M Horgan
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 16728 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | M Horgan |
| NOMBRES | M |
| APELLIDO | Horgan |
| FIRMA | HORGAN M |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Guelph |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1056-928X |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 25 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 160 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 25 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2003 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 6 |
Critical Friendship in the Modern World
Friendship is a critically important aspect of our lives, but is it always an unassailably 'good thing'? This book begins with the innovative premise that friendship is inherently complex and characterized by opposing qualities: it is both pleasurable and fraught, private and public, and inclusive and exclusionary. Rather than simply celebrating friendship as universally beneficial or worrying about its decline amid rising social disconnection, L…
Glisten and Glint
Mervyn Horgan reflects on his relationship with Ajay Heble, from the start of his work at the University of Guelph to present day
Civil society IV
A defining feature of what Alexander calls Civil Society (CS) III is its separation-analytic and empirical-from the putatively non-civil spheres of the family, schools, and associational forms which lack public communicative intent and comprise CS I. While critical to the progress of CST as a research program, with this separation and delimited conception, civil sphere theorists may miss a key insight of CS I regarding the mutual interdependence …
Moral landscapes and morally meaningful encounters
This article presents a theoretical argument for examining the previously unexamined interface between the strong program in cultural sociology ethnomethodology/conversation analysis (EMCA). While these two approaches have radically different theoretical and empirical commitments, they nonetheless share a common root in Durkheim's sociology, specifically with regard to the centrality of solidarity, ritual, and morality to collective life. Similar…
Everyday Encounters with Urban Suffering
Entanglements of Improvisation, Conviviality, and Conflict in Everyday Encounters in Public Space
The everyday life of public space is characterised by many kinds of convivial, conflictual, and improvisational encounters between people of diverse backgrounds and experiences. Because public spaces are, in principle at least, freely accessible to all, they are of central importance to everyday life and intrinsically interesting to social scientists. This thematic issue brings together a range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives o…
Center renters
One in three Canadian households rent their home, consistently accounting for around one-half of Canadian households spending over 30% of income on shelter costs (Statistics Canada, 2011, 2016, 2022). Regardless, hard luck stories of prospective homebuyers squeezed out by rising prices and interest rates still make better copy than those of the ever-expanding ranks of renters. Media sound bites from big bank economists, mortgage professionals, an…
Everyday Multiculturalism on Ice
Hockey-loving Canadians sometimes forget that not all ice rinks permit hockey. This article examines such ice rinks as public sites for sociable interactions between strangers across social differences. Through naturalistic and participant observation, we report on two public outdoor city hall ice rinks in Southern Ontario (Toronto and Guelph), showing how these rinks are distinctive, heterogeneous public spaces that realize aspects of “unpanicke…
Urban interaction ritual
Most encounters between strangers in urban public spaces involve the ritual of civil inattention ( Goffman 1963 ). Generalized diffusion of this ritual upholds the urban interaction order. This article outlines a typology of infractions of the ritual of civil inattention, and focuses on two types: uncivil attention and uncivil inattention. Drawing on interviews ( n = 326) about participants’ most recent encounter with a rude stranger in urban pub…
Housing Stigmatization
This article treats housing stigmatization as a social process of symbolic ascription, connected to inhabitants, housing form, housing tenure, and/or housing location. Stigmatization research tends to focus on personal stigmatization, or to examine housing only in relation to territorial stigmatization, while housing research tends to focus on health and policy. This article demonstrates that housing stigmatization, which is differentiated from p…
Sacred civility? An alternative conceptual architecture informed by cultural sociology
The roots of (im)politeness research in Durkheim’s sociology are neglected. Goffman is the go-to sociologist in (im)politeness research, and Goffman’s debt to Durkheim is substantial. This article argues that a renewed and broadened field of inquiry opens up around (im)politeness phenomena when we take seriously the centrality of Durkheim’s conception of the sacred to both the practice of everyday life and the analysis of everyday phenomena. To e…
Painting publics
Painting publics: transnational legal graffiti scenes as spaces of encounters." Visual Studies, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–2
A Shared Everyday Ethic of Public Sociability
Everyday life in urban public space means living amongst people unknown to one another. As part of the broader convivial turn within the study of everyday urban life (Wise & Noble, 2016), this article examines outdoor public ice rinks as spaces for encounter between strangers. With data drawn from 100 hours of naturalistic and participant observation at free and accessible outdoor public non-hockey ice rinks in two Canadian cities, we show how ‘r…
Everyday incivility and the urban interaction order
Treating uncivil encounters as breaches of the ritual contract of civil inattention ( Goffman 1963 ), this article connects ritualized interaction between strangers in everyday life and the production and maintenance of moral order more generally. The ongoing enactment of the ritual of civil inattention maintains and characterizes the particular kind of moral order that strangers collectively produce in urban public spaces. Drawing on select empi…
Automated pastures and the digital divide
A “digital revolution” in agriculture is underway. Advanced technologies like sensors, artificial intelligence, and robotics are increasingly being promoted as a means to increase food production efficiency while minimizing resource use. In the process, agricultural digitalization raises critical social questions about the implications for diverse agricultural labourers and rural spaces as digitalization evolves. In this paper, we use literature …
Politeness, Impoliteness and Ritual
Territorial Stigmatization and Territorial Destigmatization
Territorial stigmatization is one of the most powerful concepts for understanding how social, spatial and symbolic processes are intertwined in producing contemporary urban inequality. Through a detailed case study of Parkdale, a Toronto neighbourhood that has been profoundly shaped by its long association with poverty, single room occupancy housing and psychiatric survivors, this article works at the points of intersection between the rapidly ex…
The social quarantining of migrant labour
Low-wage migrant workers in wealthy nations occupy an ambiguous social and legal status that is inseparable from global economics and politics. This article adds to the growing and diverse literature on temporariness in labour and citizenship by reviewing Canada’s internationally recognised ‘model’ programme, the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP). Specifically, we present research on a small but rapidly growing peripheral pocket of work…
Durkheim, Development and the Devil
Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of Religious Life provides a theory of the eminently social processes by which people, places, times and things come to be seen as sacred or profane. He demonstrates how the sacred is a locus of collectivization essential to the formation of the solidaristic bonds that characterize a moral community. Recent work in cultural sociology suggests that the mobilization of the binary discourse of civil society-the sacred…
A Dramatic Entrance
Producing Ethnographies
Data on a large set of workplace ethnographies published from 1940 to 2002, compiled by Randy Hodson, are analyzed to show the trends over time in the production of such ethnographic work, its shifting disciplinary base, the relevance of the personal backgrounds of its authors, the contributions made by academic amateurs, the changing roles of gender and political stances, and the nature of different routes to publication. The definition of what …
Sweat, slow motion and solidarity
Kon Ichikawa's Tokyo Olympiad (1965) is widely recognised as one of the greatest Olympic films ever made, though it remains overshadowed by Riefenstahl's record of the 'Nazi Olympics', Berlin Olympia (1936). My father saw Tokyo Olympiad as a teenager in a provincial city in Ireland in the 1960s, and he credits it with inspiring him to become an athlete. This paper draws together my father's memories of seeing the film and the national context in …
Strangers and Strangership
Over a century ago, German sociologist Georg Simmel observed that the figure of the stranger is characterised by a peculiar mixture of physical proximity and social distance. In both social science and popular media, the stranger tends to be treated as equivalent to the immigrant or the unknown Other. This paper takes some of the ideas that the stranger concept generates and pushes them outwards by using Simmel's observation as a springboard to d…
Sherry B. Ortner, Anthropology and Social Theory
Practice theory stands as one of the most significant theoretical developments in the social sciences over the last half century.In Anthropology and Social Theory, Sherry Ortner sets out to show how, when wellgrounded in original empirical research, practice theory throws new light on questions of culture, power, agency and subjectivity.Ortner positions the emergence of practice theory in the late 1970s and early 1980s as one voice in the midst o…
Collision Culture
This paper interprets the phenomenon of road traffic accidents in contemporary Irish society as a symptom of crisis arising from processes of social transformation. Empirical data from the National Roads Authority, from Local Authority Engineers, and from the Gardaí, showing the typical traffic accident pattern, is used to develop a more general hypothesis of the uneasy coexistence of traditional and modern forms of life in contemporary Ireland. …
Automated pastures and the digital divide
A “digital revolution” in agriculture is underway. Advanced technologies like sensors, artificial intelligence, and robotics are increasingly being promoted as a means to increase food production efficiency while minimizing resource use. In the process, agricultural digitalization raises critical social questions about the implications for diverse agricultural labourers and rural spaces as digitalization evolves. In this paper, we use literature …
Strangers and Strangership
Over a century ago, German sociologist Georg Simmel observed that the figure of the stranger is characterised by a peculiar mixture of physical proximity and social distance. In both social science and popular media, the stranger tends to be treated as equivalent to the immigrant or the unknown Other. This paper takes some of the ideas that the stranger concept generates and pushes them outwards by using Simmel's observation as a springboard to d…
The social quarantining of migrant labour
Low-wage migrant workers in wealthy nations occupy an ambiguous social and legal status that is inseparable from global economics and politics. This article adds to the growing and diverse literature on temporariness in labour and citizenship by reviewing Canada’s internationally recognised ‘model’ programme, the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP). Specifically, we present research on a small but rapidly growing peripheral pocket of work…
Territorial Stigmatization and Territorial Destigmatization
Territorial stigmatization is one of the most powerful concepts for understanding how social, spatial and symbolic processes are intertwined in producing contemporary urban inequality. Through a detailed case study of Parkdale, a Toronto neighbourhood that has been profoundly shaped by its long association with poverty, single room occupancy housing and psychiatric survivors, this article works at the points of intersection between the rapidly ex…
Housing Stigmatization
This article treats housing stigmatization as a social process of symbolic ascription, connected to inhabitants, housing form, housing tenure, and/or housing location. Stigmatization research tends to focus on personal stigmatization, or to examine housing only in relation to territorial stigmatization, while housing research tends to focus on health and policy. This article demonstrates that housing stigmatization, which is differentiated from p…
A Shared Everyday Ethic of Public Sociability
Everyday life in urban public space means living amongst people unknown to one another. As part of the broader convivial turn within the study of everyday urban life (Wise & Noble, 2016), this article examines outdoor public ice rinks as spaces for encounter between strangers. With data drawn from 100 hours of naturalistic and participant observation at free and accessible outdoor public non-hockey ice rinks in two Canadian cities, we show how ‘r…
Sacred civility? An alternative conceptual architecture informed by cultural sociology
The roots of (im)politeness research in Durkheim’s sociology are neglected. Goffman is the go-to sociologist in (im)politeness research, and Goffman’s debt to Durkheim is substantial. This article argues that a renewed and broadened field of inquiry opens up around (im)politeness phenomena when we take seriously the centrality of Durkheim’s conception of the sacred to both the practice of everyday life and the analysis of everyday phenomena. To e…
Durkheim, Development and the Devil
Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of Religious Life provides a theory of the eminently social processes by which people, places, times and things come to be seen as sacred or profane. He demonstrates how the sacred is a locus of collectivization essential to the formation of the solidaristic bonds that characterize a moral community. Recent work in cultural sociology suggests that the mobilization of the binary discourse of civil society-the sacred…
Everyday Multiculturalism on Ice
Hockey-loving Canadians sometimes forget that not all ice rinks permit hockey. This article examines such ice rinks as public sites for sociable interactions between strangers across social differences. Through naturalistic and participant observation, we report on two public outdoor city hall ice rinks in Southern Ontario (Toronto and Guelph), showing how these rinks are distinctive, heterogeneous public spaces that realize aspects of “unpanicke…
Moral landscapes and morally meaningful encounters
This article presents a theoretical argument for examining the previously unexamined interface between the strong program in cultural sociology ethnomethodology/conversation analysis (EMCA). While these two approaches have radically different theoretical and empirical commitments, they nonetheless share a common root in Durkheim's sociology, specifically with regard to the centrality of solidarity, ritual, and morality to collective life. Similar…
Producing Ethnographies
Data on a large set of workplace ethnographies published from 1940 to 2002, compiled by Randy Hodson, are analyzed to show the trends over time in the production of such ethnographic work, its shifting disciplinary base, the relevance of the personal backgrounds of its authors, the contributions made by academic amateurs, the changing roles of gender and political stances, and the nature of different routes to publication. The definition of what …
Collision Culture
This paper interprets the phenomenon of road traffic accidents in contemporary Irish society as a symptom of crisis arising from processes of social transformation. Empirical data from the National Roads Authority, from Local Authority Engineers, and from the Gardaí, showing the typical traffic accident pattern, is used to develop a more general hypothesis of the uneasy coexistence of traditional and modern forms of life in contemporary Ireland. …
Sherry B. Ortner, Anthropology and Social Theory
Practice theory stands as one of the most significant theoretical developments in the social sciences over the last half century.In Anthropology and Social Theory, Sherry Ortner sets out to show how, when wellgrounded in original empirical research, practice theory throws new light on questions of culture, power, agency and subjectivity.Ortner positions the emergence of practice theory in the late 1970s and early 1980s as one voice in the midst o…
Sweat, slow motion and solidarity
Kon Ichikawa's Tokyo Olympiad (1965) is widely recognised as one of the greatest Olympic films ever made, though it remains overshadowed by Riefenstahl's record of the 'Nazi Olympics', Berlin Olympia (1936). My father saw Tokyo Olympiad as a teenager in a provincial city in Ireland in the 1960s, and he credits it with inspiring him to become an athlete. This paper draws together my father's memories of seeing the film and the national context in …
Strangers and Strangership
Over a century ago, German sociologist Georg Simmel observed that the figure of the stranger is characterised by a peculiar mixture of physical proximity and social distance. In both social science and popular media, the stranger tends to be treated as equivalent to the immigrant or the unknown Other. This paper takes some of the ideas that the stranger concept generates and pushes them outwards by using Simmel's observation as a springboard to d…
Producing Ethnographies
Data on a large set of workplace ethnographies published from 1940 to 2002, compiled by Randy Hodson, are analyzed to show the trends over time in the production of such ethnographic work, its shifting disciplinary base, the relevance of the personal backgrounds of its authors, the contributions made by academic amateurs, the changing roles of gender and political stances, and the nature of different routes to publication. The definition of what …
Durkheim, Development and the Devil
Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of Religious Life provides a theory of the eminently social processes by which people, places, times and things come to be seen as sacred or profane. He demonstrates how the sacred is a locus of collectivization essential to the formation of the solidaristic bonds that characterize a moral community. Recent work in cultural sociology suggests that the mobilization of the binary discourse of civil society-the sacred…
A Dramatic Entrance
The social quarantining of migrant labour
Low-wage migrant workers in wealthy nations occupy an ambiguous social and legal status that is inseparable from global economics and politics. This article adds to the growing and diverse literature on temporariness in labour and citizenship by reviewing Canada’s internationally recognised ‘model’ programme, the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP). Specifically, we present research on a small but rapidly growing peripheral pocket of work…
Territorial Stigmatization and Territorial Destigmatization
Territorial stigmatization is one of the most powerful concepts for understanding how social, spatial and symbolic processes are intertwined in producing contemporary urban inequality. Through a detailed case study of Parkdale, a Toronto neighbourhood that has been profoundly shaped by its long association with poverty, single room occupancy housing and psychiatric survivors, this article works at the points of intersection between the rapidly ex…
Everyday incivility and the urban interaction order
Treating uncivil encounters as breaches of the ritual contract of civil inattention ( Goffman 1963 ), this article connects ritualized interaction between strangers in everyday life and the production and maintenance of moral order more generally. The ongoing enactment of the ritual of civil inattention maintains and characterizes the particular kind of moral order that strangers collectively produce in urban public spaces. Drawing on select empi…
Automated pastures and the digital divide
A “digital revolution” in agriculture is underway. Advanced technologies like sensors, artificial intelligence, and robotics are increasingly being promoted as a means to increase food production efficiency while minimizing resource use. In the process, agricultural digitalization raises critical social questions about the implications for diverse agricultural labourers and rural spaces as digitalization evolves. In this paper, we use literature …
Politeness, Impoliteness and Ritual
Urban interaction ritual
Most encounters between strangers in urban public spaces involve the ritual of civil inattention ( Goffman 1963 ). Generalized diffusion of this ritual upholds the urban interaction order. This article outlines a typology of infractions of the ritual of civil inattention, and focuses on two types: uncivil attention and uncivil inattention. Drawing on interviews ( n = 326) about participants’ most recent encounter with a rude stranger in urban pub…
Housing Stigmatization
This article treats housing stigmatization as a social process of symbolic ascription, connected to inhabitants, housing form, housing tenure, and/or housing location. Stigmatization research tends to focus on personal stigmatization, or to examine housing only in relation to territorial stigmatization, while housing research tends to focus on health and policy. This article demonstrates that housing stigmatization, which is differentiated from p…
Sacred civility? An alternative conceptual architecture informed by cultural sociology
The roots of (im)politeness research in Durkheim’s sociology are neglected. Goffman is the go-to sociologist in (im)politeness research, and Goffman’s debt to Durkheim is substantial. This article argues that a renewed and broadened field of inquiry opens up around (im)politeness phenomena when we take seriously the centrality of Durkheim’s conception of the sacred to both the practice of everyday life and the analysis of everyday phenomena. To e…
Painting publics
Painting publics: transnational legal graffiti scenes as spaces of encounters." Visual Studies, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–2
A Shared Everyday Ethic of Public Sociability
Everyday life in urban public space means living amongst people unknown to one another. As part of the broader convivial turn within the study of everyday urban life (Wise & Noble, 2016), this article examines outdoor public ice rinks as spaces for encounter between strangers. With data drawn from 100 hours of naturalistic and participant observation at free and accessible outdoor public non-hockey ice rinks in two Canadian cities, we show how ‘r…
Everyday Multiculturalism on Ice
Hockey-loving Canadians sometimes forget that not all ice rinks permit hockey. This article examines such ice rinks as public sites for sociable interactions between strangers across social differences. Through naturalistic and participant observation, we report on two public outdoor city hall ice rinks in Southern Ontario (Toronto and Guelph), showing how these rinks are distinctive, heterogeneous public spaces that realize aspects of “unpanicke…
Entanglements of Improvisation, Conviviality, and Conflict in Everyday Encounters in Public Space
The everyday life of public space is characterised by many kinds of convivial, conflictual, and improvisational encounters between people of diverse backgrounds and experiences. Because public spaces are, in principle at least, freely accessible to all, they are of central importance to everyday life and intrinsically interesting to social scientists. This thematic issue brings together a range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives o…
Center renters
One in three Canadian households rent their home, consistently accounting for around one-half of Canadian households spending over 30% of income on shelter costs (Statistics Canada, 2011, 2016, 2022). Regardless, hard luck stories of prospective homebuyers squeezed out by rising prices and interest rates still make better copy than those of the ever-expanding ranks of renters. Media sound bites from big bank economists, mortgage professionals, an…
Moral landscapes and morally meaningful encounters
This article presents a theoretical argument for examining the previously unexamined interface between the strong program in cultural sociology ethnomethodology/conversation analysis (EMCA). While these two approaches have radically different theoretical and empirical commitments, they nonetheless share a common root in Durkheim's sociology, specifically with regard to the centrality of solidarity, ritual, and morality to collective life. Similar…
Everyday Encounters with Urban Suffering
Glisten and Glint
Mervyn Horgan reflects on his relationship with Ajay Heble, from the start of his work at the University of Guelph to present day
Civil society IV
A defining feature of what Alexander calls Civil Society (CS) III is its separation-analytic and empirical-from the putatively non-civil spheres of the family, schools, and associational forms which lack public communicative intent and comprise CS I. While critical to the progress of CST as a research program, with this separation and delimited conception, civil sphere theorists may miss a key insight of CS I regarding the mutual interdependence …
Critical Friendship in the Modern World
Friendship is a critically important aspect of our lives, but is it always an unassailably 'good thing'? This book begins with the innovative premise that friendship is inherently complex and characterized by opposing qualities: it is both pleasurable and fraught, private and public, and inclusive and exclusionary. Rather than simply celebrating friendship as universally beneficial or worrying about its decline amid rising social disconnection, L…
Sociology (19 obras) · Political science (11 obras) · Social science (10 obras) · Epistemology (8 obras) · Law (8 obras) · Psychology (8 obras) · Computer Science (7 obras) · Politics (7 obras) · Social Psychology (6 obras) · Everyday life (5 obras)