This paper explores the impacts of the transition to parenthood on the relationship between (from a Bourdieusian perspective) habitus and field in social reproduction. The paper is based on a longitudinal study of white middle-class gentrifier households in Amsterdam before and after childbirth. The study reveals the disruptive (as well as re-configurative) impact of parenthood as transition, even for this relatively privileged group (in terms of legitimated habitus and spatial discretion and mobility). Our findings strongly suggest the highly gendered nature of this transition, and also reveal the significance of spatial dimensions of this gendered experience - from embodiment all the way through to changing relationships in urban space. These impacts suggest parenthood as a distinct 'field' of social struggle and emphasise the significance of gender and spatial experience in understanding habitus-field relations, alongside the more acknowledged temporalities of social reproduction.

Pragmatism is a philosophy that sees life as being defined by the relations of organisms and things in an environment that is ever changing and uncertain. The nature of these relationships (or transactions, as pragmatists call them) is such that they are persistently co-constitutive, with no rounded-out clearly defined objects or organisms. This relational, processual view of life embeds human organisms in an active environment such that their knowledge of it is primarily acquired through action, in situations, and is only provisional and not based on solid foundations. Situations are contextual, though not necessarily geographically and spatially so. Acquiring robust knowledge to operate in this environment involves persistent experimentation and the testing out of ideas through active intervention in the world. Active experimentation comes about when the habitual relations of organisms to their environment become obstructed or uncertain (in problematic situations), otherwise most organic activity (including that of humans) is noncognitive and based on habit that is embodied and involving affect. Humans’ problem-solving capacities have been expanded by language use, and thus communication takes on an important role as a collective problem-solving capacity (or mind), a type of rationality that exists beyond individual cognitive capacities. The effective functioning of these capacities is the pragmatist’s idea of democratic life. This normative aspiration acts as a critique of actually existing democratic systems, with all their institutional anachronisms, social divisions, and obstacles to the realization of individual and thus collective capacities. Pragmatism emerged in the United States in the second half of the 19th century, involving figures such as William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, George Herbert Mead, and John Dewey. It was a philosophy strongly influenced by Darwinian naturalism but also by the traumatic experience of civil war. From both these influences pragmatism has taken an assumption of the ineluctable nature of relations all things but also of the dangers of beliefs that separate or deny this interrelatedness. Despite its environmental sensibilities (and some early connections via urban sociology) there have been no consistent relations between geographical thinking and pragmatism. But as an antifoundational and process philosophy of material things and organisms pragmatism has stimulated a flurry of recent engagement through variants of poststructuralist thinking that have involved geographical enquiry and critique.

In geography the key theoretical registers of assemblage theory and Actor Network Theory have been psychoanalytic-semiotic, materialist and vitalist (emphasising affect). In contrast, this paper indicates the original influence and continued relevance of philosophical pragmatism’s action-oriented approach for assemblage and ANT. It suggests how a pragmatist understanding of human experience, situation and reason offers a different perspective on the nature of emergent and relational space in assemblages and networks. This perspective extends existing pragmatist work in geography to explore the distinctive, hyper-relational spatialities of human activity in a world of acting things, suggesting wider implications for progress in human geography.

This chapter describes the usefulness of social network analysis, both theoretically and empirically, for an understanding of social and spatial change commonly known as 'gentrification'. It draws on fieldwork carried out in a part of London in the 1980s. Both materialist and liberal analyses of gentrification couch the discussion of social change in terms of class transition in residential neighbourhoods. The chapter proceeds from the assumption that materialist and liberal analysis is imbued with a spatial formalism that ties social change to residential spaces and solidary groups (classes or communities). Sands End was experiencing the gentrification of the Victorian terraces by incoming professionals and small local building firms, as well as the wholesale transformation of the industrial riverside into a luxury residential and commercial zone (becoming Chelsea Harbour and Sands Wharf). The lambda statistic is a non-parametric test that has the advantage over its better-known counterpart (the contingency coefficient) of not being a chi-square-based test.

Contemporary discussions of human–environment relations see habits as enabling forces of change (becoming) in contrast to traditional views of habit as routine and restrictive elements of identity (being). Vital life (becoming) is realised in habit through body repetition (Ravaisson) or through material force (Deleuze). This paper argues for the significance of the pragmatist work of John Dewey that shares this dispositional, enabling view of habit, but denies any dualism between life and mechanism. The paper explores Dewey’s idea of habits as mechanisms of natural forms of organisation that have different life force, depending on the situational qualities of environment–human transactions. This approach also implicates habit in problematisation. The paper goes on to discuss the implications of pragmatist thinking for understanding human–environment relations and the place that habits have in intervening in and reforming those relations through social activism and public policy.

Urban research has increasingly acknowledged the significance of the social and spatial composition of schools in the broader socio-spatial dynamics of cities overall. With increasingly marketised education systems, parental choice of school is a key mechanism affecting wider urban processes such as gentrification. Most research into school choice in cities concentrates on the dynamics of choice (how and what parents say they choose). Fewer studies deal with the relationship between choice and the subsequent allocation of pupils to schools. This paper reports the findings of an international systematic review of the connections between parental choice and pupil allocation in school choice systems across the globe. We find that school choice is associated with higher levels of segregation of pupils from different socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds between schools. This finding is consistent across all types of choice mechanism, in different countries and cities, and across choice systems that have been in place for different lengths of time. The reasons behind the observed relationship are, however, highly localised and contextual, including particularities of the choice mechanism, social composition of neighbourhoods and mix of school types in a city. Increases in between-school segregation may lead to schools being more homogeneous in their social composition, with broader implications for social cohesion and educational inequalities in cities. Relating the findings to the broader urban school literatures, we suggest that scales and geographies of allocation are critical in understanding the dilemmas and dynamics of choice, the resultant inequalities, and any proposed interventions or solutions to reduce these inequalities.

This chapter discusses how the Great Recession and restraining welfare budgets have reconfigured the moral argument against undeserving claimants and the form of civic punishment and exclusion from social redistribution. It focuses on the moral boundaries of the society from the standpoint of two key sociological concepts: the outsider and the stranger. The chapter describes the process of scapegoating today and analyses the 'stranger' as the perfect economic scapegoat of the times. It explains the latest events in Italy and Britain illustrates the impact of two different types of crisis on the identification of new scapegoats: immigrants and refugees. The chapter reviews the main results against the background provided by Loic Wacquant's argument on the 'survival of the fittest' and discusses the case for the disruption of solidarity in the society. Solidarity opportunities at the neighbourhood level are almost …

In the context of debates about the epistemological and ontological coherence of concepts of critical urban studies, we argue that urban concepts should be conceptualized problematically. We do so by aligning Michel Foucault's genealogical work on problematization with John Dewey's pragmatist understanding of problem formation and responsiveness. This approach brings into view the degree to which debates about urban futures are shaped by a variety of critical perspectives that extend beyond the academy and activism. We elaborate this argument through examples of global urban policy formation and practices of neighbourhood change. Approaching urban concepts problematically suggests a move away from the idea of critique as a form of scholastic correction towards an appreciation of the contested fields of practice in and through which critical understandings of urban problems emerge.

International Journal of Urban and Regional ResearchVolume 40, Issue 2 p. 474-475 Book Review Alberta Andreotti, Patrick Le Galès and Francisco J. Moreno-Fuentes 2015: Globalised Minds, Roots in the City: Urban Upper Middle Classes in Europe. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell Gary Bridge, Gary Bridge Cardiff UniversitySearch for more papers by this author Gary Bridge, Gary Bridge Cardiff UniversitySearch for more papers by this author First published: 23 August 2016 https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12351Citations: 1Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article.Citing Literature Volume40, Issue2March 2016Pages 474-475 RelatedInformation

This chapter investigates whether — and to what extent — our respondents consider themselves to be middle class, how they explain what being middle class, or just "in the middle" means to them and the role of place in forging these classed identities. As discussed in Chapter 1, many political claims have been made on behalf of the middle classes. Here we ask whether such strategic uses of the term in contemporary political discourse bear any relation to our respondents' sense of their own position.

In this concluding chapter, we will review what we have learned with regard to our research into urban space and what urban lifestyles, habits and the residential strategies of the middle classes have to tell us about contemporary cities, and the workings of segregation and social mix. As we indicated in Chapter 1, we took advantage of an empirical and yet multi-circumstantial approach in an effort to understand the relationship between the middle classes and their urban spaces. This has allowed us to analyse a range of socio-urban situations.

Understanding how different groups of users make choices is central to explaining the outcomes of choice-based mechanisms such as those observed in education systems across different national contexts. We discuss two established perspectives employed to explain decision-making in relation to class and education, and develop an argument for the superior explanatory potential of an elaborated, interactive, sociological rational choice perspective. We illustrate how this framework may be operationalised to inform policy aimed at reducing class differentials in school choice and subsequent educational outcomes in the context of New Public Management ideas.