J Brownlie
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 9467 |
|---|---|
| NOME | J Brownlie |
| PRENOMES | J |
| SOBRENOME | Brownlie |
| ASSINATURA | BROWNLIE J |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Edinburgh |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8299-6483 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 31 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 190 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 31 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1998 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 7 |
The 'good story' and kindness Twitter
There is a long history of investment in solidaristic stories in the face of social upheaval, threat or conflict, and this was especially evident in relation to Covid-19. This article examines the way that one such narrative - the idea of kindness - was drawn on by Twitter users during the pandemic. Setting it in the context of a wider cultural preoccupation with kindness that both predates and continues beyond the pandemic, we draw on empirical …
How kindness took a hold
How are we to understand the contemporary preoccupation-at least in many English-speaking societies-with 'random acts of kindness' and the idea of kindness more generally? Should this be seen as a challenge to the logic of capitalism or reinforcing of it, an example of commodification of emotion within our everyday lives? By introducing and mapping the contours of an emergent 'kindness industry', placing emotion (and enchantment) at the heart of …
Troubling content
Growing concerns about “online harm” and “duty of care” fuel debate about how best to regulate and moderate “troubling content” on social media. This has become a pressing issue in relation to the potential application of media guidelines to online discussion of death by suicide—discussion which is troubling because it is often transgressive and contested. Drawing on an innovative mixed‐method analysis of a large‐scale Twitter dataset, this artic…
Empathy Rituals
There is growing research interest in the sharing of emotions through social media. Usually centred on 'newsworthy' events and collective 'flows' of emotion, this work is often computationally driven. This article presents an interaction-led analysis of small data from Twitter to illustrate how this kind of intensive focus can 'thicken' claims about emotions, and particularly empathy. Drawing on Goffman's work on ritual, we introduce and then app…
Out of the ordinary
How do research participants feel about having their ‘ordinary’ lives researched? This article focuses on how research participants manage the sharing of details emerging out of their ordinary lives in the context of research – an activity which, for most, is outside of the ordinary. Despite two significant research turns – towards reflexivity and towards the ‘everyday’ – these experiences remain curiously neglected. Drawing on a study of small a…
Materialities of mundane care and the art of holding one's own
The focus of this special issue is on how everyday or mundane materialities actively mediate health and care practices. This article extends this concern with the mundane to care itself and explores how specific materialities, such as shared spaces and everyday objects, not only mediate mundane care but enable it to happen. Our focus is on mundane help in the context of ill health, between people who are not immediate family, such as neighbours, …
Thinking Sociologically About Kindness
This article makes the case for a sociological engagement with kindness. Although virtually ignored by sociologists, we tend to know kindness when we see it and to feel its absence keenly. We suggest there are at least four features of 'ordinary' kindness which render it sociologically relevant: its infrastructural quality; its unobligated character; its micro or inter-personal focus and its atmospheric potential. This latter quality is not the '…
The Practice of Being There
This final part of the book considers emerging, or so far neglected, stories that might help us make sense of our emotional lives: stories about being, doing, reflexivity, privacy and vulnerability. This chapter begins by looking at what relationships that ‘matter’ look and feel like and teasing out what we mean when we say others are ‘there’ for us. To draw on Goffman’s (1974) question, I am interested in what it is that is going on1 when we are…
On Not Telling Our Sad Stories
At the heart of the epochal stories about our emotional lives in Anglo-American societies outlined in Part I is the claim that we increasingly perceive ourselves to be vulnerable. Despite a dearth of empirical evidence (Misztal, 2011, p.35), such claims, which include theorizing about how individualization and globalization create vulnerable selves, are a dominant strand in sociological narratives about emotional lives (Beck and Beck Gernsheim, 2…
Look Who’s Listening
In Part I of the book, I explored the cultural significance of disclosure, captured in Les Back’s (2007, p.7) claim that ours is a culture in which ‘there is a clamour to be heard, to narrate and gain attention’. Within the social sciences, though, the focus has been on talk without, curiously, much interest in who is doing the listening . Most of the discussion in the last chapter focused on our general orientations towards emotions talk, that i…
Living in the Second World
The unsaid has been a recurrent theme throughout this book: in the conceptual discussions about practical consciousness; the methodological challenges of the unspoken; the variations in the propensity to engage in emotions talk; the contingency of who is actually there to listen or coax us to talk; and the unspoken dimensions of reflexivity examined in the last chapter. In this chapter, I continue that exploration by looking at why and how we kee…
‘It’s Good to Talk’ and Other Stories
Part I of the book looked at epochal claims that have been made about our emotional lives and explored what a more nuanced understanding of these lives might look like. Specifically, it called for a closer conceptual and methodological engagement with notions of culture, reflexivity and emotions. Part II continues this process by gauging empirically the nature of our emotional relationships in the context of emotional support and the role of talk…
About Distances
Arthur Miller, near the end of his life, wrote that he felt more drawn to writing stories than plays. Reading stories as a boy, he wanted to skip to the dialogue, to where, as he saw it, the author stopped getting in the way and the action began. As he got older, he became more interested in the things which ‘register and weigh’ (Miller, 2010, p.viii) — place, objects, memories, the mood of the moment, dimensions he felt he could best capture thr…
Introduction
The book’s title comes from Raymond Williams’ (1979) observation that ‘many people are brought through quite profound disorders by the actual development of ordinary relationships’ (1979, p.184). For Williams, ‘the principle that you can only be brought through emotional crisis by a professional’ is an ‘extraordinary characteristic notion of bourgeois-bureaucratic society’. The potential of ‘ordinary relationships’ is much debated in the current …
Seizing the Spinning Top
Despite theoretical interest in reflexivity, empirical research in this area is still rare (Phillips and Western, 2005). This is, likely, in part, to be a result of the methodological difficulty involved: akin to seizing a spinning top to understand how it works (James, 1890, p.244, cited Archer, 2010, p.5). Yet we do need to find out more about reflexivity, about how we make our way in the world and, specifically, the role of emotions in this. T…
What We Talk about When We Talk about Emotion Culture
In this chapter I start by sketching some existing work on emotion culture, with therapeutic culture presented as a specific case. In doing so, I make two main arguments. The first is that despite bringing together the words ‘emotion’ and ‘culture’, sociological accounts of emotion culture are often curiously underengaged with the actual nature of culture and emotions or with the role of reflexivity. The second is that the claims made about such …
Conclusion
Writing about ordinary relationships is not a discrete endeavour; the interconnected nature of our lives means that, in writing about such relationships, one teeters much of the time on the verge of writing a sociology of everything. Some readers might feel that this balancing act has not been successful. Others might be questioning the focus on everyday emotional lives at this time and asking whether sociology has not got better things to do in …
Ordinary Relationships
Recent theorizing tends to position ordinary relationships as something we have lost, yet the nature of these relationships is not seriously engaged with. Drawing on rich empirical data, this book que
Being there
Emotional lives tend to be untidy. Yet despite a growing recognition of this, sociological research designs rarely mirror the multidimensionality they are striving to represent. This article takes as its starting point a recent study of beliefs and practices about emotional support and emotions talk in Britain, to illustrate how a methodologically mixed approach offers particular purchase on what passes between us in our everyday emotional lives …
Social bundles
Drawing on a UK research study on immunization, this article investigates parents' understandings of the relationship between themselves, their infants, other bodies, the state, and cultural practices - material and symbolic. The article argues that infant bodies are best thought of as always social bundles, rather than as biobundles made social through state intervention; and concludes that, while the natural/cultural divide may now be widely ac…
Not 'going there
This article takes as its starting point the thesis that there has been a shift towards emotional openness in Anglo-American societies and that, as a result, we are increasingly at ease with talking to professionals, those who are trained to listen, when faced with difficulties in our emotional lives. Such assumptions are implicit, if unexamined, in recent mental health policy in the UK. Drawing on findings from the first British general populati…
The Age of Grief in the Time of Talk
Responding to Charles Tilly's call to map how individuals and groups encounter big structures or large processes, this article is concerned with experiences of one particular social process: the move towards emotional openess. Drawing on a mixed methods study of emotions talk, the article questions this 'en bloc' narrative of social change 'in our own time' (Tilly, 1984). In particular, through analysis of survey data, it highlights the life-stag…
Researching, Not Playing, in the Public Sphere
Journals and research networks are awash with advice about how best to promote children and young people's participation, with young people's involvement in the doing of research often presented as a specific expression of this wider good. Most of this discussion, however, is concerned with methods, the practicalities of securing research involvement and, more recently, with research training. At the same time, wider debates about the uses of soc…
Between the demands of truth and government
Beyond Anti-Smacking
Recently, it has been argued that 'anti-smacking' campaigns have been so successful that 'explicit pro-smackers' are now thin on the ground. Yet the use of physical chastisement remains widespread. One response to this contradiction is to focus less on parents and more on children's rights. In this article, however, the authors draw on data from a recent Scottish study of parents' views of physical chastisement to answer the following question: I…
Leaps of Faith' and MMR
Möllering has argued for sociological research on trust that pays attention to the 'fine details of interpretation' and begins from the perspectives of those engaged in relations of trust. In this article we explore what it would mean to take up Möllering's challenge to explore the interpretative elements of trust and the 'leaps of faith' trusting entails.We do this through an empirical study of parental and professional talk about the MMR (measl…
Materialities of mundane care and the art of holding one's own
The focus of this special issue is on how everyday or mundane materialities actively mediate health and care practices. This article extends this concern with the mundane to care itself and explores how specific materialities, such as shared spaces and everyday objects, not only mediate mundane care but enable it to happen. Our focus is on mundane help in the context of ill health, between people who are not immediate family, such as neighbours, …
Being there
Emotional lives tend to be untidy. Yet despite a growing recognition of this, sociological research designs rarely mirror the multidimensionality they are striving to represent. This article takes as its starting point a recent study of beliefs and practices about emotional support and emotions talk in Britain, to illustrate how a methodologically mixed approach offers particular purchase on what passes between us in our everyday emotional lives …
Ordinary Relationships
Recent theorizing tends to position ordinary relationships as something we have lost, yet the nature of these relationships is not seriously engaged with. Drawing on rich empirical data, this book que
Thinking Sociologically About Kindness
This article makes the case for a sociological engagement with kindness. Although virtually ignored by sociologists, we tend to know kindness when we see it and to feel its absence keenly. We suggest there are at least four features of 'ordinary' kindness which render it sociologically relevant: its infrastructural quality; its unobligated character; its micro or inter-personal focus and its atmospheric potential. This latter quality is not the '…
Between the demands of truth and government
Social bundles
Drawing on a UK research study on immunization, this article investigates parents' understandings of the relationship between themselves, their infants, other bodies, the state, and cultural practices - material and symbolic. The article argues that infant bodies are best thought of as always social bundles, rather than as biobundles made social through state intervention; and concludes that, while the natural/cultural divide may now be widely ac…
Not 'going there
This article takes as its starting point the thesis that there has been a shift towards emotional openness in Anglo-American societies and that, as a result, we are increasingly at ease with talking to professionals, those who are trained to listen, when faced with difficulties in our emotional lives. Such assumptions are implicit, if unexamined, in recent mental health policy in the UK. Drawing on findings from the first British general populati…
Tasting the Witches' Brew
Interaction is at the heart of most therapeutic practices, yet sociological work on the therapeutic has either tended to ignore this dimension or focused on it at the expense of understanding the wider social context within which such practices unfold. Not surprisingly, Foucauldian work on the therapeutic has, for different reasons, also tended not to concern itself with interaction. Yet there are those who argue not only that Foucault might be u…
Empathy Rituals
There is growing research interest in the sharing of emotions through social media. Usually centred on 'newsworthy' events and collective 'flows' of emotion, this work is often computationally driven. This article presents an interaction-led analysis of small data from Twitter to illustrate how this kind of intensive focus can 'thicken' claims about emotions, and particularly empathy. Drawing on Goffman's work on ritual, we introduce and then app…
Out of the ordinary
How do research participants feel about having their ‘ordinary’ lives researched? This article focuses on how research participants manage the sharing of details emerging out of their ordinary lives in the context of research – an activity which, for most, is outside of the ordinary. Despite two significant research turns – towards reflexivity and towards the ‘everyday’ – these experiences remain curiously neglected. Drawing on a study of small a…
Researching, Not Playing, in the Public Sphere
Journals and research networks are awash with advice about how best to promote children and young people's participation, with young people's involvement in the doing of research often presented as a specific expression of this wider good. Most of this discussion, however, is concerned with methods, the practicalities of securing research involvement and, more recently, with research training. At the same time, wider debates about the uses of soc…
Beyond Anti-Smacking
Recently, it has been argued that 'anti-smacking' campaigns have been so successful that 'explicit pro-smackers' are now thin on the ground. Yet the use of physical chastisement remains widespread. One response to this contradiction is to focus less on parents and more on children's rights. In this article, however, the authors draw on data from a recent Scottish study of parents' views of physical chastisement to answer the following question: I…
The 'Being-Risky' Child
Recent sociological work suggests that anxieties for, and about, children has helped create the impression that being a child is in itself problematic; or to put it another way, that risk and its management are now central to how we in the West construct childhood. Nowhere is this clearer than in relation to the `young sexual abuser'-a subjectivity, defined by age and sexual risk, which emerged in the late twentieth century. In this article, Fouc…
How kindness took a hold
How are we to understand the contemporary preoccupation-at least in many English-speaking societies-with 'random acts of kindness' and the idea of kindness more generally? Should this be seen as a challenge to the logic of capitalism or reinforcing of it, an example of commodification of emotion within our everyday lives? By introducing and mapping the contours of an emergent 'kindness industry', placing emotion (and enchantment) at the heart of …
The Basic Stuff of Our Memories
In recent political debates about physical chastisement, children have been positioned as 'potential' selves and have had their bodies mapped in specific ways. This article compares these discourses with findings from a study of parents' views of proposed legislation on physical discipline. It is argued that parents' talk about physical discipline is temporal not only because it is concerned with the nature of the child's body/self at the time of…
The Age of Grief in the Time of Talk
Responding to Charles Tilly's call to map how individuals and groups encounter big structures or large processes, this article is concerned with experiences of one particular social process: the move towards emotional openess. Drawing on a mixed methods study of emotions talk, the article questions this 'en bloc' narrative of social change 'in our own time' (Tilly, 1984). In particular, through analysis of survey data, it highlights the life-stag…
An Unsolvable Justice Problem’? Punishing Young People's Sexual Violence
This article addresses the paradox that whilst young offenders in general are increasingly diverted from formal justice, there continues to be resistance to the idea of diversion for those young people who commit sexual offences. It explores the ways in which tensions arising from this paradox are currently being played out within criminal justice systems in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. Building on published and new research on criminal just…
Working with Men
In their response, Cree and Cavanagh directly address one paragraph to my review and then re-iterate the feminist objectives of their work. As I am in agreement with these objectives, I will concentrate on their specific response to the review. Unfortunately as there is no engagement with the ideas they said they found useful from the review, I can only address the misinterpretations they believe I have made of their work and, hopefully, take the…
The 'Being-Risky' Child
Recent sociological work suggests that anxieties for, and about, children has helped create the impression that being a child is in itself problematic; or to put it another way, that risk and its management are now central to how we in the West construct childhood. Nowhere is this clearer than in relation to the `young sexual abuser'-a subjectivity, defined by age and sexual risk, which emerged in the late twentieth century. In this article, Fouc…
An Unsolvable Justice Problem’? Punishing Young People's Sexual Violence
This article addresses the paradox that whilst young offenders in general are increasingly diverted from formal justice, there continues to be resistance to the idea of diversion for those young people who commit sexual offences. It explores the ways in which tensions arising from this paradox are currently being played out within criminal justice systems in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. Building on published and new research on criminal just…
Tasting the Witches' Brew
Interaction is at the heart of most therapeutic practices, yet sociological work on the therapeutic has either tended to ignore this dimension or focused on it at the expense of understanding the wider social context within which such practices unfold. Not surprisingly, Foucauldian work on the therapeutic has, for different reasons, also tended not to concern itself with interaction. Yet there are those who argue not only that Foucault might be u…
Leaps of Faith' and MMR
Möllering has argued for sociological research on trust that pays attention to the 'fine details of interpretation' and begins from the perspectives of those engaged in relations of trust. In this article we explore what it would mean to take up Möllering's challenge to explore the interpretative elements of trust and the 'leaps of faith' trusting entails.We do this through an empirical study of parental and professional talk about the MMR (measl…
Between the demands of truth and government
Beyond Anti-Smacking
Recently, it has been argued that 'anti-smacking' campaigns have been so successful that 'explicit pro-smackers' are now thin on the ground. Yet the use of physical chastisement remains widespread. One response to this contradiction is to focus less on parents and more on children's rights. In this article, however, the authors draw on data from a recent Scottish study of parents' views of physical chastisement to answer the following question: I…
The Basic Stuff of Our Memories
In recent political debates about physical chastisement, children have been positioned as 'potential' selves and have had their bodies mapped in specific ways. This article compares these discourses with findings from a study of parents' views of proposed legislation on physical discipline. It is argued that parents' talk about physical discipline is temporal not only because it is concerned with the nature of the child's body/self at the time of…
The Age of Grief in the Time of Talk
Responding to Charles Tilly's call to map how individuals and groups encounter big structures or large processes, this article is concerned with experiences of one particular social process: the move towards emotional openess. Drawing on a mixed methods study of emotions talk, the article questions this 'en bloc' narrative of social change 'in our own time' (Tilly, 1984). In particular, through analysis of survey data, it highlights the life-stag…
Researching, Not Playing, in the Public Sphere
Journals and research networks are awash with advice about how best to promote children and young people's participation, with young people's involvement in the doing of research often presented as a specific expression of this wider good. Most of this discussion, however, is concerned with methods, the practicalities of securing research involvement and, more recently, with research training. At the same time, wider debates about the uses of soc…
Being there
Emotional lives tend to be untidy. Yet despite a growing recognition of this, sociological research designs rarely mirror the multidimensionality they are striving to represent. This article takes as its starting point a recent study of beliefs and practices about emotional support and emotions talk in Britain, to illustrate how a methodologically mixed approach offers particular purchase on what passes between us in our everyday emotional lives …
Social bundles
Drawing on a UK research study on immunization, this article investigates parents' understandings of the relationship between themselves, their infants, other bodies, the state, and cultural practices - material and symbolic. The article argues that infant bodies are best thought of as always social bundles, rather than as biobundles made social through state intervention; and concludes that, while the natural/cultural divide may now be widely ac…
Not 'going there
This article takes as its starting point the thesis that there has been a shift towards emotional openness in Anglo-American societies and that, as a result, we are increasingly at ease with talking to professionals, those who are trained to listen, when faced with difficulties in our emotional lives. Such assumptions are implicit, if unexamined, in recent mental health policy in the UK. Drawing on findings from the first British general populati…
The Practice of Being There
This final part of the book considers emerging, or so far neglected, stories that might help us make sense of our emotional lives: stories about being, doing, reflexivity, privacy and vulnerability. This chapter begins by looking at what relationships that ‘matter’ look and feel like and teasing out what we mean when we say others are ‘there’ for us. To draw on Goffman’s (1974) question, I am interested in what it is that is going on1 when we are…
On Not Telling Our Sad Stories
At the heart of the epochal stories about our emotional lives in Anglo-American societies outlined in Part I is the claim that we increasingly perceive ourselves to be vulnerable. Despite a dearth of empirical evidence (Misztal, 2011, p.35), such claims, which include theorizing about how individualization and globalization create vulnerable selves, are a dominant strand in sociological narratives about emotional lives (Beck and Beck Gernsheim, 2…
Look Who’s Listening
In Part I of the book, I explored the cultural significance of disclosure, captured in Les Back’s (2007, p.7) claim that ours is a culture in which ‘there is a clamour to be heard, to narrate and gain attention’. Within the social sciences, though, the focus has been on talk without, curiously, much interest in who is doing the listening . Most of the discussion in the last chapter focused on our general orientations towards emotions talk, that i…
Living in the Second World
The unsaid has been a recurrent theme throughout this book: in the conceptual discussions about practical consciousness; the methodological challenges of the unspoken; the variations in the propensity to engage in emotions talk; the contingency of who is actually there to listen or coax us to talk; and the unspoken dimensions of reflexivity examined in the last chapter. In this chapter, I continue that exploration by looking at why and how we kee…
‘It’s Good to Talk’ and Other Stories
Part I of the book looked at epochal claims that have been made about our emotional lives and explored what a more nuanced understanding of these lives might look like. Specifically, it called for a closer conceptual and methodological engagement with notions of culture, reflexivity and emotions. Part II continues this process by gauging empirically the nature of our emotional relationships in the context of emotional support and the role of talk…
About Distances
Arthur Miller, near the end of his life, wrote that he felt more drawn to writing stories than plays. Reading stories as a boy, he wanted to skip to the dialogue, to where, as he saw it, the author stopped getting in the way and the action began. As he got older, he became more interested in the things which ‘register and weigh’ (Miller, 2010, p.viii) — place, objects, memories, the mood of the moment, dimensions he felt he could best capture thr…
Introduction
The book’s title comes from Raymond Williams’ (1979) observation that ‘many people are brought through quite profound disorders by the actual development of ordinary relationships’ (1979, p.184). For Williams, ‘the principle that you can only be brought through emotional crisis by a professional’ is an ‘extraordinary characteristic notion of bourgeois-bureaucratic society’. The potential of ‘ordinary relationships’ is much debated in the current …
Seizing the Spinning Top
Despite theoretical interest in reflexivity, empirical research in this area is still rare (Phillips and Western, 2005). This is, likely, in part, to be a result of the methodological difficulty involved: akin to seizing a spinning top to understand how it works (James, 1890, p.244, cited Archer, 2010, p.5). Yet we do need to find out more about reflexivity, about how we make our way in the world and, specifically, the role of emotions in this. T…
What We Talk about When We Talk about Emotion Culture
In this chapter I start by sketching some existing work on emotion culture, with therapeutic culture presented as a specific case. In doing so, I make two main arguments. The first is that despite bringing together the words ‘emotion’ and ‘culture’, sociological accounts of emotion culture are often curiously underengaged with the actual nature of culture and emotions or with the role of reflexivity. The second is that the claims made about such …
Conclusion
Writing about ordinary relationships is not a discrete endeavour; the interconnected nature of our lives means that, in writing about such relationships, one teeters much of the time on the verge of writing a sociology of everything. Some readers might feel that this balancing act has not been successful. Others might be questioning the focus on everyday emotional lives at this time and asking whether sociology has not got better things to do in …
Ordinary Relationships
Recent theorizing tends to position ordinary relationships as something we have lost, yet the nature of these relationships is not seriously engaged with. Drawing on rich empirical data, this book que
Thinking Sociologically About Kindness
This article makes the case for a sociological engagement with kindness. Although virtually ignored by sociologists, we tend to know kindness when we see it and to feel its absence keenly. We suggest there are at least four features of 'ordinary' kindness which render it sociologically relevant: its infrastructural quality; its unobligated character; its micro or inter-personal focus and its atmospheric potential. This latter quality is not the '…
Psychology (27 obras) · Sociology (27 obras) · Social Psychology (21 obras) · Epistemology (18 obras) · Social science (16 obras) · Aesthetics (12 obras) · Philosophy (12 obras) · Political science (12 obras) · Reflexivity (11 obras) · Law (9 obras)