R Coleman
Biographic Data
| ID | 14253 |
|---|---|
| NAME | R Coleman |
| GIVEN NAMES | R |
| FAMILY NAME | Coleman |
| SIGNATURE | COLEMAN R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Goldsmiths University of London |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1390-2180 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 43 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 305 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 43 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1992 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
A sociodigital approach to investigating youth, teachers' and parents' experiences of smartphone banning in England
Smartphone bans or pledges signed by parents/carers to delay giving phones to young people are gaining international traction. Bans are usually based on arguments that smartphones are addictive, unhealthy and contribute to worsening educational outcomes. However, as a relatively new phenomenon, little existing research exists on the practical and experiential repercussions of these bans. Extant research shows that abstinence approaches to mitigat…
Present feelings, feeling present
The Covid-19 pandemic made the liveness of the social world readily apparent. Everyday rhythms and routines were, for many, upended and new and uncertain ones were rapidly and repeatedly re-made. A plethora of intense and flattened feelings - from anxiety to depression to pleasure - were generated. This article considers our collaborative research project on everyday experiences of time during the early stages of the pandemic in the UK through a …
Towards a minor sociology of futures
This 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 differen…
Why We (still) Need Utopian Thinking Now
Undisciplining II session looking at why rehabilitating utopia within sociology requires that we understand utopia not as a plan, but as a method of thinking both about present and possible future societies
‘There is No Direct Evidence of Anything’
In this essay, we track back and forth between Lauren Berlant’s and Raymond Williams’ work to assemble a purposefully compact genealogy of mediation that also pays attention to how mediation intersects with and often redraws many taken-for-granted understandings of affect, ideology, aesthetics and materialism. We explore how, for Berlant and Williams, mediation requires a suspension or dislodging of direct cause and effect relations in favour of …
Genre Trouble, Feel Tanks and Memetic Flailing
This paper explores how Berlant’s concept of ‘genre flailing’ offers productive ways of understanding the circulation and sharing of memes during the Covid-19 pandemic. It focuses on our collaborative research project that deployed Feel Tanks to consider experiences of pandemic time, and specifically on how one participant unexpectedly responded to research prompts with a series of disjointed memes. Genre flailing refers to the thrashing around t…
Economies of attachment
In this response to Anderson's formulation of a theoretical framework for understanding attachments, I propose a third concept to join those of forms of attachment and scenes of attachment: economies of attachment. The concept of economies of attachment attends to how specific promissory objects become forms of attachment and how promissory objects compose ongoing and ordinary attachments as well as the fleeting and temporary moments suggested by…
Rupture, repetition, and new rhythms for pandemic times
The COVID-19 pandemic has foregrounded the significance of time to everyday life, as the routines, pace, and speed of social relations were widely reconfigured. This article uses rhythm as an object and tool of inquiry to make sense of spatio-temporal change. We analyse the Mass Observation (MO) directive we co-commissioned on 'COVID-19 and Time', where volunteer writers reflect on whether and how time was made, experienced, and imagined differen…
Recalibrating Everyday Futures during the Covid-19 Pandemic
This article contributes to sociologies of futures by arguing that quotidian imaginations, makings and experiences of futures are crucial to social life. We develop Sharma’s concept of recalibration to understand ongoing and multiple adjustments of present–future relations, focusing on how these were articulated by Mass Observation writers in the UK during the early part of the COVID-19 pandemic. We identify three key modes of recalibration: fiss…
Everything is Patchwork! A Conversation about Methodological Experimentation with Patchwork Ethnography
This article collectively discusses creative feminist approaches to ethnographic methods developed in response to challenging social, personal, environmental, and temporal conditions and pressures. Patchwork Ethnography, developed by Gökçe Günel, Saiba Varma and Chika Watanabe, recognises mundane pressures, and works with insights and experiences that emerge not only from doing research, but from what happens around the edges. By rendering the ma…
Child Studies Multiple
This text is an exploration of collaborative thinking and writing through theories, methods, and experiences on the topic of the child, children, and childhood. It is a collaborative written text (with 32 authors) that sprang out of the experimental workshop Child Studies Multiple. The workshop and this text are about daring to stay with mess, 'un-closure' , and uncertainty in order to investigate the (e)motions and complexities of being either a…
Funny how time slips away
If the pandemic led to a rupture or pause in the everyday, it also brought about a reconfiguration of temporalities and new, non-linear connections and articulations between past, present and future – which our project A Day at a Time explores. Three metaphors really stood out in the diaries: swerving, shrinking and sticking
Refresh
This paper explores the often unremarkable and unremarked upon activity of the refreshing of digital media streams and feeds, paying particular attention to its temporalities. It draws on original empirical research with UK based digital media professionals, mindfulness practitioners and school students to highlight the ways in which the temporalities of refreshing are embodied and experienced. To do this, it considers what theorisations of the p…
Mediating Presents
This introduction to a special issue of Media Theory on Mediating Presents contextualises the thematic focus and outlines the central arguments of the contributions. It suggests it is both productive and necessary to think together ‘the present’ and mediation to understand how various interlocking aspects of socio-cultural life are currently produced, organised and arranged, embodied and affectively experienced. The contributions to the special i…
The presents of the present
Mindfulness, as the cultivation of ways to become attentive to the present moment, has grown exponentially in some areas of the global north over the past decade or so. As such, it has generated much important debate about its efficacy and the politics it produces, especially in terms of whether and how mindfulness is a response to, or effect of, neoliberalism. Drawing on Berlant's argument that affects are structured and collective but not neces…
Making, managing and experiencing ‘the now’
Digital media time is commonly described as ‘real-time’. But what does this term refer to? How is ‘real-time’ made, managed and experienced? This article explores these questions, drawing on interviews with UK-based digital media professionals. Its specific concern is with how accounts of the time of digital media indicate a particular, yet supple, temporality, which emphasises ‘the now’. I draw on current literature that explores how real-time i…
The social life of time and methods
This paper contributes to work on the social life of time. It focuses on how time is doubled; produced by, and productive of, the relations and processes it operates through. In particular, it explores the methodological implications of this conception of time for how social scientists may study the doubledness of time. It draws on an allied move within the social sciences to see methods as themselves doubled, as both emerging from and constituti…
Pricing bodies
Arguments that the economic and socio-cultural should be understood as relational and intertwined, and that price involves a reciprocal relationship between the economic and socio-cultural, are increasingly prevalent in the social sciences. I develop these notions of relationality and reciprocation through a feminist new materialist perspective, which emphasizes the entanglement of and intra-action between what might usually be seen as independen…
Theorizing the present
Digital media are frequently described as producing a ‘real-time’, ‘live’, ‘always-on’ temporality. While seemingly referring to similar processes and experiences, these descriptions indicate a temporality that is diverse, multiple and changing. This paper proposes that it is necessary to develop theoretical approaches to this temporality, and that it is productive to understand this temporality in terms of the present; a temporality that is both…
Introduction to Special Issue of Sociological Review on ‘Futures in Question
A sensory sociology of the future
This article examines the difficulty of researching the intangibility of the future. Drawing on recent work on visual and sensory sociology, affect, and futurity, I propose that inventive methodologies provide some ways of grasping, understanding, and attuning to the future. To develop this argument, I pay close attention to the Children of Unquiet (2013–2014) film project by artist Mikhail Karikis, which involved Karikis working with children to…
Visualizing Surfaces, Surfacing Vision
In this Introduction to a special section on 'Visualizing Surfaces, Surfacing Vision', the authors argue that to conceive vision in the contemporary world it is necessary to examine its embedding within, expression via and organization on the surface. First, they review recent social and cultural theories to demonstrate how and why an attention to surfaces is salient today. Second, they consider how vision may be understood in terms of surfaces, …
Austerity Futures
This article examines the relationships between austerity, debt and mood through a focus on temporality and the future. Its starting point is a poll, conducted in Britain in 2011, which showed an increase of pessimism about the future and led to suggestions that ‘a new pessimism’ had become the ‘national mood’. Exploring this survey and other related examples, I ask whether and how pessimism about the future might be considered a mood characteris…
Response to McCormack’s Refrains for Moving Bodies
Cruel optimism Lauren Berlant
A sensory sociology of the future
This article examines the difficulty of researching the intangibility of the future. Drawing on recent work on visual and sensory sociology, affect, and futurity, I propose that inventive methodologies provide some ways of grasping, understanding, and attuning to the future. To develop this argument, I pay close attention to the Children of Unquiet (2013–2014) film project by artist Mikhail Karikis, which involved Karikis working with children to…
The Becoming of Bodies
The relations between women's bodies and images have long interested and occupied feminist theoretical and empirical work. Recently, much feminist research has focused on the relations between girls' and young women's bodies and images in “the media.” Underpinning much of this research, I argue, is an oppositional model of subject/object onto which bodies and images are mapped. Developing Deleuze's concept of becoming and exploring my own researc…
Deleuze and Research Methodologies
Things That Stay
Taking up Grosz's proposal for the `complexities of time and becoming' to be considered seriously, this article explores the status of time and the future within feminist theory through empirical research in which teenage girls describe things `staying'. Focusing on these `things that stay' and drawing on Bergson's concepts of duration and the virtual, the article argues that time is dynamic and heterogeneous; things endure through divergence and…
Introduction to Special Issue of Sociological Review on ‘Futures in Question
Did fertility go up after the oklahoma city bombing? An analysis of births in metropolitan counties in Oklahoma, 1990–1999
Political and sociocultural events (e.g., Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and the German reunification in 1989) and natural disasters (e.g., Hurricane Hugo in 1989) can affect fertility. In our research, we addressed the question of whether the Oklahoma City bombing in April 1995, a man-made disaster, influenced fertility patterns in Oklahoma. We defined three theoretical orientations—replacement theory, community influence theory, and terror…
Inventive Feminist Theory
This article examines key arguments on the relations between bodies and images developed in the context of the discursive turn to consider what light a feminist materialist approach might shed on them. Rather than set the discursive and materialist ‘turns’ in opposition to each other, the author tries to draw connections between different theories of the relations between bodies and images, and unpack how certain feminist concerns are approached …
Making, managing and experiencing ‘the now’
Digital media time is commonly described as ‘real-time’. But what does this term refer to? How is ‘real-time’ made, managed and experienced? This article explores these questions, drawing on interviews with UK-based digital media professionals. Its specific concern is with how accounts of the time of digital media indicate a particular, yet supple, temporality, which emphasises ‘the now’. I draw on current literature that explores how real-time i…
Dieting Temporalities
In the context of a concern with achieving a healthy and desirable weight, this article explores the temporalities that underpin dieting and that are produced through interaction with a dieting web site. In contrast to a linear progressive temporality that successful dieting is often understood through, I suggest that the dieting website at stake here attends to and creates new kinds of dieting temporalities, where time is understood as potontial…
A method of intuition
This article examines social research on the relations between (young) women's bodies and images through Bergson's method of intuition, which suggests that the only way a thing can be known is through coinciding with the uniqueness of its becoming. I suggest that in this aim, intuition is, necessarily, an intimate research method. Rather than apply Bergson's argument to this area of social research, I examine the resonances between his philosophi…
Sociology and the Virtual
This article explores the role of images in the workings of contemporary power. It examines one of the central ways in which sociology has approached images as representations and proposes an alternative understanding of images through the concepts of interactivity, intensity and the virtual. Focusing on the examples of three interactive mirrors, one a piece of artwork, another designed to be located in a designer shop and the other a medical mir…
Rupture, repetition, and new rhythms for pandemic times
The COVID-19 pandemic has foregrounded the significance of time to everyday life, as the routines, pace, and speed of social relations were widely reconfigured. This article uses rhythm as an object and tool of inquiry to make sense of spatio-temporal change. We analyse the Mass Observation (MO) directive we co-commissioned on 'COVID-19 and Time', where volunteer writers reflect on whether and how time was made, experienced, and imagined differen…
Visualizing Surfaces, Surfacing Vision
In this Introduction to a special section on 'Visualizing Surfaces, Surfacing Vision', the authors argue that to conceive vision in the contemporary world it is necessary to examine its embedding within, expression via and organization on the surface. First, they review recent social and cultural theories to demonstrate how and why an attention to surfaces is salient today. Second, they consider how vision may be understood in terms of surfaces, …
The presents of the present
Mindfulness, as the cultivation of ways to become attentive to the present moment, has grown exponentially in some areas of the global north over the past decade or so. As such, it has generated much important debate about its efficacy and the politics it produces, especially in terms of whether and how mindfulness is a response to, or effect of, neoliberalism. Drawing on Berlant's argument that affects are structured and collective but not neces…
The social life of time and methods
This paper contributes to work on the social life of time. It focuses on how time is doubled; produced by, and productive of, the relations and processes it operates through. In particular, it explores the methodological implications of this conception of time for how social scientists may study the doubledness of time. It draws on an allied move within the social sciences to see methods as themselves doubled, as both emerging from and constituti…
Commentary And Criticism
Between March and December 2008 Jane Arthurs was co-editor, with Usha Zacharias, of the Commentary and Criticism Section of this journal, which included topical short essays themed around issues of significance to feminist media studies either from a methodological, critical or political point of view. This article covered the politics of the ‘affective turn’ in critical theory
Present feelings, feeling present
The Covid-19 pandemic made the liveness of the social world readily apparent. Everyday rhythms and routines were, for many, upended and new and uncertain ones were rapidly and repeatedly re-made. A plethora of intense and flattened feelings - from anxiety to depression to pleasure - were generated. This article considers our collaborative research project on everyday experiences of time during the early stages of the pandemic in the UK through a …
Economies of attachment
In this response to Anderson's formulation of a theoretical framework for understanding attachments, I propose a third concept to join those of forms of attachment and scenes of attachment: economies of attachment. The concept of economies of attachment attends to how specific promissory objects become forms of attachment and how promissory objects compose ongoing and ordinary attachments as well as the fleeting and temporary moments suggested by…
Recalibrating Everyday Futures during the Covid-19 Pandemic
This article contributes to sociologies of futures by arguing that quotidian imaginations, makings and experiences of futures are crucial to social life. We develop Sharma’s concept of recalibration to understand ongoing and multiple adjustments of present–future relations, focusing on how these were articulated by Mass Observation writers in the UK during the early part of the COVID-19 pandemic. We identify three key modes of recalibration: fiss…
Everything is Patchwork! A Conversation about Methodological Experimentation with Patchwork Ethnography
This article collectively discusses creative feminist approaches to ethnographic methods developed in response to challenging social, personal, environmental, and temporal conditions and pressures. Patchwork Ethnography, developed by Gökçe Günel, Saiba Varma and Chika Watanabe, recognises mundane pressures, and works with insights and experiences that emerge not only from doing research, but from what happens around the edges. By rendering the ma…
Child Studies Multiple
This text is an exploration of collaborative thinking and writing through theories, methods, and experiences on the topic of the child, children, and childhood. It is a collaborative written text (with 32 authors) that sprang out of the experimental workshop Child Studies Multiple. The workshop and this text are about daring to stay with mess, 'un-closure' , and uncertainty in order to investigate the (e)motions and complexities of being either a…
Habit, Temporality and the Body as Movement
This article explores the 5:2 dietary plan in terms of the relationship between habit, temporality and matter through a focus on the somatechnics of the body in movement. It makes links between some of the recent work on the body and habit which suggests, broadly speaking, that habit is an important way of understanding the body, the social and the temporal, and recent work on the body and animation and automation. This latter set of literature e…
The psychodynamics of the STD clinic
We introduce the idea of a professionally isolated and apparently disconnected agency. We describe how health professionals working in settings with good multi‐agency links may not recognize the effect of the isolated agency system on the presentation of problems. In particular, we describe the setting of the Sexually Transmitted Diseases clinic (STD) in which confidentiality can be turned into secrecy by the patients at the service of their deni…
Improving Life Quality by Countering Design Exclusion
This paper concerns itself with design exclusion, and strategies developed to counter this at the Royal College of Art (RCA), in London. It showcases work resulting from the DesignAge programme, from ‘design for our future selves’, an annual competition for final year MA students at the RCA, and most recently, from the Helen Hamlyn Research Associates Programme, with teams of recent RCA Masters graduates with major companies and voluntary sector …
Visual Elements in Public Journalism Newspapers in an Election
Did fertility go up after the oklahoma city bombing? An analysis of births in metropolitan counties in Oklahoma, 1990–1999
Political and sociocultural events (e.g., Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and the German reunification in 1989) and natural disasters (e.g., Hurricane Hugo in 1989) can affect fertility. In our research, we addressed the question of whether the Oklahoma City bombing in April 1995, a man-made disaster, influenced fertility patterns in Oklahoma. We defined three theoretical orientations—replacement theory, community influence theory, and terror…
Commentary And Criticism
Between March and December 2008 Jane Arthurs was co-editor, with Usha Zacharias, of the Commentary and Criticism Section of this journal, which included topical short essays themed around issues of significance to feminist media studies either from a methodological, critical or political point of view. This article covered the politics of the ‘affective turn’ in critical theory
The Becoming of Bodies
The relations between women's bodies and images have long interested and occupied feminist theoretical and empirical work. Recently, much feminist research has focused on the relations between girls' and young women's bodies and images in “the media.” Underpinning much of this research, I argue, is an oppositional model of subject/object onto which bodies and images are mapped. Developing Deleuze's concept of becoming and exploring my own researc…
A method of intuition
This article examines social research on the relations between (young) women's bodies and images through Bergson's method of intuition, which suggests that the only way a thing can be known is through coinciding with the uniqueness of its becoming. I suggest that in this aim, intuition is, necessarily, an intimate research method. Rather than apply Bergson's argument to this area of social research, I examine the resonances between his philosophi…
Things That Stay
Taking up Grosz's proposal for the `complexities of time and becoming' to be considered seriously, this article explores the status of time and the future within feminist theory through empirical research in which teenage girls describe things `staying'. Focusing on these `things that stay' and drawing on Bergson's concepts of duration and the virtual, the article argues that time is dynamic and heterogeneous; things endure through divergence and…
Past and Future Perfect? Beauty, Affect and Hope
This article engages with and draws on what have been called two recent “turns” in feminist theory: to beauty and to affect. While much feminist research has concentrated on the beauty industry, where beauty is conceived as a series of economic, social and cultural practices, the authors suggest that beauty should also be understood as an embodied affective process. The authors’ focus is on understanding the conceptions of beauty that emerged in …
Introduction
Dieting Temporalities
In the context of a concern with achieving a healthy and desirable weight, this article explores the temporalities that underpin dieting and that are produced through interaction with a dieting web site. In contrast to a linear progressive temporality that successful dieting is often understood through, I suggest that the dieting website at stake here attends to and creates new kinds of dieting temporalities, where time is understood as potontial…
The Handbook of Global Online Journalism
In 1993, a couple of months after the launch of the first web browser, Mosaic, the University of Florida ' s Journalism Department launched what is generally considered to be the first online journalism web site.It was a very basic, static web site, with a picture of the red-bricked wall of the Journalism Department.It was updated only occasionally, at nights and weekends, when the machine was not in use by others, running on a 486-25 processor w…
Deleuze and Research Methodologies
Introduction
Chapter 7 Looking and Desiring Machines
Sociology and the Virtual
This article explores the role of images in the workings of contemporary power. It examines one of the central ways in which sociology has approached images as representations and proposes an alternative understanding of images through the concepts of interactivity, intensity and the virtual. Focusing on the examples of three interactive mirrors, one a piece of artwork, another designed to be located in a designer shop and the other a medical mir…
Habit, Temporality and the Body as Movement
This article explores the 5:2 dietary plan in terms of the relationship between habit, temporality and matter through a focus on the somatechnics of the body in movement. It makes links between some of the recent work on the body and habit which suggests, broadly speaking, that habit is an important way of understanding the body, the social and the temporal, and recent work on the body and animation and automation. This latter set of literature e…
Inventive Feminist Theory
This article examines key arguments on the relations between bodies and images developed in the context of the discursive turn to consider what light a feminist materialist approach might shed on them. Rather than set the discursive and materialist ‘turns’ in opposition to each other, the author tries to draw connections between different theories of the relations between bodies and images, and unpack how certain feminist concerns are approached …
Cruel optimism Lauren Berlant
Austerity Futures
This article examines the relationships between austerity, debt and mood through a focus on temporality and the future. Its starting point is a poll, conducted in Britain in 2011, which showed an increase of pessimism about the future and led to suggestions that ‘a new pessimism’ had become the ‘national mood’. Exploring this survey and other related examples, I ask whether and how pessimism about the future might be considered a mood characteris…
Response to McCormack’s Refrains for Moving Bodies
Theorizing the present
Digital media are frequently described as producing a ‘real-time’, ‘live’, ‘always-on’ temporality. While seemingly referring to similar processes and experiences, these descriptions indicate a temporality that is diverse, multiple and changing. This paper proposes that it is necessary to develop theoretical approaches to this temporality, and that it is productive to understand this temporality in terms of the present; a temporality that is both…
Introduction to Special Issue of Sociological Review on ‘Futures in Question
A sensory sociology of the future
This article examines the difficulty of researching the intangibility of the future. Drawing on recent work on visual and sensory sociology, affect, and futurity, I propose that inventive methodologies provide some ways of grasping, understanding, and attuning to the future. To develop this argument, I pay close attention to the Children of Unquiet (2013–2014) film project by artist Mikhail Karikis, which involved Karikis working with children to…
Visualizing Surfaces, Surfacing Vision
In this Introduction to a special section on 'Visualizing Surfaces, Surfacing Vision', the authors argue that to conceive vision in the contemporary world it is necessary to examine its embedding within, expression via and organization on the surface. First, they review recent social and cultural theories to demonstrate how and why an attention to surfaces is salient today. Second, they consider how vision may be understood in terms of surfaces, …
Sociology (33 works) · Epistemology (29 works) · Philosophy (23 works) · Computer Science (17 works) · Philosophy (15 works) · Psychology (15 works) · Aesthetics (13 works) · Art (10 works) · Gender, Feminism, and Media (10 works) · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism (10 works)