ORCID Profile
0000-0001-5217-713X
Current Organisation
The University of Edinburgh
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Sociology of family and relationships | Sociology | Environmental sociology | Sociology of health |
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 05-2004
DOI: 10.1111/J.1467-954X.2004.00464.X
Abstract: Intimacy is usually thought to require physical proximity as a prerequisite, so how are intimate relationships maintained when partners do not live their daily lives in the same place? Couples who are frequently apart are not an entirely new phenomenon, but the dual-career, dual-household couples examined in this pilot study of contemporary distance relationships illustrate new ways of relating. This paper will explore these new ways of relating in terms of debates about the impact of in idualisation processes on intimacy. It is argued that the extension of such processes to women has been limited. Ways of being intimate at a distance may offer alternative formulations of gender and power, but the rationalised timetabling necessary to maintain such relationships imposes new gendered constraints with bodily and emotional consequences.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 02-2010
Abstract: Reflexivity refers to the practices of altering one’s life as a response to knowledge about one’s circumstances. While theories of reflexivity have not entirely ignored emotions, attention to them has been insufficient. These theories need emotionalizing and this article proposes that emotions have become central to a subjectivity and sociality that is relationally constructed. The emotionalization of reflexivity not only refers to a theoretical endeavour but is a phrase used to begin to explore whether in iduals are increasingly drawing on emotions in assessing themselves and their lives. It is argued that dislocation from tradition produces a reflexivity that can be very dependent on comparing experiences and can move others to reflect and reorder their own relations to self and others. Thus, emotions are crucial to how the social is reproduced and to enduring within a complex social world.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 06-2015
Abstract: This article focuses on the underresearched topic of how masculinity relates to emotional forms of caring within heterosexual relationships. Both scholarly and common sense thinking, often present heterosexual male partners as unable and/or unwilling to do emotion work, leaving women burdened with this task. However, contemporary relational complexity increasingly requires emotional reflexivity. Such reflexivity entails interpretations of one’s own and others’ emotions, and acting in light of those interpretations. The question here is to what extent and how that emotional reflexivity might effect a reshaping of heteromasculinity toward more caring forms of emotionality? Drawing on interviews with heterosexual couples in distance relationships, it is argued that emotional reflexivity may produce a variety of ways of relationally gendering emotions. Those who seem to adhere to ideas of men as emotionally restricted may claim tactile forms of emotional expression. However, there may be limitations to these forms in certain circumstances, and this may prompt a reflexive reorientation of heteromasculine emotionalities toward more verbal forms of support. The point of seeking to illustrate that masculinity and emotionality are open to such reflexive shifts is to debunk essentialist views of gendered emotionality which undermine efforts to achieve greater gender equality in intimate life.
Publisher: OpenEdition
Date: 15-05-2010
DOI: 10.4000/RSA.191
Publisher: Bristol University Press
Date: 03-2018
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 17-05-2021
Abstract: Reflexive emotionalisation means increased thinking about and acting on emotional experiences in response to major changes to social life, such as those accompanying colonisation. This article explains and develops this novel concept, assessing its usefulness through an exploratory assessment of reflexive emotionalisation in the formation of Aotearoa New Zealand as a colonised settler state. It is argued that as cultures met and sought to coexist, emotions were vital. Focusing on reflexive emotionalisation in Aotearoa reveals how differences in feeling rules were navigated, sometimes in violent ways, as power shifted towards the colonisers. Feelings of belonging are important in that ongoing process of reflexive emotionalisation, the elucidation of which provides a new understanding of social change and settler state formation that avoids casting colonised peoples as passive objects of ‘progress’ brought by colonisers.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 25-09-2019
Abstract: This article develops a model of relational happiness that challenges popular in idualized definitions and emphasizes how it can enhance the sociological analysis of inequality. Many studies of happiness suggest that social inequalities are closely associated with distributions of happiness at the national level, but happiness research continues to favour in idual-level analyses. Limited attention has been given to the intersubjective aspects of happiness and the correlations between it and higher social equality. Conversely, key theoretical debates about inequalities, such as Axel Honneth and Nancy Fraser’s exchanges, have only indirectly touched on happiness. A relational approach to happiness is not new, but what this article offers is a new combination of a relational understanding of happiness as an intersubjectively, culturally experienced complex of emotions with discussions about recognition of marginalized groups and redistribution of material resources. This combined approach can further debates about understanding and remedying social inequalities. It argues that theories and measurements of happiness must consider how it can be achieved collectively through working at mutual respect as well as greater material equality.
Publisher: Routledge
Date: 18-07-2023
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 11-01-2021
Abstract: This article sets out a conceptual framework for examining future building as an emotionally reflexive practice of intimacy and gendered agency. Emotionally reflexive future building is a relational activity, subject to gendering but open to queering. We illustrate this by drawing on cases taken from three qualitative studies that deal with the future building of women in relationships that do not conform to norms around having and rearing children. By referring to the future building of single mothers, women who are undecided about having children and women in non-cohabiting distance relationships we illustrate the significance of reflexively making sense of one’s own and others’ emotions in navigating gendered constraints and opportunities. Anger, despair, ambivalence, love, guilt and other emotions are key in how women with differing degrees of economic security imagine and try to create futures that queer gender.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 06-2011
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK
Date: 2014
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 13-09-2014
Abstract: This article develops the concept of affinity as one means available in understanding how citizens make, or fail to make, connections with politics and politicians. It is argued that the disappearance of class from much political discourse has led to more emotional ways of relating to politics. We claim that the reflexivity involved in political deliberation must take account of people’s emotional responses to the political. We argue that one key element in these emotional responses is a feeling, or lack of feeling, of affinity. We propose that citizens often use feelings of likeness in their (dis)engagement with politicians, policies and parties. Understanding the emotional aspects of political (dis)engagement in this way is crucial in dealing with concerns about widespread disengagement from, and dissatisfaction with, electoral politics.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 08-2013
Abstract: There are signs that a significant number of British people do not feel that their concerns are being addressed by the mainstream parties or the political system. This paper attends to the quality of that political dissatisfaction amongst members of ‘the white working classes’. There is a need to extend typical concerns about youth disengagement to adults and to consider the role that class plays. Lower participation in formal democratic processes may not mean disengagement from all forms of politics, but could have considerable consequences for who gains power and for the tone and focus of political debates and policies. Our project contributes to exploring political dissatisfaction by engaging with low wage workers in Yorkshire and the North West, where high support for the far-right BNP and low voter turnout are signs that mainstream politics and politicians are failing to impress. We asked people about their feelings in relation to mainstream politics and their concerns. These participants feel distanced from governing elites, formal political processes and old ideologies. They are searching for ways to make sense of their struggles to live a decent life, and in doing so must contend with the dominance of racist discourses.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 05-2019
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 09-2004
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 03-2004
Abstract: The contention made by Giddens, among others, that intimacy has transformed due to processes of in idualization is appraised in this article. With a specific emphasis on the degree of choice now said to be inherent in intimate relationships, consideration is given to the gendered nature of negotiating choice and how gendered inequality is often reproduced as a result. This is illustrated by research on distance relationships.
Publisher: Bristol University Press
Date: 07-2023
DOI: 10.1332/263168922X16680946441057
Abstract: We share findings from a qualitative study on emotions in Scottish working-class households during lockdown. The results challenge existing research focused on emotional capital, which often suggests that working-class people struggle to provide emotional resources to those close to them. Using the concept of emotional reflexivity we show how these household members cared for each other’s feelings, challenging deficit views of working-class emotionality. This research offers a novel understanding of working-class participants collaboratively making space for each other to feel, many favouring acts of care rather than talking. The COVID-19 lockdown, however, tended to reinforce gendered practices of emotion work, although some participants drew on emotional support beyond the household to try to mitigate this burden. The emotionally reflexive practices seen in these households suggest that sustaining more equality in emotional wellbeing relies on navigating material circumstances, is not always about verbal sharing, is often an interactional achievement, but also means resisting unrealistic expectations of intimate relationships within households as the fountainhead of all emotional succour.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 03-2000
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 05-12-2015
Abstract: The everyday novelties of contemporary society require emotional reflexivity (Holmes, 2010a), but how can it be researched? Joint interviews can give more insight into the relational and embodied nature of emotional reflexivity than analysis of text-based online sources. Although textual analysis of online sources might be useful for seeing how people relationally negotiate what to feel when feeling rules are unclear, interviews allow observation of emotional reflexivity as done in interaction, especially if there is more than one interviewee. This highlights not only the relational, but the embodied aspects of emotional reflexivity, and shows how it is a useful concept for researching aspects of emotionality not well addressed by other concepts such as “emotional intelligence” and “emotion work.”
Publisher: Bristol University Press
Date: 11-2020
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 13-08-2015
Abstract: The intention of this article is to challenge orthodoxies regarding heterosexuality, which have tended to constitute it as a static monolith and queer as the only potential site for a less oppressive sexuality. By contrast, we consider heterodox possibilities for pleasure and change within the realm of the dominant. We examine three ex les – ergence, transgression and subversion – and then consider some terminologies that might flesh out experiential aspects of these ex les of social change in heterosexuality. This conjunction offers a means to acknowledge heterosexuality’s coercive aspects while attending to its more egalitarian, less orthodox forms.
Publisher: Uniwersytet Lodzki (University of Lodz)
Date: 30-08-2010
DOI: 10.18778/1733-8077.6.2.04
Abstract: Reflexive accounts of research are important, but they should include attention to a wider range of relations than those between researcher and participant. The researcher’s position in relation to the participants does merit discussion, especially when there is an element of autoethnography involved. However, assistants in the research such as transcribers, can play a role in accounting for the research. The relationships participants have with loved ones also shape how they reflexively account for themselves and their experiences, in this case – of being in a distance relationship.
Publisher: Bristol University Press
Date: 03-2022
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 06-2000
DOI: 10.1177/0961463X00009002005
Abstract: The rhythms of human bodies are profoundly implicated with the time regimes that are dominant in different societies. This article seeks to explicate the relations between the temporal dispositions of one aspect of the body, its defecatory capacities, and the chronological and spatial categorizations of modernity. This latter configuration is understood variously as being characterized by: the social relations of the `civilizing process' (Elias) capitalist economic relations (Marx) instrumental rationality (Adorno and Horkheimer) and patriarchy (feminism). Focusing on each of these aspects of the modern allows us to chart historically the rise of a series of temporal regulations over acts of defecation. However, following the position of Sigmund Freud, we trace out one of the key dilemmas of modernity: while the times when defecation occurs have come under increasing levels of guidance and administration, the human body and its faecal capacities still continue to some degree to operate according to rhythms other than those imposed upon them, thus occasionally effecting a disorderly `return of the repressed' in the realm of systematized time.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 13-08-2015
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 03-2014
DOI: 10.5153/SRO.1423
Abstract: Distance relationships may be increasingly undertaken by dual-career couples at some point in their life course. Although this can make it difficult to quantitatively measure the extent of distance relating, qualitative analysis of distance relationships promises to give considerable insight into the changing nature of intimate lives across the life course. This paper indicates the kind of insights offered via analysis of exploratory research into distance relating in Britain. What begins to emerge is a picture of distance relating as offering certain possibilities in relation to the gendered organisation of emotional labour and of care in conjunction with the pursuit, especially of professional, careers. These possibilities might be more realistic, however, at certain points in the life course. Nevertheless, this new form of periods of separation between partners, tell us a considerable amount about how people approach the challenges of maintaining a satisfying and egalitarian intimate life, involving caring relationships with others, within contemporary social conditions.
Publisher: Bristol University Press
Date: 05-2020
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 06-2013
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 2003
Publisher: Routledge
Date: 15-05-2016
Publisher: Springer Netherlands
Date: 2015
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 09-2010
Location: United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Location: United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Start Date: 03-2024
End Date: 03-2027
Amount: $405,000.00
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded Activity