were in the same graduate schools at the same time. All presidents have had distinguished academic records, but it is shown that their publication strategies have varied considerably. Some have had no ASR publications except their presidential addresses, while books and large numbers of other journals not normally mentioned in this context have figured in their contributions, as well as being more prominent in citations. It seems clear that articles in the leading journals have not been as closely tied to prestigious careers as has sometimes been suggested, and that if there is a cartel it has not included all the presidents.

This chapter explores intersections of sexuality and ‘race’ by drawing on different projects: ethnographic research conducted in Manchester’s Gay Village and observations gathered through voluntary work with the grassroots organisation Lesbian Immigration Support Group (LISG) in Manchester. The chapter demonstrates that in both night-time lesbian leisure spaces and the asylum system in the UK, belonging to the group ‘lesbian’ is inherently racialised. In the Gay Village, some bodies are perceived and constructed as the ‘somatic norm’ while others are (made) ‘out of place’. The chapter argues that this norm is produced through representations, door policies, and other spatial practices. In the asylum system, for asylum claims based on sexuality to be successful the claimant must ‘prove’ their sexuality. The majority of sexuality cases are refused on grounds of credibility, where the claimant is not believed to be lesbian. The chapter demonstrates that these claims have a higher chance of success if the claimant conforms to homonormative notions that are racialised and constructed around a Western model of sexuality that is ‘out and proud’.

Setting: The joint Médecins Sans Frontières/Ministry of Health multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) programme; Karakalpakstan, Uzbekistan.
Objective: Uzbekistan has high rates of MDR-TB. We aimed to understand patients’ and prescribers’ attitudes to TB drug prescription, regulation, and drug-taking behaviour.
Methods: Participants (12 patients, 12 practitioners) were recruited purposively. Data were gathered qualitatively using field notes and in-depth interviews and analysed thematically.
Findings: Our analysis highlighted two main themes. First, shame and stigma were reported to increase the likelihood of self-treatment and incorrect use of TB drugs, most commonly at initial stages of illness. A health system failure to promote health information was perceived, leading to wrong diagnoses and inappropriate therapies. Motivated by shame, patients hid their condition by resorting to drug-treatment options outside the programme, compounding the risk of chaotic management and dissemination of erroneous information through lay networks. Second, positive influences on treatment were reported through patients, practitioners and peers working effectively together to deliver the correct information and support, which acted to normalise TB, reduce stigma and prevent misuse of TB drugs.
Conclusion: Effective case finding, patient support and community education strategies are essential. Patients, practitioners and peers working together can help reduce stigma and prevent misuse of TB drugs.

This article draws on the early work of Erich Fromm. In Escape from Freedom (1969) Fromm directly addressed the psychological mechanisms of escape modern individuals employ to protect themselves from feelings of ontological insecurity and existential estrangement. The article builds on Fromm’s analysis by discussing the significance of his escape mechanisms for understanding the dynamic psychological attractions of identifying with entitative groups. Fromm’s work will be discussed in relation to Hogg’s recent work on uncertainty-identity theory. The aim of the article is to examine the advantages of combining Fromm’s psychoanalytic analysis with Hogg’s uncertainty-identity theory and to highlight the potential this approach has for understanding why groups engage in violent and destructive behaviour.

This article brings together findings from two separate ethnographic studies that explore the motivations, behaviours and experiences of those who voluntarily engage in high-risk activities. Focusing on Csikszentmihalyi’s phenomenology of enjoyment, and taking a particular interest in the psychological and experiential aspects of action, the accounts of skydivers and climbers are presented and discussed in relation to each of the components Csikszentmihalyi has identified as necessary for providing a deep sense of enjoyment. The aim of the article is to show how the concept of flow provides a useful framework for understanding the attractions of engaging in high-risk pursuits that are often overlooked. This contributes to an understanding of particular rural settings,specifically mountains and flying sites, as a backdrop for meaningful action.

What is fun? How is it distinct from happiness or pleasure? How do we know when we are having it? This book is the first to provide a comprehensive sociological account of this taken for granted social phenomenon. Fincham investigates areas such as our memories of fun in childhood, the fun we have as adults, our muted experiences of fun at work and our lived experiences of having fun. Using first-hand accounts and a new approach to interpreting fun, the paradox of fun as not serious or unimportant whilst at the same time essential for a happy life is exposed. Addressing questions of control, transgression and the primacy of social relationships in fun, The Sociology of Fun is intended to provoke discussion about how we want to have fun and who determines the fun we have.

The question of a plurality of ‘Europes’ raises new questions about the nature of unity and diversity. The argument given in the article is that the problem of unity cannot be jettisoned in favour of diversity, but needs to be conceptualised in a way that includes plurality; accordingly a proposal is made for a theory of modernity that integrates both unity and diversity, which it is argued offers a more useful approach than identity or culture based ones; finally, a brief sketch is provided of this framework with respect to the twentieth century and rival projects of modernity that were a feature of the age. While many examples can be found in the long perspective of European history, the twentieth century was particularly important in shaping the present diversity of Europe and therefore merits special attention.

This paper takes as its main focus the intersection of young people’s international mobility within Europe with a number of youth life transitions – from education to work, from unemployment to employment, and, more widely, from ‘youth’ to ‘adulthood’. It surveys both the extensive empirical literature on European youth migrations and a number of theoretical approaches which help to conceptualise and understand this youth-mobility phenomenon. Three categories of young intra-EU migrants are identified: students who are studying abroad, graduates who are working or seeking work abroad (the ‘higher-skilled’), and non-graduates working or looking for work abroad (the ‘lower-skilled’). The age-band is 16-35 years, although we acknowledge that ‘youth’ and ‘young adults’ are flexible categories. We also problematise the notion of skill and its various levels. Amongst the theoretical lenses we deploy to frame youth mobility are economic theory (neoclassical and ‘new economics’), social networks, life-course studies, temporal conjunctures (EU enlargement, the 2008 ‘crisis’), and core-periphery dynamics. The three longest sections of the paper review the empirical and theoretical literatures on mobile students and higher- and lower-skilled workers. The concluding discussion reviews policy measures taken at EU, national and local levels.

Whose personal is more political? This paper rethinks the role of experience in contemporary feminism, arguing that it can operate as a form of capital within abstracted and decontextualised debates which entrench existing power relations. Although experiential epistemologies are crucial to progressive feminist thought and action, in a neoliberal context in which the personal and emotional is commodified powerful groups can mobilise traumatic narratives to gain political advantage. Through case study analysis this paper shows how privileged feminists, speaking for others and sometimes for themselves, use experience to generate emotion and justify particular agendas, silencing critics who are often from more marginalised social positions. The use of the experiential as capital both reflects and perpetuates the neoliberal invisibilisation of structural dynamics: it situates all experiences as equal, and in the process fortifies existing inequalities. This competitive discursive field is polarising, and creates selective empathies through which we tend to discredit others¹ realities instead of engaging with their politics. However, I am not arguing for a renunciation of the politics of experience: instead, I ask that we resist its commodification and respect varied narratives while situating them in a structural frame.

In the context of renewed debates and interest in this area, this paper reframes the theoretical agenda around laddish masculinities in UK higher education, and similar masculinities overseas. These can be contextualised within consumerist neoliberal rationalities, the neoconservative backlash against feminism and other social justice movements, and the postfeminist belief that women are winning the ‘battle of the sexes’. Contemporary discussions of ‘lad culture’ have rightly centred sexism and men¹s violence against women: however, we need a more intersectional analysis. In the UK a key intersecting category is social class, and there is evidence that while working class articulations of laddism proceed from being dominated within alienating education systems, middle class and elite versions are a reaction to feeling dominated due to a loss of gender, class and race privilege. These are important differences, and we need to know more about the conditions which shape and produce particular performances of laddism, in interaction with masculinities articulated by other social groups. It is perhaps unhelpful, therefore, to collapse these social positions and identities under the banner of ‘lad culture’, as has been done in the past.

Albert Pierrepoint was Britain’s most famous 20th-century hangman. This article utilises diverse sources in order to chart his public representation, or cultural persona, as hangman from his rise to prominence in the mid-1940s to his portrayal in the biopic Pierrepoint(2005). It argues that Pierrepoint exercised agency in shaping this persona through publishing his autobiography and engagement with the media, although there were also representations that he did not influence. In particular, it explores three iterations of his cultural persona – the Professional Hangman, the Reformed Hangman and the Haunted Hangman. Each of these built on and reworked historical antecedents and also communicated wider understandings and contested meanings in relation to capital punishment. As a hangman who remained in the public eye after the death penalty in Britain was abolished, Pierrepoint was an important, authentic link to the practice of execution and a symbolic figure in debates over reintroduction. In the 21st century, he was portrayed as a victim of the ‘secondary trauma’ of the death penalty, which resonated with worldwide campaigns
for abolition.

This paper uses findings from research diaries to explore the use of practices of intimacy among asexual people. While much of the literature to date has focused on the supposedly transformative and political nature of uniquely asexual practices of intimacy, our findings suggest something different. Rather than seeking to transform the nature of intimate relationships, asexual people make pragmatic adjustments and engage in negotiations to achieve the forms of physical and emotional intimacy they seek. We discuss this in relation to three areas: friendships, sex as a practice of intimacy, and exclusion from intimacy. Our findings suggest the importance of not only considering the social context in which asexual people practise intimacy, but also how the practices in which they engage may be shared with non-asexual people.

This reflexive analysis of two sports ethnographers’ studies of an aerobics class and a swimming pool explores the effects of doing fieldwork on a physical activity that one loves. While using our bodies as phenomenological sites of perception initially created an epistemological advantage, researching the familiarly beloved not only ‘took the fun out of’ the activity, but also more profoundly challenged our ‘exercise identities’. Emulating poor technique, enduring interactional awkwardness, and deep acting role performances, combined to take their toll, so that ‘going native’ became a matter not just of intellectual disadvantage but of ontological destabilisation. Doing activity-based ethnography on something personally special is a double-edged sword: on the one hand elucidating awareness, but on the other depriving the researcher of pleasure and ‘spoiling’ aspects of their identity.

In contrast to conventional models of positively “becoming” an identity through social interaction, this article explores the inverse, negational process of “non-becoming,” whereby actors start but do not continue along an identity career trajectory. Through cumulative attrition, interactions and encounters at key moments create an overall pattern of non-progression. Using asexuality as an example, we identify three main trajectory stages of non-awareness, communicative negation and non-consolidation, each involving interactional contingencies. With a wider applicability to other repudiated identities, this model shows how even negational symbolic social objects (non-issues, non-events, and non-identities) are constituted through social interaction.

Autism is a lifelong neurodevelopmental disorder requiring various levels of social support across the life course. Early cohorts of children first diagnosed as having autism are now middle-aged or older. Needs for support and services, meaningful and accurate information, and acceptance are substantial among both families supporting a person with autism and people with autism themselves. Social awareness and services for people with autism have changed over time; however, there is a paucity of reviews of the social context and services available since autism's ‘discovery’. This narrative overview explores historically the social care services available to adults with autism and their families, in the context of changes in societal understanding and awareness of autism over time in England. Such an approach may contribute to understandings of older people with autism who have had a label of autism for many decades or who may have acquired this in later life. Retracing the historical social context and care services for autism contextualises the life course experiences and interactions with social workers of today's adults with autism and their families. This review may assist social workers supporting adults with autism and their families to have a better understanding of service trajectories and why contact with professionals may be or has been varied and inconsistent. The key themes from this narrative review suggest the interconnections between scientific development, social awareness and service provision for individuals with autism and their families and changes in social care over time.

This article examines how Romanians in London use native contacts for occupational advancement. Contrary to common associations of ‘bridging’ ties with ‘weak’ ties useful for upward mobility, it illustrates the differentiated nature, role, and resources of native contacts. Drawing on Bourdieu’s capital theory, it shows how weak bridging ties with natives facilitate migrants’ access to better jobs within lower-skilled sectors, whereas strong ties with natives generate distinct cultural resources often required for high-skilled occupations. I consider two strategies of converting strong bridging ties into cultural capital, signalling some limitations of weak ties in facilitating career advancement: mobilizing British friends to act as ‘cultural brokers’, and immersion in British professional networks to acquire and demonstrate local cultural capital. The findings enhance our understanding of bridging social capital and its variable role in enabling upward mobility.

This study explores the social and dynamic aspects of the concept ‘exercise identity’. Previous research, mainly in psychology, has documented a link between exercise identity and exercise behaviour. However, the process of identity formation is not straightforward but rather something that can change with time, context and interaction with others. Subsequently, the present work is informed by a social constructivist approach that views exercise identity as a social product and the formation of it as a social process. Our case study of ‘Adrianna’ examined through a biographical narrative analysis how such an identity may be constructed through interaction and over the life course. Three themes were identified; Adrianna's relationship to (1) significant others, (2) her body and (3) sociocultural norms and expectations. Reflecting this fluidity of exercise identities, we suggest the alternative concept ‘vulnerable exercise identity’ to better understand the subtler dynamics of exercise identity formation and development. Adrianna's case is presented as a ‘recognizable story’, representative of the struggle many people face when trying to become more physically active in contemporary western societies.

This article presents a qualitative study of a hitherto un-researched group, women leaders within the UK Fire & Rescue Service (FRS). The process of modernising the FRS has increased expectations of workforce diversification and of women more easily entering and progressing within the organisation. Here, however, participants’ commentary testifies to the difficulties women faced in being recognised as skilled workers in this context; achieving recognition for both physical and non-physical skills remained a contested process, and one that was not eased by promotion. Participants identified the heightened visibility that accompanied leadership as especially problematic, following a period of gender dimming and assimilation that many had undergone as marginal workers, and had undergone to maximize the chances of being recognised as skilled workers. The findings suggest that some new elements of the modernising FRS culture are less successful than they might be at supporting senior women.