How citizens think about, and relate to, climate change and possibilities for addressing it are sociologically important questions, sharpened in the current context of extensive climate change concern. Social science approaches generally have shown the profound importance of context and the social embeddedness of lay perceptions. More specifically, theories of social practice focus analytic attention away from individuals and onto the economic, energy and social arrangements which drive people's habituated carbon intensive everyday practices. However, there has been a growing interest in how citizens may, at junctures, be more or less reflexive, evaluative and critical of practices which they carry or adapt. Interested in how citizens engage with possibilities for addressing climate change, we report on new UK-based qualitative research and analyse participants' accounts of (in)efficacy, responsibility, constraint and affect in acting on climate. We explore contextual variation in the meanings participants bring to acting on climate change, and affective aspects of acting, or feeling situated, 'against the grain' of normalised practices. The evidence offers insights into the diverse meanings people bring to the possibility of acting on climate and the ways in which such meanings are enmeshed with, but also often critically evaluative of carbon intensive practices.

Shared mobility services such as shared scooters, bikes, and ridehailing services have transformed the urban mobility landscape in recent years. In this paper we identify the goals that local governments are pursuing when regulating these private services. We also analyse the circumstances and motivations that led to the pursuit of these goals. For this, we carried out three in-depth case studies of cities where private companies had deployed shared mobility services: Bogotá, Colombia; Paris, France; and Los Angeles, USA. We found that there is a wide range of goals (34 distinct goals) that the governments of these cities are pursuing when attempting to regulate shared mobility services. However, only between three and four of these goals tend to dominate most of their actions. We also identified a mix of motivations for the pursuit of these goals: from the public interest of redressing past inequities, to circumstantial motivations such as appeasing the incumbents that have seen their businesses endangered by these new technologies. The academic literature converges on sustainability and equitable access being two of the primary goals to be pursued in transport policy, but our findings suggest that practitioners and policymakers are pursuing a range of other goals that do not fit neatly into these two theoretical categories.

Despite evidence of extensive and growing concern about climate change, citizens remain relatively unlikely to discuss it in everyday conversation, presenting a puzzle to commentators and researchers. Different explanations of climate silence have been suggested, most notably from social psychology and from political economy perspectives, which posit forms of cultural control. However, there is limited evidence about the relational contexts of everyday climate talk and the meanings that people themselves attach to it. In this article, we analyse data from new qualitative research and explore how climate talk is patterned, forms of self-silencing and the meanings attached to climate talk, with reference to its interactional and relational contexts. We argue that social interactional contexts, relational work and mundane forms of practical constraint play an under-investigated yet crucial role in limiting climate talk.

In this article we explore how the English post-industrial canal has gone from enclosed and abandoned urban ruin to thriving but contested urban landscape. We contend that canals deserve closer social scientific attention in and of themselves but also as a creative entry point for understanding the instabilities and ambivalences of contemporary urban life. We probe at three dynamics in the English context: uneven cycles of attention from state, capital and civil society that ‘revealed’ the canal over the course of the 20th century; how the contemporary canalscape is made ‘from below’ and how its unique materiality as a stretched, socio-natural waterway has been mobilised, latterly, in biopolitical ways. We note how the cultivated meaning of these previously enclosed industrial relics is now deeply entwined with the mood and mobility of urban dwellers. Methodologically, we excavate these three dimensions through a synthesis of phenomenological attunement and analysis of historical, literary and social scientific accounts.

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in studying the interactions between the fields of digital technology and transport and multiple terms to describe these interactions have been proposed. These include terms such as “smart mobility”, “new mobility”, “3-revolutions” and “Mobility-as-a-Service”, amongst others. While these terms encompass a wide range of technology-transportation interactions, all of them include shared mobility as one of its elements, yet there is still no broadly accepted definition in the academic literature of what the term “shared mobility” means or what type of technology-transport interactions it encompasses. The aim of this paper is to propose a taxonomy for shared mobility based on a critical engagement with the main bodies of literature across disciplinary areas that underpin this concept: (1) the interactions between digital technology and transport, and (2) the broader concept of the sharing economy. Though these two elements are sometimes mentioned together in the literature as relevant to shared mobility, to the authors’ knowledge they have not yet been combined in a published study to explicitly propose a definition or taxonomy. Having a clearly defined and broadly accepted terminology for shared mobility is important, as this is a term that is used not only in the academic literature, but also by policymakers and in policy documents, and the lack of a definition leads to a lack of clarity and shared understanding of what shared mobility involves. The literature reviewed carried out for this paper suggests that different authors use the term shared mobility in diverse ways to refer to a diverse set of solutions. The proposed taxonomy can therefore be used by public and private policymakers and academics alike to speak a common language when referring to, planning for, and evaluating shared mobility solutions.

Professor of Sociology in the School of Media, Communication and Sociology, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK; Associate Professor of Sociology in the School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK; Lecturer in Sociology in the School of Media, Communication and Sociology, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK; Lecturer in Sociology in the School of Sociology and Social Policy , University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

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We thank Whitaker and Atkinson for their highly constructive and generous response to our discussion of their work in our ‘Beyond Performative Talk’ paper (Hughes et al., 2020). We fully accept tha...

We centrally consider the question of what interview data can be used to 'say' through adialogue with advocates of the 'radical critique' of interview studies. We propose that while the critique has considerable utility in drawing attention to 'the social life of interviews' and the pervasiveness of notions of the 'romantic subject', it simultaneously goes too far in its reduction of interviews to narrative performance, and not far enough in its own critical departure from core characteristics of the romantic subject. We show how the critique leaves intact imagery of a seemingly unbridgeable divide between the experienced and the expressed, and involves a related conflation of what can be said at interview with what interviews can be used to say. We explore how the radical critique might productively be built upon via more 'synthetic' forms of research engagement, outlining alternative modes of apprehending interview data through afurther critical departure from the romantic subject. Accordingly, we advance a move beyond asole engagement with questions of how data are constructed and produced and towards how such data might otherwise be used to speak about the social world beyond the social nexus that constitutes an interview encounter.

The two iconic blue cargo cranes that once loomed over the dockside in Salford, Northern England were demolished by the municipal authority in 2013. Dating from 1966, the loss of the cranes was lamented by local campaigners on aesthetic, heritage and political grounds. This was Salford! A city alert to its scars, where Engels, the Chartists and a radical literary canon populate the cultural memory. And yet there had been a slow-motion takeover. The docks were now Salford Quays a prestige private development of media, hospitality and real estate and the cranes had begun, said local politicians, to distract from the Quays vista (Salford Star, 2013). Any nostalgia for the cranes was misplaced, implied the authority, it was time for the city to move on. Moreover, all was not lost: those interested in accessing recreations of the cranes could now do so digitally, via a new smartphone app.

The recent floods in the UK underlined the importance of community resilience, however we know little about the extent to which people are prepared for different emergencies and often their resilience (or lack of) is only revealed post-event. This paper draws on empirical evidence from a case study of Swansea, South Wales, which explored everyday experiences and understandings of resilience and risk, and considers how the broader context of austerity shapes community resilience to disasters and crisis. It suggests that austerity measures function to undermine and dismantle collective institutions of social protection, and to limit the capacity of different government departments to tackle key risks, as well as contributing to the proliferation of risks in people's everyday lives. In this sense, austerity can be seen to undermine resilience whilst also contributing to increasing vulnerability. At the same time, participants’ accounts outline some of the difficulties faced in engaging the public in thinking about and preparing for different kinds of risk. It is suggested that there is a need to address these engagement issues as well as to acknowledge the relationship between community resilience and broader questions of social, economic and environmental security.

This article draws on case study research of a low-income neighbourhood in Leeds to explore experiences of, and attitudes towards, place-based community. Through tracing social relations in the neighbourhood over time, from the early twentieth century to the present day, the ways in which community is embedded in everyday activities and social interactions, and the social impact of socioeconomic change on local neighbourhoods, is demonstrated. It is argued that the relentless and nostalgic focus on local communities as an idealised form of social solidarity has meant that the reasons why place-based community has declined over time have been overlooked. The article challenges the assumption that social fragmentation on neighbourhood levels necessarily indicates antisocial trends or a lack of a sense of duty towards others, and draws attention to the constraints people face in developing relationships with others. Questions are raised about the viability of top-down attempts to shape social relations in particular ways.