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Towards a minor sociology of futures: Shifting futures in Mass Observation accounts of the COVID-19 pandemic
Get PDFThis article argues for a ‘minor sociology of futures’, which focuses on the significance of futures in and to everyday life by attending to minor shifts in temporal rhythms and patterns that illuminate how futures are imagined and made. We draw on Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of the major and minor, to attend to how major time is ruptured and remade and how minor temporalities can be productive of new relationships with the major and different futures. Our analysis focuses on the intricate and ambivalent relations with futures articulated in written reflections submitted during the early phase (March–November 2020) of the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK to a Mass Observation directive on COVID-19 and time. Nourishing a sensitivity to the minor helps us develop a minor sociology that takes futures seriously, which we argue matters in times of uncertainty that stretch beyond the pandemic
Drawing as a means to characterize memory and cognition
No full textAs psychological research embraces more naturalistic questions and large-scale analytic methods, drawing has emerged as an exciting tool for studying cognition. Drawing provides rich information about how we view the world, ranging from largely veridical perceptual representations to abstracted meta-cognitive representations. Drawing also requires the integration of multiple processes (e.g., vision, memory, motor learning), and experience with drawing can have an impact on such processes. As a result, drawing presents several interesting cognitive questions, while also providing a way to gain insight into a multitude of others. This Special Issue features 25 cutting-edge studies utilizing drawing to reveal discoveries transversing fields in psychology. These diverse studies investigate drawing across children, young adults, older adults, and special populations such as individuals with blindness, anterograde amnesia, apraxia, and semantic dementia. These studies detail new discoveries about the mechanisms underlying memory, attention, mathematical reasoning, and other cognitive processes. They employ a range of methods including psychophysical experiments, deep learning, and neuroimaging. Finally, many of these studies cover topics about the impact of drawing as a process on other cognitive processes, including how drawing expertise impacts other processes like visual memory, or spatial abilities. Overall, this collection of studies paves the way for an exciting future of drawing as a commonplace tool used by psychologists to understand complex phenomena
The university: caring community or carewashing central? Autosociobiographical reflections
Get PDFThis paper offers a small slice of ‘autosociobiography’: autobiographical reflections which situate these impressions in a wider social context (Ernaux 2022, Jaquet 2023, Twellman and Lammers 2023). These particular autosociobiographical reflections are about my experiences of university, and how they have offered both positive and sometimes more problematic forms of community. The first part of the article pursues this by considering the social contexts of my routes taken to university, narratives of social mobility, and the forces shaping higher education over that timeframe in the UK, in that particular geographical and social conjuncture. The second part of the article shifts its attention to the present day and considers the forms of ‘carewashing’ pushed by the contemporary university in the increasingly uncaring, and difficult, UK context of marketized higher education. It ends by considering the ‘micro’ and ‘meso’ forms of community and care which are today often used to attempt to cope with and survive such contexts, as well as the ‘macro’ changes discussed throughout the article that urgently needed to redress such ‘structural carelessness’. In the process, through these combined lenses, the article aims to consider relationships between care, community and ‘the university’
Object-oriented interviews in qualitative longitudinal research
Get PDFThis paper reflects on the use of objects in qualitative interview methods. We consider the use of objects in “single” research events and in longitudinal designs. This leads us to consider how using objects in interviews situates in relation to time. Emphasizing the materiality of objects as well as how objects help to materialize events, experiences, and accounts, we explore what objects do and how we can practically work with objects, especially in qualitative longitudinal research. Objects in interviews do not simply afford representations or elicitations of participant stories, but become dynamic actors that enable interviews to speak materially. Using vignettes from a longitudinal study investigating experiences of COVID-19 in time, we hone our attention towards the temporal affordances of object methods. We conclude with a list of practical suggestions for using objects in qualitative longitudinal research
Being an educator, artist, researcher
No full textA 'focus' piece for the AD Magazine Educator Artist Researcher Special Edition, Issue 44, Autumn 2025, published by National Society for Education in Art and Design (NSEAD)
‘Fighting for breath’: Inhabiting uninhabitable places
Get PDFIn 2021, clean-air activists Choked Up put up hacked road signs in the London neighbourhoods of Catford, Brixton and Whitechapel. The signs stated: ‘People of colour are more likely to live in an area with illegal pollution levels’. They also demanded ‘Clean air for all’. The following year, Breathe: 2022 by artist Dryden Goodwin was installed across the borough of Lewisham. Depicting people struggling to breathe, like the road signs, the delicate pencil-drawn images were a way of ‘making the invisible visible’. These interventions highlight both the elevated levels of air pollution in particular locations and the unevenness of its distribution. They also point to how places and bodies are interconnected in the air that ‘we’ breathe. Foregrounding this activism, this article draws on Nirmal Puwar’s conceptualisation of the ‘somatic norm’ whereby particular spaces are (or, rather, become) ‘reserved’ for particular bodies and, concomitantly, the ‘ontological anxiety’ provoked when bodies enter into spaces not meant for them. I extend Puwar’s work on Space Invaders in two ways. First, reading air quality research data through work which has theorised the spatial–bodily relationship, the article explores how the yoking together of spaces and bodies can serve to locate people in places which are not fit for habitation. Second, I draw attention to the highly corporeal and emotional ways in which these interconnections are manifested, and like the visceral registers of ‘ontological anxiety’, I consider what this might tell us about spatialised and bodied power relations. To render the asymmetries in air pollution exposure not only visible but sense-able, the article draws on a mobile, emplaced and embodied methodology of walking and cycling through London. The processes of moving, breathing and leaving put into relief both the deep fleshiness of spatial–bodily interconnections and the palpability of the power dynamics which permeate them
Suicide, the music industry, and a call to action
Get PDFDr George Musgrave is both a musician and an academic, with first-hand experience of the music industry’s challenges. In this guest editorial, inspired by their moving and urgent new article in Frontiers in Public Health, he and co-author Dr Dorian Lamis, who is a clinical psychologist and suicide prevention expert, turn the spotlight on the toll of death by suicide in the music industry, and call for immediate action to support vulnerable artists
Against Standardization: Reflections on Decolonization, Logic and Economics
No full textThis paper considers the notion of decolonisation through the concerns of epistemic domination and standardisation in the context of economics. Exploring the connections between colonisation and the drive to standardise across different spheres, it briefly outlines how standardisation has occurred in economic theorising, especially in the mathematical mode. The excessive, unchallenged reliance of economic theory on classical mathematics and logic to formulate economic problems is highlighted. Building on this, it draws from alternative approaches to logic and makes a case for adopting pluralism of logics -- and not just of theories and methods -- in economics. Overall, we argue for conceiving decolonisation as a process not simply of undoing existing colonial influences, but also, by adopting a pluralist approach, of resisting future attempts at epistemic colonisation
Sex and Psychedelics: A Wide-Lens Look at a Burgeoning Field
Get PDFIn this article we initiate a conversation between scientific and humanities-oriented studies of sexuality and psychedelics. Drawing on three recent studies which indicate a positive connection between the use of psychedelics and sexual well-being, the article argues that taking account of sexuality as culturally produced, historically contingent and geographically specific would improve the reliability and efficacy of future studies. The need for socially and culturally attuned research grounded in contemporary sexual politics in this area is urgent, as in recent years—despite little reporting of sexuality in clinical research—the psychedelics field has had to grapple with the ethics of the relationship between psychedelic states and sexual interactions in therapeutic spaces and the ’underground’. There is also scant attention to date paid to the gendered dynamics of sex and sexuality, and how this may impact perceptions of the relationship between psychedelic therapeutic repair versus enhancement. We unpack some of these dilemmas and outline some key concerns and potential priorities for future research into sexuality and psychedelics in a post-#MeToo era