This article examines how domestic work in Brazil is shaped by the afterlives of slavery, showing how racialised and gendered structures organise relations of dependency, exclusion and domination. Drawing on fieldwork with domestic workers in Pelotas and historical analysis of domestic labour during and after slavery, it interrogates the recent turn to the language of ‘modern slavery’ in public and academic discourse in Brazil. By framing exploitation as an exceptional moral rupture, this discourse individualises abuse and detaches labour subordination from the legacies of slavery and racial capitalism. Against this framing, the article develops the concept of precarious freedom to show how domestic workers’ lives are shaped not by a binary between slavery and freedom, but by coercive mechanisms embedded in relations of socio-economic dependency, legal regulations and affective governance. This reframes exploitation in domestic work as a constitutive feature of racialised-gendered capitalist relations rather than an exceptional violation.
How do young adults negotiate consent and responsibility in sexual encounters involving intoxication? Drawing on 31 qualitative interviews with young adults in the Greater Stockholm area, this article conceptualizes such encounters as situations in which taken-for-granted moral orientation may become destabilized. Participants described uncertainty about intentions, consent, responsibility, and the meaning of events, especially where memory loss, uneven intoxication, or unclear reciprocity were involved. To navigate this uncertainty, they relied on practical moral heuristics, including distinctions between being “tipsy” versus “too drunk,” the “dead-drunk” taboo, and ideals of intoxication parity or being on the “same level.” These heuristics translated uncertain internal states into workable social cues for judging fairness, vulnerability, and legitimacy, yet were also shaped by gendered sexual scripts. The article contributes to moral sociology by theorizing moral judgment as a situated accomplishment under conditions of uncertainty.
Campaigns to prohibit the use of corporal punishment against children receive only a fraction of the interest and support that is elicited by campaigns to eliminate ‘child slavery’, even though the latter is said to be defined primarily by the use of violence to control children. This article draws on research with young Ghanaian men and women who, as children, experienced what antislavery NGOs describe as ‘child slavery’ to show that the kind of violent control they were subjected to as supposed ‘child slaves’ was neither qualitatively different from, nor more extreme than, the kinds of violent control they experienced in other contexts, especially the home. The article questions the selective focus on violence in ‘child slavery’ in abolitionist campaigns, arguing that it reflects and reproduces patriarchal, racialised, and colonial thinking about childhood, dependency, and legitimate authority, including the idea that some adults have the right to violently control children.
Despite long-term school absence having serious consequences for both children and parents, research on their experiences remains limited. The purpose of this article is to explore the process through which children become school refusers. The analysis draws on Bourdieu’s sociology and is based on interviews with 20 Swedish mothers of children they described as school refusers (in Swedish: ‘hemmasittare’). Three core contributions are outlined: First , the study adds nuance to discussions on the definitions of school absence by analysing extended school absence as a phased process linked to habitus transformation, emphasising its transformative nature. Second , the analysis highlights how school absence is influenced by medicalisation, the family’s economic, social, and cultural capital, and contemporary forms of parenting. Lastly , the study discusses school refusal as a reflection of societal tensions concerning the doxa (common beliefs) that positions education as essential, success in school as the norm, and school attendance as non-negotiable.
Recent research has established that elites in many contexts are keen to portray themselves as ordinary and that such strategies of impression management have distinct reputational pay-offs. In this article, we draw on a range of experiments with a representative sample of the UK population to explore what happens when elite expressions of ordinariness are undermined. Our results suggest that elites are generally not punished when new – and potentially contradictory – information comes to light, unless such evidence suggests explicit duplicity. Projecting ordinariness, in other words, represents an effective strategy of impression management, even if elites lead less ordinary lives in practice. Our analysis also shows that successful expressions of elite ordinariness have implications for public acceptance of income inequality. Specifically, we find people in the UK are happier to accept higher rates of income inequality when they think those earning the highest salaries have been upwardly socially mobile.
Across the globe, scholars are pushing for non-western, indigenous or culturally relevant ways of knowing. While this drive represents as a stance and a counter imperial knowledge strategy, ongoing entanglements and knowledge canons render still invisible the voices, knowledge and practices of the Global South. The article draws on the critique and alternative framing of development from New World Thinkers to underscore some of the insights and lessons of resistance which can be leveraged in the teaching of global sociology. A push is for pedagogies of resistance that centre the relevance of: (i) critical or radical thought; (ii) affirming and decolonial methodologies; and (iii) open dialogue, public accountability and engagement. These learnings provide an opportunity to challenge absolute narratives and directives, while framing epistemic resistance to take Caribbean and global sociology forward.
Some scholars argue that poverty reduces responsiveness to regulatory incentives, reducing the law’s deterrent effects. Conversely, some expect the poor to assess risks better and to be more risk-averse. In the former case, destitute people will be less likely to comply with criminal regulations. We test this prediction with the help of a natural experiment: the proclamation of a Brussels city council bylaw that forbids the presence of children accompanying beggars. Questionnaire survey data from people who beg were collected in Brussels before and after the proclamation of the bylaw and a decade before the declaration of the bylaw using the same seasonal design. A difference-in-differences approach shows that begging with children decreased after the regulation. We find no evidence of a displacement effect, where beggars with children move to the periphery. The results suggest that individuals in extreme poverty are highly responsive to the incentives communicated by law.
Brazil’s central role in the transatlantic slave trade and its enduring racialized inequalities contrast sharply with the country’s limited public memorialization of slavery. This article examines Rio de Janeiro’s samba schools as cultural and creative industries that produce and contest narratives of enslavement in the absence of sustained state-led remembrance. Methodologically, it brings Trouillot’s concept of historical silences into dialogue with Hartman’s critical fabulation and Twine’s racial–visual literacy to develop a sociological approach to visual cultural production as history-making . Focusing on two formerly enslaved women from 18th-century Minas Gerais, the article compares carnival fabulations produced 60 years apart. It shows how shifting racial and gendered imaginaries shape the retrospective significance of slavery: while Chica da Silva’s narrative aligned with myths of racial democracy and sexualized racism, Rosa Maria’s depiction reflects contemporary critical perspectives. Persistent racialized inequalities in cultural production reveal the afterlives of slavery across Brazil’s artistic and academic landscapes.
This article describes a conversational sequence by which commercial airline pilots report unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) to local air traffic control. Analysis shows how the sequence is organised to address possible reputational risk associated with reporting UAP and contributes to work on the communicative competences by which reporters of extraordinary events establish the factual status of their claims, the objectivity of the claimed phenomenon and their reliability as reporters. The data are recordings of pilots interacting with air traffic controllers collected by aviation enthusiasts and UAP researchers and posted on YouTube. Conversation analysis was used to examine the turn-by-turn development of the UAP reporting sequence, focusing on turn design procedures and the underpinning normative frameworks. The analysis is framed in relation to social science research on UAP/UFO experiences and concludes by outlining how this work can contribute to studies of aviation communication and the emerging science of UAP studies.
This article examines how precarious workers in Spain engage in direct action to contest and reshape regulatory frameworks in contexts of limited institutional protection. Focusing on two grassroots organisations—Las Kellys and Riders x Derechos—it analyses how workers act as regulatory agents through visibility-making, protest, media engagement, and legal mobilisation. Drawing on qualitative case studies and inductive thematic analysis, the article shows how these groups expose managerial control, contest legal classifications, and deploy disruptive and hybrid organisational repertoires to influence company, sectoral, and state-level governance. The findings demonstrate that regulation is constituted from below through workers’ practices and narratives, revealing a plural and multi-scalar model of enforcement in contemporary precarious labour markets.
