Ruth Sheldon
Biographic Data
| ID | 3634945 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ruth Sheldon |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ruth |
| FAMILY NAME | Sheldon |
| SIGNATURE | SHELDON R |
| AFFILIATIONS | King's College London |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 9 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 40 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 9 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Redeeming marriage? Bittersweet intimacy and the dialectics of liberation among Haredi Jews in London
This article intervenes in feminist anthropological debates about marriage within Western cosmopolitan, 'post-traditional' contexts through a close ethnographic examination of food and ritualized meals among Haredi Jews in London. We focus on this diasporic religious Jewish minority, whose marital practices have been the object of debates over marriage, gender, and cultural difference in cosmopolitan London. Learning from ethnographic and conjuga…
Where is the Good in the World?
Bringing together contributions from anthropology, sociology, religious studies, and philosophy, along with ethnographic case studies from diverse settings, this volume explores how different disciplinary perspectives on the good might engage with and enrich each other. The chapters examine how people realize the good in social life, exploring how ethics and values relate to forms of suffering, power and inequality, and, in doing so, demonstrate …
A new normal? The inordinate ordinary of Covid times
This article responds to the seismic transformations in urban relations to the ordinary, which have emerged in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, a condition in which mundane objects and actions have been permeated by the pressure of law and ethics. I draw together reflections from an ethnography conducted a few years ago in the strictly orthodox Jewish neighbourhood of Stamford Hill, London, with more recent autoethnographic reflections from …
On Learning from the Margins
This contribution to the special issue draws on ethnographic fieldwork exploring pluralities of Jewish life across adjacent urban neighbourhoods in London in order to engage with the conceptual questions and empirical omissions that are currently of concern to scholars of nonreligion. Learning from some illustrative moments in my fieldwork in which articulations of non-belief in God serendipitously arose, I first consider how marginal Jewish pers…
Transmission, Relationality, Ethnography
The "relational turn" in social research raises many issues that might loosely be collected together under the heading of "reflexivity." This can have a variety of meanings, but here, following a newly articulated "tradition" in psychosocial studies, we are using it to think about how the relationality of the research process impacts upon, and is in turn influenced by, the relationality that is the subject of the research itself. We are intereste…
Witnessing loss in the everyday
This article is concerned with what happens to precarious community buildings in times of austerity. It responds to a landscape of capitalist realism, in which instrumental, economic forms of value are mobilised to justify the closure of ordinary buildings whose survival is not identified as a political priority. The study focuses on two London cases of a library and an elderly day centre under threat of closure, and traces how grammars of auster…
Tragic Encounters and Ordinary Ethics
For over four decades, events in Palestine-Israel have provoked raging conflicts between members of British universities, giving rise to controversies around free speech, ‘extremism’, antisemitism and Islamophobia within higher education, which have been widely reported in the media and subject to repeated interventions by politicians. But why is this conflict so significant for student activists living at such a geographical distance from the re…
Formative sociology and ethico-political imaginaries
Recent contributors to this journal have sought to radicalize sociology by exploring how the discipline might expand political imaginaries and take up non-reductionist notions of everyday ethics. In a related move, sociologists are exploring the performative potential of sociological practices and sensibilities, while anthropologists are reframing the relationship of ethnography to theory. This article contributes to these projects by focusing on…
The sociology of the sacred
Over the past 20 years, Jeffrey C. Alexander has been a leading social theorist and a pioneer of the 'strong program' in cultural sociology, which emphasises the significance of cultural structures of meaning for social life. Following an introductory overview of his work, this article records a public conversation with Alexander about the role and significance of the concept of the sacred in his sociological work. Issues addressed in this conver…
Witnessing loss in the everyday
This article is concerned with what happens to precarious community buildings in times of austerity. It responds to a landscape of capitalist realism, in which instrumental, economic forms of value are mobilised to justify the closure of ordinary buildings whose survival is not identified as a political priority. The study focuses on two London cases of a library and an elderly day centre under threat of closure, and traces how grammars of auster…
The sociology of the sacred
Over the past 20 years, Jeffrey C. Alexander has been a leading social theorist and a pioneer of the 'strong program' in cultural sociology, which emphasises the significance of cultural structures of meaning for social life. Following an introductory overview of his work, this article records a public conversation with Alexander about the role and significance of the concept of the sacred in his sociological work. Issues addressed in this conver…
A new normal? The inordinate ordinary of Covid times
This article responds to the seismic transformations in urban relations to the ordinary, which have emerged in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, a condition in which mundane objects and actions have been permeated by the pressure of law and ethics. I draw together reflections from an ethnography conducted a few years ago in the strictly orthodox Jewish neighbourhood of Stamford Hill, London, with more recent autoethnographic reflections from …
Transmission, Relationality, Ethnography
The "relational turn" in social research raises many issues that might loosely be collected together under the heading of "reflexivity." This can have a variety of meanings, but here, following a newly articulated "tradition" in psychosocial studies, we are using it to think about how the relationality of the research process impacts upon, and is in turn influenced by, the relationality that is the subject of the research itself. We are intereste…
Formative sociology and ethico-political imaginaries
Recent contributors to this journal have sought to radicalize sociology by exploring how the discipline might expand political imaginaries and take up non-reductionist notions of everyday ethics. In a related move, sociologists are exploring the performative potential of sociological practices and sensibilities, while anthropologists are reframing the relationship of ethnography to theory. This article contributes to these projects by focusing on…
The sociology of the sacred
Over the past 20 years, Jeffrey C. Alexander has been a leading social theorist and a pioneer of the 'strong program' in cultural sociology, which emphasises the significance of cultural structures of meaning for social life. Following an introductory overview of his work, this article records a public conversation with Alexander about the role and significance of the concept of the sacred in his sociological work. Issues addressed in this conver…
Tragic Encounters and Ordinary Ethics
For over four decades, events in Palestine-Israel have provoked raging conflicts between members of British universities, giving rise to controversies around free speech, ‘extremism’, antisemitism and Islamophobia within higher education, which have been widely reported in the media and subject to repeated interventions by politicians. But why is this conflict so significant for student activists living at such a geographical distance from the re…
Formative sociology and ethico-political imaginaries
Recent contributors to this journal have sought to radicalize sociology by exploring how the discipline might expand political imaginaries and take up non-reductionist notions of everyday ethics. In a related move, sociologists are exploring the performative potential of sociological practices and sensibilities, while anthropologists are reframing the relationship of ethnography to theory. This article contributes to these projects by focusing on…
On Learning from the Margins
This contribution to the special issue draws on ethnographic fieldwork exploring pluralities of Jewish life across adjacent urban neighbourhoods in London in order to engage with the conceptual questions and empirical omissions that are currently of concern to scholars of nonreligion. Learning from some illustrative moments in my fieldwork in which articulations of non-belief in God serendipitously arose, I first consider how marginal Jewish pers…
Transmission, Relationality, Ethnography
The "relational turn" in social research raises many issues that might loosely be collected together under the heading of "reflexivity." This can have a variety of meanings, but here, following a newly articulated "tradition" in psychosocial studies, we are using it to think about how the relationality of the research process impacts upon, and is in turn influenced by, the relationality that is the subject of the research itself. We are intereste…
Witnessing loss in the everyday
This article is concerned with what happens to precarious community buildings in times of austerity. It responds to a landscape of capitalist realism, in which instrumental, economic forms of value are mobilised to justify the closure of ordinary buildings whose survival is not identified as a political priority. The study focuses on two London cases of a library and an elderly day centre under threat of closure, and traces how grammars of auster…
A new normal? The inordinate ordinary of Covid times
This article responds to the seismic transformations in urban relations to the ordinary, which have emerged in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, a condition in which mundane objects and actions have been permeated by the pressure of law and ethics. I draw together reflections from an ethnography conducted a few years ago in the strictly orthodox Jewish neighbourhood of Stamford Hill, London, with more recent autoethnographic reflections from …
Where is the Good in the World?
Bringing together contributions from anthropology, sociology, religious studies, and philosophy, along with ethnographic case studies from diverse settings, this volume explores how different disciplinary perspectives on the good might engage with and enrich each other. The chapters examine how people realize the good in social life, exploring how ethics and values relate to forms of suffering, power and inequality, and, in doing so, demonstrate …
Redeeming marriage? Bittersweet intimacy and the dialectics of liberation among Haredi Jews in London
This article intervenes in feminist anthropological debates about marriage within Western cosmopolitan, 'post-traditional' contexts through a close ethnographic examination of food and ritualized meals among Haredi Jews in London. We focus on this diasporic religious Jewish minority, whose marital practices have been the object of debates over marriage, gender, and cultural difference in cosmopolitan London. Learning from ethnographic and conjuga…
Sociology (7 works) · Anthropology (5 works) · Epistemology (5 works) · Ethnography (5 works) · Philosophy (4 works) · Social science (4 works) · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies (3 works) · Philosophy (3 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (2 works) · Contemporary Sociological Theory and Practice (2 works)