http://www.socresonline.org.uk Sociological Research Online: High quality applied sociology, focusing on theoretical, empirical and methodological discussions which engage with current political, cultural and intellectual topics and debates en-GB Copyright Sociological Research Online Wed, 29 Feb 2012 14:22:55 +0000 socres@surrey.ac.uk (Ross Coomber and Gayle Letherby) http://www.epress.ac.uk/SRO/SRO_75x30.gif http://www.socresonline.org.uk srorosscoomber@googlemail.com (Ross Coomber and Gayle Letherby) Article http://www.socresonline.org.uk/17/1/10.html http://www.socresonline.org.uk/17/1/10.html Wed, 29 Feb 2012 12:59:00 +0000 Ross Coomber and Gayle Letherby: [No abstract] R.A.Wiles@soton.ac.uk (Rose Wiles, Amanda Coffey, Judy Robison and Jon Prosser) Article http://www.socresonline.org.uk/17/1/8.html http://www.socresonline.org.uk/17/1/8.html Wed, 29 Feb 2012 12:58:00 +0000 Rose Wiles, Amanda Coffey, Judy Robison and Jon Prosser: The ethical regulation of social research in the UK has been steadily increasing over the last decade or so and comprises a form of audit to which all researchers in Higher Education are subject. Concerns have been raised by social researchers using visual methods that such ethical scrutiny and regulation will place severe limitations on visual research developments and practice. This paper draws on a qualitative study of social researchers using visual methods in the UK. The study explored their views, the challenges they face and the practices they adopt in relation to processes of ethical review. Researchers reflected on the variety of strategies they adopted for managing the ethical approval process in relation to visual research. For some this meant explicitly 'making the case' for undertaking visual research, notwithstanding the ethical challenges, while for others it involved 'normalising' visual methods in ways which delimited the possible ethical dilemmas of visual approaches. Researchers only rarely identified significant barriers to conducting visual research from ethical approval processes, though skilful negotiation and actively managing the system was often required. Nevertheless, the climate of increasing ethical regulation is identified as having a potential detrimental effect on visual research practice and development, in some instances leading to subtle but significant self-censorship in the dissemination of findings. profclaudiamitchell@gmail.com (Naydene de Lange and Claudia Mitchell) Article http://www.socresonline.org.uk/17/1/7.html http://www.socresonline.org.uk/17/1/7.html Wed, 29 Feb 2012 12:57:00 +0000 Naydene de Lange and Claudia Mitchell: Addressing the issue of HIV-stigma is recognised as essential to reducing the spread of HIV and AIDS, enabling community members to access prevention, treatment and care. Often the very people who are able to contribute to solving the problem, are marginalised and do not see ways to insert themselves into dialogues related to combating stigma. Community health workers in rural South Africa are one such group. At the heart of the research discussed in this article is an intervention based on participatory analysis through participatory archiving (Shilton and Srinivasan 2008). Drawing on participatory work with thirteen community health workers in rural KwaZulu-Natal, we use a digital archive containing HIV-stigma visual data - generated five years earlier by youth in the community - to engage the participants in the analysis. Drawing on such participatory work as Jenkins' participatory cultures framework, we focus on the idea of re-using, re-coding, and re-mixing visual data. One participant stated that "these pictures talk about the real issues faced by our communities", highlighting the value of resources generated by community members themselves. They also indicate that they "could use [the resources] to teach the cons of stigmatizing". A key concern in work related to visual images (particularly in projects such as ours where a large amount of visual data is produced) is to consider ways of extending its life through the use of community-based digital archives. S.Spencer@shu.ac.uk (Stephen Spencer) Article http://www.socresonline.org.uk/17/1/6.html http://www.socresonline.org.uk/17/1/6.html Wed, 29 Feb 2012 12:56:00 +0000 Stephen Spencer: This paper explores the historical sources, personal narratives and representations of Africville, an area beside the Bedford Basin near Halifax in Nova Scotia which has been the site of a struggle for social justice and reparation since it was destroyed by the city of Halifax authorities over 40 years ago. The article examines the complex construction of the place as a source of identity and protest, the persistence of the community in memories and stories retrieved in walking the site with a former resident. Through careful consideration of video and still images, artworks and archive maps, the study traces the intersection of different discourses and shows how visual representations and their interpretation produce a complex understanding of place. Images, it is argued, have a different ontology to writing and produce a gradually unfolding, parallel argument. Africville is considered through a combination of traditional written texts, visual ethnographic sources and popular cultural signs, producing a complementary and intersubjective appreciation of a place and its lines of possibility. stewart.muir@manchester.ac.uk (Stewart Muir and Jennifer Mason) Article http://www.socresonline.org.uk/17/1/5.html http://www.socresonline.org.uk/17/1/5.html Wed, 29 Feb 2012 12:55:00 +0000 Stewart Muir and Jennifer Mason: In this paper, we discuss our use of participant-produced digital footage of family Christmases, collected as part of a larger project exploring family backgrounds and family traditions. The audio-visual recording (and subsequent dissemination) of these otherwise difficult-to-access domestic celebrations provides important insights into the multi-dimensional, multisensory, physical and situational nature of such family traditions. With their blend of genre styles - from narrated documentary to home-movie style wobbly camera work - the 'Christmas videos' show both conscious 'displays' of family life and practice (performed for the camera, for the participants and for posterity) and largely unscripted, and sometimes noisily chaotic, interactions. Although videos cannot provide unmediated access into what such traditions are 'really like', in combination with our other data sources the footage has helped to push our thinking about family traditions as being at once intellectualised productions and a series of bodily engagements with a host of practices, understandings, knowledges, family histories, things and people. This form of 'backstage' analytical usage of the video data has been very productive for us. However, we argue that there are ethical issues in publicly presenting such data alongside other forms of data, eg interview data, in a deep sociological analysis of people's personal lives. There is the potential not only for the production of incisive knowledge and insight, but also for a prying and distinctively sociological intrusiveness, and sociologists need to think carefully about how to proceed. c.yuill@rgu.ac.uk (Chris Yuill) Article http://www.socresonline.org.uk/17/1/4.html http://www.socresonline.org.uk/17/1/4.html Wed, 29 Feb 2012 12:54:00 +0000 Chris Yuill: The North Laine in Brighton provides a useful case study in exploring different ways of experiencing and imagining urban life. The area possess many distinctive street forms and supports counter-cultural lifestyles, which emphasise environmentalism and alternative forms of capitalism, such as cooperative and collective organisation of the workplace. Drawing on the ideas and theories of Henri Lefebvre the essay focuses on (1) the various social and historical process that have conditioned and influenced the development of the area and (2) the various social power relations that have both sustained the area, allowing it to develop into its current format, and in turn question its future. A visual methodological approach is used to present the data and to convey the distinctive aesthetic of The North Laine. luc.pauwels@ua.ac.be (Luc Pauwels) Article http://www.socresonline.org.uk/17/1/1.html http://www.socresonline.org.uk/17/1/1.html Wed, 29 Feb 2012 12:53:00 +0000 Luc Pauwels: This article discusses and exemplifies more visual and expressive way of constructing and presenting sociological insight. It seeks to articulate the specific demands, traits and potentials of the 'visual essay' as a societal and sociological practice and format. More in particular it provides some observations, propositions and arguments that may further help to clarify what the visual sociological essay as a unorthodox scholarly product might entail and what place it should acquire in the broader scholarly discourse. This theoretical discussion is complemented with excerpts of concrete visual essays of both scholarly and non-scholarly origin. These examples help to explain some of the basic strengths of this format that tries to play out the synergy of the distinct forms of expression that are combined: images, words, layout and design, adding up to a scientifically informed statement. s.pink@lboro.ac.uk (Sarah Pink and Kerstin Leder Mackley) Article http://www.socresonline.org.uk/17/1/3.html http://www.socresonline.org.uk/17/1/3.html Wed, 29 Feb 2012 12:52:00 +0000 Sarah Pink and Kerstin Leder Mackley: This article proposes and demonstrates an approach to understanding everyday life that takes as its starting point the sensory aesthetics of place. In doing so it advances a video-ethnography approach to studying 'invisible' elements of everyday domestic life through the prism of the sensory home. Our concern is chiefly methodological: first, we take a biography of method approach to explain and identify the status of the research knowledge this approach can produce; second, we outline how the video tour as a multisensorial and collaborative research encounter can open up understandings of home as place-event; finally, we probe the status of video as ethnographic description by inviting the reader/viewer to access ways of knowing as they are inscribed in embedded clips, in relation to our written argument. To demonstrate this we discuss and embed clips from a pilot video tour developed as part of an interdisciplinary research project, seeking to understand domestic energy consumption as entangled in everyday practices, experiences and creativities. Eldin.Fahmy@bristol.ac.uk (Eldin Fahmy and Simon Pemberton) Article http://www.socresonline.org.uk/17/1/2.html http://www.socresonline.org.uk/17/1/2.html Wed, 29 Feb 2012 12:51:00 +0000 Eldin Fahmy and Simon Pemberton: In this paper, we seek to illustrate the potential theoretical and methodological contributions that video research methods can make in advancing social-scientific understanding and informing public debates on social problems. We do so by presenting findings on the experience and impacts of poverty and exclusion based upon the video 'testimony' with 33 people experiencing low income in one relatively remote rural area, the County of Herefordshire. Based on these data and subsequent follow-up qualitative work, this study highlights the personal impacts of disadvantage associated with a denial of rights, assault on dignity, and processes of stigmatisation and disempowerment. In doing so it demonstrates the potential of video data both as an emerging social research practice in its own right and as a vehicle for giving voice to marginalised groups within wider public debates and policy development. Lee.Monaghan@ul.ie (Lee F. Monaghan and Micheal O'Flynn) Article http://www.socresonline.org.uk/17/1/9.html http://www.socresonline.org.uk/17/1/9.html Wed, 29 Feb 2012 12:50:00 +0000 Lee F. Monaghan and Micheal O'Flynn: Sudden explosions of street violence and disorder tend to evoke simplistic responses. Echoing Victorian moralising and condemnation of urban street fighting at the end of the nineteenth century, politicians depicted England's August 2011 riots as 'mindless criminality'. Critical of such rhetoric, we maintain that the recent riots should not be misrecognised through the class politics of the advantaged. Instead, we locate this unrest in a larger historical, social, economic and political context. This context includes the progressive predominance of finance capital in the post-1970s era and related neoliberal policy agendas and ideological forms. We posit that neoliberal transformations in the economy and society have undermined many young people's capacity to lead useful and meaningful lives, and that the potential for hopelessness, resentment, frustration and outbursts of anger has significantly increased as a consequence. We argue that the alienation of young people today cannot be separated from forms of accumulation that depend on massive debt-expansion. Neither can it be separated from the proliferation of related practices and institutional supports that enable this expansion, further accelerating the deterioration of already disaffected young people's prospects and futures. We refer to the enabling elements of this process as 'Madoffization' at a time when ponzi finance has made economic collapse and ongoing social unrest inevitable. a.hussain10@aston.ac.uk (Gargi Bhattacharyya, James Cowles, Steve Garner and Ajmal Hussain) Article http://www.socresonline.org.uk/17/1/11.html http://www.socresonline.org.uk/17/1/11.html Wed, 29 Feb 2012 12:49:00 +0000 Gargi Bhattacharyya, James Cowles, Steve Garner and Ajmal Hussain: This paper presents key ideas from fieldwork conducted in Birmingham between 2009 and 2011. This work examined identity in 'white' neighbourhoods, and attitudes to politics and understandings of poverty in more mixed ones. This work revealed that many Birmingham residents were concerned about a perceived loss of values, the impact of 'unrespectable' households and individuals in their areas and the apparent disconnect between political representatives and local residents. In the aftermath of the disturbances of August 2011 across England, including in Birmingham, we revisit these themes and examine the implications for understanding disorder in the city of Birmingham. K.Murji@open.ac.uk (Karim Murji) Review http://www.socresonline.org.uk/17/1/reviews/2.html http://www.socresonline.org.uk/17/1/reviews/2.html Wed, 29 Feb 2012 12:48:00 +0000 Review of: The Freedom to Be Racist?: How the United States and Europe Struggle to Preserve Freedom and Combat Racism by Bleich, Erik, reviewed by Karim Murji A.Schneider-5@sms.ed.ac.uk (Anna Schneider) Review http://www.socresonline.org.uk/17/1/reviews/1.html http://www.socresonline.org.uk/17/1/reviews/1.html Wed, 29 Feb 2012 12:47:00 +0000 Review of: Consumer Culture by Lury, Celia, reviewed by Anna Schneider