Recent sociological scholarship argues that we should expand understandings of organising for social change to include less overtly politicised activities such as mutual aid. Thus far this expansion has emphasised service provision and excluded fundraising appeals for public goods. Appeals are often considered professionalised charitable projects in which publics are passive audiences, and the use of charitable appeals in the welfare state is seen as accelerating state retrenchment from the provision of public goods. This article reports an extended five-year case study of a charitable appeal to purchase an MRI scanner for the NHS in the remote archipelago of Shetland, including observation, interviews with staff and fundraisers, and analysis of appeal documents and news and social media debates on the appeal. Based on this case, I argue charitable appeals are a distinctive mode of organising for social change. Leveraging the concept of solvable problems and Honig’s politics of public things, I demonstrate the potentialities and limitations of charitable fundraising appeals as a mode of social action. Specifically, appeals require the articulation of a ‘solvable problem’ and a tangible, material goal, both of which can silence more diffuse or intransigent problems. However, I argue that fundraising appeals also generate opportunities to articulate community identity, to deliberate about public goods and to generate new affective relations around the ‘public things’ appeals can provide. I conclude by proposing some features of a charitable appeal for public goods that might more effectively interpellate us into new patterns of deliberation and mutual care.
In a context of pervasive financialization and a global proliferation of interest-bearing capital, construction plays an increasingly important role in transforming liquid finance into fixed capital. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork on four construction projects of large new buildings in the North East of England, in this article I demonstrate the vital role the work of construction managers plays in these processes. Utilizing dance as an analytical lens, I show how managers are continuously engaged in choreography, orchestrating rhythm, and improvisation – spatio-temporal dynamics that enable the management of risk and precarity and eventually the successful completion of buildings. Building on scholarship that re-centres labour and seeks to better conceptualize the experiences of contemporary work, I suggest dance offers fruitful conceptual metaphors to illuminate a range of differing but interrelated spatio-temporal workplace dynamics, created, shaped and orchestrated through worker actions and relations of labour. Beyond the recognition of precarity as a structural labour condition, the lens of dance can capture the contingent, unfolding and live nature of precarity and risk as spatio-temporal processes that characterize everyday life at work.
This article proposes an analytical framework of ‘un/learning’ to conceptualise the non-linear identity transformations of ex-Muslim refugees in the UK. While previous studies on leaving religion (apostasy) focus on populations in secularised contexts, identity shifts from Christian traditions and non-displaced individuals, this study addresses an empirical and theoretical gap: the lived experience of apostasy from Islam within the precarity of forced displacement. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 12 refugees who sought asylum in the United Kingdom (UK) due to fear of persecution for apostasy, I argue that ‘leaving’ religion occurs through simultaneous and iterative experiences of: (1) learning religion through everyday life; (2) unlearning religion through processes shaped by gendered, classed and political identities; and (3) learning non-religion, whereby participants develop new ways of knowing and being within the precarious context of displacement. By engaging with and extending the un/learning framework, I utilise rich original data to portray identity transformation as a (re)negotiation of learning, unlearning and relearning. In doing so, the study advances non-religion and asylum studies by revealing how identity is shaped through the overlapping pressures of displacement, deconversion and bureaucratic assessment. More broadly, this framework provides a lens for examining other contexts of identity transformation, such as those related to gender, culture or politics, where individuals must simultaneously unlearn inherited frameworks and relearn their place in the world.
Drawing on a five-year longitudinal study of 12 working-class Arab Palestinian mothers in Israel, this article examines how maternal projects of respectability are reshaped when anticipated social mobility fails. Building on Beverly Skeggs’ conceptualization of respectability as a central moral project, existing scholarship has largely focused on how mothers secure respectability under conditions of poverty. Far less attention has been paid to moments in which respectability is denied, and to the processes through which it is subsequently reclaimed. Addressing this gap, the study traces mothers’ responses to the erosion of hoped-for educational futures for their daughters. Drawing on Lauren Berlant’s framework of cruel optimism, which describes attachments to promising but ultimately unachievable visions of the good life, this study situates optimism in a broader theoretical context. The analysis reveals how maternal investments in education, as a pathway to mobility, collide with structural constraints that render these aspirations unattainable. The article introduces the concept of dynamic optimism to capture how mothers move between disappointment and renewed moral affirmation by re-anchoring maternal worth in alternative value frameworks. Emotional decline emerges at moments of structural blockage, while emotional uplift is generated through renewed alignment with conservative gendered norms, including reliance on men’s protection and early marriage. By foregrounding rupture, retreat and realignment, the article offers a dynamic account of how optimism and respectability are continually renegotiated under conditions of structural constraint and moral regulation.
Fans Supporting Foodbanks (FSF) has emerged as a response to the impact of the UK’s economic and social welfare crisis. Started by rival Everton F.C. and Liverpool F.C. football fans in 2015, the movement has spread to other fan groups, who collect food and donations to support emergency food provision. This article analyses the forces behind the growth and spread of the movement and, in doing so, addresses the lack of research into sports fan activism in anti-poverty, along with the ephemeral and fragmented nature of resistance to neoliberal systems of oppression more broadly. To do so, we utilised an involved participatory action research methodology to better understand the movement and grow the potential of social activism among fans. Cognisant of the need to protect and enhance their agency, key stakeholders were involved in every stage of the process, in line with this approach. Evident is that in uniting passions from the terraces around the need for change via networks of solidarity, FSF has become a significant force in the fight against the ravages of poverty. To edify this analysis, we meld Gramsci’s concept of hegemony and the cultural analysis of Stuart Hall. In doing so, we show that rather than tributaries to neoliberal dogma, fan culture can act as an important site of resistance with potential to spread across other codes and contexts in the fight against inequality.
This article uses artivist methods such as feminist cartooning and body mapping to examine the diversity of racialised women’s menopause knowledge and experiences in the UK, Sweden and India, noting how these are varied and need to be understood contextually against the larger frame of their life experiences. We take as our starting point the menopause discourse prevalent in mainstream media and workplace initiatives in the UK, noting that it is still largely white and middle-class. To widen and decolonise this anglophone discourse, we employ artivist methods in enunciating the menopause experiences of racialised immigrant women in Sweden and Dalit working-class women in India. In both Sweden and India, we deployed feminist cartooning to produce comic strips in one case and body mapping in the other to elicit marginal women’s experiences to not just broaden the anglophone discourse but also to reimagine menopause. We argue that between them, UK, Sweden and India are representative of the unevenness of menopause discourse and activism. In comparison to the UK, a forerunner, Sweden represents a middle ground where the questions of menopause have begun to emerge in the last decade via the issue of women’s health and sick leave, whereas in India the discourse and menopause policy is yet to concretise. This article is grounded in our involvement in the AHRC-funded research network, MAUSI Net: Menopause Artivism in the UK, Sweden and India , which brings together feminist scholars from these three different country contexts.
The transitions to adulthood for disabled young people in the UK have long been marked by multiple barriers that have implications for their adult futures. While these dynamics have been considered in disability studies, they have been given less emphasis in critical youth studies. This article brings together critical disability studies and critical youth studies to explore the affective costs embedded in the normative underpinnings which frame adult futures as geared towards self-made self-sufficiency. It also highlights the key role of ‘third spaces’ which include third sector organisations and other spaces of community in providing a response to such costs. The article draws on a qualitative project that involved longitudinal interviews and creative methods with disabled young people growing up in Central Scotland and the North East of England, alongside interviews with family members and people who work with disabled young people in the statutory or third sector. The article argues that ‘third spaces’ of communal activity, interaction and care are important resources in escaping the ableism of mainstream spaces of youth life and requirements to build self-made futures. Such spaces enable spending time in recognition and belonging, while opening up alternative future possibilities. However, surrounding social and material conditions can undermine this key role that third spaces enable.
This article reflects on teaching the sociology of colonialism, settler colonialism, and anti-colonialism in Beirut as Israel committed a genocide in Gaza and war crimes in Lebanon. In this environment—amid the explosions of bombs, endless ambulance sirens, and the unrelenting hum of Israeli drones, as students and educators faced sweeping evacuation orders and forced displacement—the classroom became a space for resisting our shared experience of violence and (re)building anti-colonial political consciousness. While our class was learning about the history of colonialism and settler colonialism, we were simultaneously observing the matrix of power that upheld it and living through its violent effects. The course became a space for potential social transformation, where we could forge solidarity relations with others by acknowledging our connected experiences of colonial violence. The article stresses the role of critical sociology in analyzing the social structures of colonialism and settler colonialism and their interconnectedness to the violence inflicted on us, as well as engaging students with possible radical emancipatory politics, from local to global. It highlights the need for critical pedagogy, as reflected in our class discussions and assignments. While each of the sessions brought a wealth of different ideas and emotions from students, special attention will be given to two positionality papers that students completed: one at the beginning of the semester, amid the Gaza genocide but before the escalated war in Lebanon, and the second at the end of the semester, as the Gaza genocide continued and after the start of a fragile ceasefire in Lebanon.
The article advances scholarship on intergenerational space, insecurity and risk, by examining the ongoing transformation of English football fandom as an apposite case study of the emergent uncertainties, and distrust in the generational timescape of British society. Despite significant changes in the finances, infrastructure and scale of the national sport over the past four decades, football stadia remain a key focal point for fan communities and inter alia distinct spaces of intergenerational connection. While research has examined the impacts of neoliberalism and globalisation on the culture of the English game, to date, no study has analysed how these processes relate to the intergenerational nature of football fandom. Addressing this gap, we interrogate how the key touchstones of fandom - the regular season ticket and established concessions for seniors and youths - have been ritualised through the intergenerational relations and social spaces of English stadia, providing a sense of ontological security for fans. Drawing on interviews with 21 fan activists from several English Premier League clubs who mobilised a new campaign ('Stop Exploiting Loyalty') opposing above inflation ticket price hikes and erosion of concessions in the 2024-25 season, we argue that fans' collective emotions reveal a concern that new ticketing policies threaten to fracture the intergenerational bonds and futures of fandom as a predominantly localised cultural practice. We thus extend existing scholarship by introducing the relational-temporal role of intergenerationality and unpack the tensions, distrust and ruptures that putatively undermine the imagined intergenerational futures of football as a cultural tissue of English urban life.
This article explores epistemic injustice in the context of border crossings. In many contexts around the world borders are fortified not only through walls, fences and guards, but also through knowledge claims about human mobility. We can conceptualise these types of claims as ‘epistemic borderwork’. This article discusses 39 semi-structured interviews with people who crossed the English Channel irregularly, primarily in small boats. These testimonies are less heard in public debate on irregularised Channel crossings. In making such voices visible and audible, we can create an imminently productive dynamic: epistemic friction. Coming from a position of epistemic injustice, we argue that such border knowledge has the potential to act as a powerful tool of disruptive epistemic friction.
Scholarship on activism and state repression has outlined the centrality of affect and emotions for the experience of grassroots politics. There has been substantial focus on intentional affects, such as moral outrage, anger, fear and loyalty, for their work in moving people to participate in and commit to political groups. Less attention has been given to anxiety and paranoia as often subtle feelings that persist in long-term temporalities within activist organising networks. This article investigates the role of anxiety and paranoia in shaping lived experience of participation in such groups in the context of surveillance practices and recent public order legislation in Britain. It argues that activists inhabited anxiety and paranoia in ways that encouraged critical reflection and analysis of state power, illustrating how collective subjectivity is entangled with conditions of state repression. The article suggests that these negative affects emerging through protest policing, surveillance and anti-protest laws in particular did not undermine political agency. Rather, given the ambiguous dimension of affect, activists were channelling anxiety and paranoia that emerged through perceptions of and encounters with state power into unfolding critiques of the status quo. This approach highlights the importance of studying durable affects that often remain implicit for their role in evolving forms of resistance and collective agency. The article draws on affect theory and studies of ambiguous agency, and is based on 28 interviews with activists in Britain who were involved in groups campaigning on issues including climate justice, Palestinian rights and animal rights.
This article examines how second-generation British Turks negotiate identity and belonging across the UK and Turkey through a Bourdieusian framework of habitus alongside the discursive processes of racialisation and Islamophobia. Drawing on 30 semi-structured interviews, it shows how participants experience and internalise the UK's racialised and Islamophobic constructions of Turkey, coded as Muslim, backward and unsafe, while simultaneously navigating classed, moralised and linguistic hierarchies in Turkey that racialise them as outsiders through the low-status gurbet & ccedil;i label. Participants' accounts reveal how the dialectical relation between UK-based Islamophobia and perceived self-deficiencies in the Turkish field shapes a floating habitus, which they continuously negotiate and situationally silence. By tracing these dynamics, the article demonstrates how transnational racialisation processes reshape embodied dispositions, extending Bourdieusian scholarship on migrant and post-migrant subjectivities.
This study examines how highly educated young women from China’s only-child generation navigate reproductive choices amidst multiple and competing discourses addressing them as reproductive subjects. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 30 women born between 1982 and 1998, this study reveals how individualism, shaped by an emphasis on self-expression, neoliberal discourse, consumerism and the child-centredness typical of urban one-child families, plays a significant, even predominant role in shaping these young women’s reproductive values and choices. These women assert their reproductive autonomy, reject the normative ideal of ‘have-it-all’, and strategically navigate cultural, familial and societal expectations surrounding motherhood and mothering in defence of their self-interests in various dimensions. This study shows that the dominant framework of familism in previous studies on East Asian women’s fertility decline is insufficient to fully capture the reproductive attitudes and choices of childbearing-aged young women in present-day China, especially those who are highly educated.
Neighbours are ambiguous ties, easier to disengage from than other personal relationships, whose meaning and obligations are flexible and not settled in advance. This article examines how neighbour-based organisations navigate this ambiguity in their process of organising. Rather than observing neighbourhood activism as carried out by already-formed and homogeneous collective actors, this article takes a step back and analyses how neighbour relationships become the building blocks of collective action. The article uses a case study approach and draws on ethnographic fieldwork to study the internal dynamics of a neighbour-based organisation campaigning for improved water access in a self-built neighbourhood of southern Mexico City. It identifies four mechanisms through which the organisation navigated ambiguity: identifying common ground, keeping each other accountable, mobilising existing networks of social ties, and linking the campaign to a shared neighbourhood history. It argues that neighbour ambiguity is not a barrier to neighbourhood activism but an inherent condition of it, continuously managed rather than eliminated in the process of organising. It shows how neighbourly ties can become political resources and how collective action and solidarity, rather than merely emerging from proximity, are sustained through ongoing relational work.
This article explores youth 'side-hustles' - or small-scale business activities pursued alongside paid employment - as a way of examining how enterprise culture and the 'post-Fordist work ethic' is reshaping relationships between identity, productivity and working time amongst young workers. The article goes beyond existing concerns with the 'entrepreneurial self' as a generic form of neoliberal youth subjectivity to focus on the everyday lives and business practices of young people who take up the call to become entrepreneurial by starting businesses. It draws on a large-scale mixed-methods project which examined the relationship between employment and entrepreneurship in the identities, motivations and everyday practices of young people with side-hustles. This article shows that young people pursue side-hustles motivated by a desire for self-realisation through productivity, and by uncertainty about the personal and financial rewards of employment. In practice, side-hustles expand the practices and temporalities of productivity as part of everyday life. Side-hustle business practices have a varied and ambivalent relationship to notions of value and profit, in which relatively limited profits are justified so long as nominally unproductive or leisure time is successfully made productive and profitable to some degree. In pursuing side-hustles, young people experience tensions between competing imperatives - between passion, commodification, productivity, value and profit. The article therefore explores enterprise culture and the post-Fordist work ethic as a site of tension and ambivalence, and establishes side-hustles as a distinct form of contemporary entrepreneurship amongst youth.
Since the transnational emergence of anti-gender mobilizations, trans people's rights and identities have been increasingly contested. While existing scholarship has shown how anti-gender actors mobilize around the abstract common enemy of 'gender ideology', less attention has been paid to recent convergences against trans rights, and to the construction of trans people as targets of mobilization. Drawing on social movement scholarship and trans studies, this article examines how trans people are constructed as enemies within contemporary anti-gender and anti-trans mobilizations. We articulate a paired comparison of Belgium and Italy - two countries characterized by distinct legislative frameworks on trans rights - and conduct a thematic analysis of 46 documents published between 2020 and 2024 by anti-gender and anti-trans actors. We examine (1) the trans-related issues addressed in these texts, (2) the strategies through which knowledge about trans issues is produced and repressed, and (3) the ways in which trans people are constructed as an enemy across contexts. Our findings show that trans people are not positioned solely as part of an abstract threat but are constructed as an embodied enemy endangering society. Through a cognitive praxis that combines strategies of knowledge production and repression, anti-gender and anti-trans actors frame trans people and their rights as a danger to children, families, free speech and, overall, cisgender people. This construction of an embodied enemy sustains the mobilizing potential of anti-gender actors and reaffirms cisness as a societal norm. By foregrounding trans perspectives, this article calls for greater attention to how cisness operates in processes of enemy construction within contemporary exclusionary politics.
Drawing on the theoretical framework of 'relational work' in economic sociology, the article examines the phenomenon of 'precarious commitment' - when employees' commitment to their work and colleagues simultaneously exposes them to the risk of self-exploitation. The study analyses semi-structured interviews with game developers in the Swedish digital games industry. The article demonstrates the negotiated meanings, relations and compensations for seemingly voluntarily unpaid or paid extra work and the ambiguities and mismatches that emerge when the norms of favour exchange and formal exchange intersect. The analysis highlights accounts of collegial reciprocity, non-reciprocated favours as well as self-blaming and guilting practices. The article contributes to the relational work literature by demonstrating the dynamic interplay between reciprocal and transactional relations within the formal structure of employment. It shows that it is the very intersection between the formal and the informal - where the boundary between morally induced favour reciprocity and formal expectations is indistinct - that may harbour precarious commitment. Hence, it adds new knowledge to the sociology of work through a nuanced analysis of the interactive processes through which precarious commitment is both questioned and potentially reproduced. The article suggests that the unspoken and hence hidden character of gift-giving opens opportunities for exploitation without accountability, which may transfer responsibility to individual employees while obscuring collective solutions.
This article examines how highly qualified migrants (HQM) in Denmark experience belonging and not-belonging and argues that these experiences reveal everyday processes of class-making in one of Europe's least stratified societies. Drawing on Bourdieu's concepts of distinction and capital, and theories of cultural Othering, microaggressions and symbolic boundaries, the article explores how migration status and perceived proximity to 'Danishness' shape social position beyond income or education. The study uses thematic analysis combined with ideal-typical clustering to analyse narrative interviews with 20 university-educated migrants in Denmark. All HQM experienced non-belonging, but in two distinct ways: 'Brick wall' migrants are typically racialized individuals of non-EU or Eastern European origin. They reported overt racism, structural barriers, invisibilization and acute isolation. 'Glass wall' migrants are typically white Western Europeans. They described subtle exclusion through cultural distinction, 'almost belonging' and a double bind in which relative privilege as 'good migrants' coexists with marginalization. The article contributes by theorizing class as co-constituted by migration and Otherness, introducing the brick wall/glass wall typology, and especially by refining the concept of national capital as an extension of Bourdieusian theory. Danishness operates as an 'infinite' and shifting symbolic boundary that structures inclusion and exclusion.
Few texts have done more to shape how sociologists and social theorists think about workplace politics, labour agency, the everyday production of cooperation and even the sociology of work than Michael Burawoy's Manufacturing Consent. As a result, discussing it poses a two-fold challenge - of scope and of depth. The first requires a profound understanding of the theoretical foundation of industrial sociology on which Burawoy built. The second, in-depth expertise of the organisation-level issues Burawoy puts forward. Paul Thompson, Emeritus Professor of Employment Studies at the University of Stirling, is a scholar equal to this challenge. Paul's influential work has been central to shaping labour process analysis and debates, which Manufacturing Consent opened. Having extensively engaged with Burawoy's work, Paul is uniquely placed to comment on the book's legacy, over 40 years on. In the conversation which follows he reflects on how Burawoy is being taken up today, how Manufacturing Consent and its successor, The Politics of Production, changed the discipline, which of its insights have endured, and what still requires reflection and critical conversation.
We open the special section 'Forty-five Years of Manufacturing Consent' by returning to Michael Burawoy's Manufacturing Consent 45 years after its publication to ask why it remains both enduring and contested in the sociology of work. Burawoy's core insight was that workplace order is not secured by control alone: consent can be organised through everyday routines, incentives, relationships, and 'games' that make work workable even when power is uneven. Yet work has changed sharply since 1979, raising fresh questions about where consent is now produced when labour is dispersed across platforms, homes, care settings and fragmented labour markets, and how agency and subjectivity are shaped under precarity. The timing of this revisit is also shaped by Burawoy's tragic passing in February 2025, which has prompted renewed reflection on his intellectual legacy and his commitments to engaged sociology. In this introductory article, we ask what the book helps us see now, what it cannot capture, and what it still provokes, then we introduce the papers in the section and reflect on what they mean for research on work, labour politics and sociological practice going forward.
