This Beyond the Text contribution offers a collective sociological interpretation of carnival practices in central Mexico through a community-focused brochure produced as part of a research project examining equality, diversity and inclusion in carnivals. Grounded on ethnographic observations and co-produced narratives with carnival organisers, the brochure documents 10 local carnivals that, despite their historical continuity and considerable cultural significance, remain largely unexplored in global festival and event scholarship. As both an academic output and a sociocultural artefact originating in the Global South, it functions as an act of social restitution by returning accessible knowledge to the communities who co-created it. The article reflects on the situated methodological and ethical processes that guided its development, arguing that such practices challenge extractivist research traditions and assert methodological sovereignty. By engaging creatively with visual and narrative forms, this contribution amplifies Latin American perspectives within global sociological debates.
This article examines the existence of symbolic boundaries in musical consumption by analysing patterns of musical tastes among consumers in Spain. To assess the validity of the cultural omnivorousness thesis and its implications for cultural hierarchies, we apply Correlational Class Analysis to identify relational structures of musical tastes and explore how symbolic-cultural boundaries emerge through oppositions between musical genres. Using data from the Survey of Cultural Habits and Practices in Spain (n = 14,524), four distinct musical taste structures are identified. The results reveal heterogeneous configurations of musical preferences characterized by different degrees of breadth, specialization and exclusion. Rather than supporting the idea of a dominant omnivorous pattern, the findings show the persistence of symbolic boundaries expressed through the rejection of specific genres and the coexistence of weak omnivorous and univorous taste structures. Finally, the article discusses the social characteristics associated with these taste configurations and their implications for understanding cultural boundaries in contemporary musical consumption.
In June 2025, families of people who died or disappeared at Europe’s maritime borders collaborated with activists, researchers and artist Séverine Sajous to create a public mural in Palermo (Italy). Emerging from a broader transnational process of memory work, advocacy and participatory research, promoted by the NGO Mem.Med, the mural transformed photographs, personal messages and testimonies into a collective visual intervention addressing the ongoing consequences of border violence. This article examines both the mural and the collaborative process through which it was created. Drawing on participatory and arts-based methods, we analyse how relatives of the dead and disappeared actively contributed to the selection, curation and public circulation of visual and textual materials. Rather than treating the mural and its making as a simple commemorative event, we approach it as a form of knowledge production through which private experiences of loss are transformed into public claims for recognition, truth and justice. We argue that the mural functions simultaneously as a counter-archive, a counter-memorial and a reparative practice from below. By making visible lives frequently erased by contemporary border regimes, it challenges institutional forms of forgetting and reaffirms the dignity of those rendered absent in official accounts. The article shows how participatory artistic practices can generate public memory through relationships of care, solidarity and collective action, while contributing to a sociology of dignity centred on recognition, agency and resistance. In doing so, it highlights the potential of collaborative visual interventions to connect research, activism and lived experience in the pursuit of more just forms of social and political belonging.
This article examines the experiences of frontline workers in the United Kingdom to understand how they navigated changes to services during COVID-19 and the impact this had on their well-being. It uses qualitative data from semi-structured interviews with frontline workers from various sectors, including health and social care, criminal justice, education, and community-led organisations. It examines some of the challenges they faced and uses Fassin’s concept of biolegitimacy (the sacredness assigned to biological life) to understand the tensions and contradictions in the United Kingdom’s response to the pandemic, which emphasised saving lives but, at the same time, did not value all lives equally. The article highlights how the primacy afforded to the National Health Service and COVID-related care created hierarchies of frontline work; considers workers’ experiences of vicarious suffering; and workers’ subjugation of their own needs to continue providing care to individuals they considered disadvantaged by the public health response to COVID-19. The article further argues there is a gendered dimension to these experiences, as women in the research bore the brunt of ill-considered, generic policy responses which failed to account for their specific needs. By using the concept of biolegitimacy to understand workers’ experiences, the article connects the micro-level experiences of frontline workers to wider value systems to consider how lives are evaluated in periods of crisis, providing an understanding of workers’ experiences that goes beyond the organisational level.
This article offers a sociological analysis of the global Rights of Nature movement, positioning dignity, repair, and socio-ecological justice at its heart. While Rights of Nature has gained traction across environmental law, Indigenous politics, and ecological science, Sociology has largely overlooked its implications, despite the deeply social origins and unequal consequences of ecological harm. To address this, the article integrates Cultural Sociology with decolonial scholarship and Indigenous relational philosophies, situating Lauren Berlant’s concepts of slow death and cruel optimism alongside the Andean philosophy of Buen Vivir . It reframes ecological degradation as an ongoing violation of dignity affecting both human communities and ecosystems. Recognising nature as a rights-bearing subject challenges foundational assumptions about the human-nature binary in rights discourse, presenting an opportunity to broaden sociological research, society–environment knowledge, and socio-political activism. The article makes three core contributions: first, it establishes the Rights of Nature as a necessary object of sociological analysis, showing that existing anthropocentric frameworks are insufficient for understanding contemporary ecological crisis; second, it demonstrates that sociological concepts, particularly those concerning representation, inequality, coloniality, and governance, provide essential tools for analysing and strengthening Rights of Nature frameworks; and third, it develops an original socio-(eco)logical rights framework grounded in dignity and reparations, including a socio-ecological forensics toolkit that enables the diagnosis of harm and the articulation of reparative pathways across human and more-than-human worlds. Together, these contributions reposition Sociology as central to understanding and advancing socio-ecological justice in the context of the global ecological crisis.
