A Barnwell
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 20578 |
|---|---|
| NOME | A Barnwell |
| PRENOMES | A |
| SOBRENOME | Barnwell |
| ASSINATURA | BARNWELL A |
| AFILIAÇÕES | The University of Melbourne |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2254-4482 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 29 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 105 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 29 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2012 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 6 |
Towards a relational understanding of loneliness
This article addresses the rising concern of a global loneliness epidemic, highlighting the limitations of current sociological approaches, which are predominantly deductive and quantitative. Existing sociological frameworks often adopt an individualisation thesis, linking loneliness to the weakening of social bonds in a contemporary culture that prizes consumerism and individualism above quality relationships. In contrast, this article draws on …
Displaying family on the DNA platform
Direct-to-consumer DNA platforms are significant yet overlooked social media platforms through which millions of users worldwide shape their identities. DNA platforms sort and match users using genetic data, creating novel familial ‘networked publics’ and reinforcing ‘genetic thinking’. Drawing on the concept of ‘family display’, we interpret the accounts of 23 Australians who had distinct motivations for engaging with DNA platforms and differing…
Journal of Sociology
In this anniversary editorial we look back to the early days of the journal as we seek to honour its history and legacy. We outline the contents of the special anniversary features curated for this issue, including a section of shorter articles engaging with Alan Davies’ article on ‘children's outlooks’ in the first issue of the journal; an interview with Professor Fran Collyer about the history of sociology in Australia; and a section featuring …
An interview with Fran Collyer
Professor Fran Collyer is a revered sociologist currently leading an epic Australian Research Council-funded project about the history of sociology in Australia. The project includes interviews with almost 200 Australian sociologists. For this special section celebrating Journal of Sociology ’s 60th Anniversary, the journal’s co-editor-in-chief, Ashley Barnwell, turned the microphone on Fran Collyer to learn more about the history of our discipli…
Inheriting the family
This introduction to the special issue ‘Inheriting the family: emotions, identities and things’ briefly explores how attention to different forms of inheritance as emotional practices offers new ways to understand ‘intergenerational emotion’. It explains the importance of new methodologies to interrogating this emotion and introduces a range of possibilities that are taken further by the contributors in the issue. These include analysis of emotio…
I Can’t Imagine’
This essay explores the relation between emotion and imagination in sociology. While scholars have noted that imagination is under-theorised as a sociological concept, attention to sociological texts, most closely C. Wright Mill’s The Sociological Imagination , reveals the interplay of feeling and imagining across personal and social scales. I draw from Mills to explore the role of emotional speculation in qualitative survey data about experience…
Troubling possessions and family reckonings
Inherited family objects are often precious or cherished, a source of warm emotions connecting us to ancestors across time. But sometimes the family keepsakes we possess, tangible or intangible, can generate more troubling emotions. They may transmit to us things that we were not meant to have or do not want. They might link us to pasts with which we would prefer not to be entangled or feel compelled to set right. In this article, I draw from a s…
Family Estrangement and the Unseen Work of Not Doing Family
Family estrangement is a common yet understudied phenomenon, especially in the sociology of family and personal life. In societies where norms about 'the family' have moved on considerably to include non-biological kinship, blended families, chosen families and so on, an emphasis on close bonds and family rituals is often resilient creating stigma for those who are distant from family. In this article, I offer a sociological analysis of experienc…
From the Inside
In the settler colonial context, family histories can be key places to explore the relations between Indigenous and settler families, past and present. In this paper we examine this use of family history with reference to a historical photographic collection that links our two families. The Thomas Dick Photographic Collection (TDPC) was produced over a ten-year period, from 1910 to 1920, as a collaboration between the amateur photographer Thomas …
Aunting as Family Shadow-Work
Women have long been known as family kin-keepers, sources of knowledge about family histories. Yet little has been written on the role of aunts within families, and more specifically on aunts’ domain over sensitive or secret family information. This paper develops the concept of family shadow-work to analyse labours that are unseen yet essential to family life. To do this it explores aunting practices around family secrets using ‘facet methodolog…
Captured and captioned
This article examines how practices of family photography are being transformed in the digital sphere, specifically on Instagram. While research on ‘digital intimacies’ focusses on romantic or peer interactions, the digital practices of families – especially intergenerational interactions – remain understudied. We use Janet Finch’s notion of ‘family display’ to consider how Instagram affords new modes of performing and sharing family life. This c…
Keeping the Nation’s Secrets
Recent studies of the genealogy craze focus on how family historians appeal to ancestors to fashion their own identities, but practicing family history can also be a form of national identity-work. In this paper I explore how Larissa Behrendt’s notion of “colonial storytelling” might apply to the hi/stories told within families, as they seek to reproduce or challenge inherited narratives of settler colonialism. To do this, I analyze a sample of s…
Critical Affect
A clear-sighted intervention into debates about affect theory and critique Addresses the important yet overlooked implications for critical methods in influential work on affect, non-representational, and actor-network theories Situates current debates within enduring ethical discussions about how to represent lived experience Foregrounds the contemporary, everyday purchase and pragmatic value of critical attention in both popular culture and soc…
Given it is all so remote from us’
This article examines how families relate emotionally to their ancestors as they deal with the discovery of past family secrets. In response to Eduardo Bericat’s (2012) call for sociologists of emotion to pay closer attention to the ways that ‘emotional experiences happen over time’, I explore how families imagine and register the emotions of the past. To do this, I draw on concepts from the sociology of the family and personal life and cultural …
What Is “Publicly Available Data”? Exploring Blurred Public–Private Boundaries and Ethical Practices Through a Case Study on Instagram
This article adds to the literature on ethics in digital research by problematizing simple understandings of what constitutes "publicly available data," thereby complicating common "consent waiver" approaches. Based on our recent study of representations of family life on Instagram, a platform with a distinct visual premise, we discuss the ethical challenges we encountered and our practices for moving forward. We ground this in Lauren Berlant's c…
Methodological intimacies and the figure of the twins
In mythology twins represent both dualism and entanglement. Saturated with archetypal meaning, the figure of the twins unsettles divisions between nature and culture and - in its various incarnations as the double, doppelganger, shadow, or fetch - it troubles the notion of a unique, bounded self. This article draws on the indivisible intimacy of twins to examine the anxieties of influence and competition that disrupt claims within the ontological…
Family Secrets and the Slow Violence of Social Stigma
This article uses Rob Nixon's theory of 'slow violence' to examine how families keep secrets to manage stigma over time. In an age driven by hurriedness and distraction, Nixon calls for scholars to attend to the uneventful injustices that slip beneath the radar, dismissed or postponed. While his concept addresses environmental pollution, I argue that it is also relevant to the temporal dimensions of other sociological problems. To understand the …
Durkheim as affect theorist
While the sociology of emotions has a long history, theories of affect claim to pose new questions about contagious currents of feeling. But the definition of affect as an autonomous force that is precognitive, outside of semiotic systems, inaccessible to interpretation and measurement, and resistant to structure and critique may present unnecessary limitations for social inquiry. The division between affect and structure has left some sociologis…
Hidden heirlooms
This article explores how wider national narratives facilitate families' choices about what information to keep secret over time. I argue that attention to the ways family secrets operate reveals how social and moral codes are both sustained and challenged on an intimate scale. The article also makes an argument for using life writing and literature to explore the often-illusive contours of family secrets. To illustrate, I examine Lynette Russell…
Method Matters
Convict shame to convict chic
This article highlights the significance of family history research for memory studies. It provides an overview of the economic and cultural impact of this popular practice as well as a survey of the interdisciplinary field of research emerging around questions of genealogy and identity. It then develops a framework for engaging with the intergenerational, socially responsive memory work of family historians drawing from Paul Connerton’s typograp…
Locating an Intergenerational Self in Postcolonial Family Histories
Historians acknowledge that since the 1970s family history research has driven individuals to confront the silences within Australia’s colonial past, including ‘the convict stain’. However, little attention is given to how the practice has been used by the Stolen Generations to deal with the fracturing impact of ‘protectionist’ social policies on family and life histories. To explore this, I bring the concept of the intergenerational self into di…
Family Historiography in The White Earth
In recent years, family history research has become a popular activity for many Australians. This imperative to connect with our ancestors extends into the field of literary production. In this essay, we examine one prominent novel that reflects this movement, Andrew McGahan’s The White Earth (2004). Looking through a lens of family history and historiography, the novel asks questions about postcolonial belonging, inheritance, and the violent fou…
Life Writing and the Life Course
More than just a journey from cradle to grave, life takes a complex course, marked by transitions and near misses and directed by the shifting values of the age. The life-course perspective, preval
Entanglements of Evidence in the Turn Against Critique
Over the past decade, a range of theorists have argued that critique, in its rigid pursuit of hidden truths, has become routinely dismissive of everyday attachments and geared towards a diagnosis of error. To explore the turn from critique, this essay revisits two of the most influential arguments against the hermeneutics of suspicion, by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Bruno Latour. It argues that while these theorists present a divisive account of me…
Family Secrets and the Slow Violence of Social Stigma
This article uses Rob Nixon's theory of 'slow violence' to examine how families keep secrets to manage stigma over time. In an age driven by hurriedness and distraction, Nixon calls for scholars to attend to the uneventful injustices that slip beneath the radar, dismissed or postponed. While his concept addresses environmental pollution, I argue that it is also relevant to the temporal dimensions of other sociological problems. To understand the …
Captured and captioned
This article examines how practices of family photography are being transformed in the digital sphere, specifically on Instagram. While research on ‘digital intimacies’ focusses on romantic or peer interactions, the digital practices of families – especially intergenerational interactions – remain understudied. We use Janet Finch’s notion of ‘family display’ to consider how Instagram affords new modes of performing and sharing family life. This c…
What Is “Publicly Available Data”? Exploring Blurred Public–Private Boundaries and Ethical Practices Through a Case Study on Instagram
This article adds to the literature on ethics in digital research by problematizing simple understandings of what constitutes "publicly available data," thereby complicating common "consent waiver" approaches. Based on our recent study of representations of family life on Instagram, a platform with a distinct visual premise, we discuss the ethical challenges we encountered and our practices for moving forward. We ground this in Lauren Berlant's c…
The Genealogy Craze
As the second most popular use of the internet, genealogy or family history research has become and is continuing to grow as a widespread, investigative life-writing practice. More than a benign hobby practised in the dusty basements of public archives and libraries, genealogy research is engaged in asking provocative questions about identity, authenticity, history, responsibility, and belonging. However, despite the significant interest in popul…
Convict shame to convict chic
This article highlights the significance of family history research for memory studies. It provides an overview of the economic and cultural impact of this popular practice as well as a survey of the interdisciplinary field of research emerging around questions of genealogy and identity. It then develops a framework for engaging with the intergenerational, socially responsive memory work of family historians drawing from Paul Connerton’s typograp…
Hidden heirlooms
This article explores how wider national narratives facilitate families' choices about what information to keep secret over time. I argue that attention to the ways family secrets operate reveals how social and moral codes are both sustained and challenged on an intimate scale. The article also makes an argument for using life writing and literature to explore the often-illusive contours of family secrets. To illustrate, I examine Lynette Russell…
Given it is all so remote from us’
This article examines how families relate emotionally to their ancestors as they deal with the discovery of past family secrets. In response to Eduardo Bericat’s (2012) call for sociologists of emotion to pay closer attention to the ways that ‘emotional experiences happen over time’, I explore how families imagine and register the emotions of the past. To do this, I draw on concepts from the sociology of the family and personal life and cultural …
Family Estrangement and the Unseen Work of Not Doing Family
Family estrangement is a common yet understudied phenomenon, especially in the sociology of family and personal life. In societies where norms about 'the family' have moved on considerably to include non-biological kinship, blended families, chosen families and so on, an emphasis on close bonds and family rituals is often resilient creating stigma for those who are distant from family. In this article, I offer a sociological analysis of experienc…
From the Inside
In the settler colonial context, family histories can be key places to explore the relations between Indigenous and settler families, past and present. In this paper we examine this use of family history with reference to a historical photographic collection that links our two families. The Thomas Dick Photographic Collection (TDPC) was produced over a ten-year period, from 1910 to 1920, as a collaboration between the amateur photographer Thomas …
Locating an Intergenerational Self in Postcolonial Family Histories
Historians acknowledge that since the 1970s family history research has driven individuals to confront the silences within Australia’s colonial past, including ‘the convict stain’. However, little attention is given to how the practice has been used by the Stolen Generations to deal with the fracturing impact of ‘protectionist’ social policies on family and life histories. To explore this, I bring the concept of the intergenerational self into di…
Methodological intimacies and the figure of the twins
In mythology twins represent both dualism and entanglement. Saturated with archetypal meaning, the figure of the twins unsettles divisions between nature and culture and - in its various incarnations as the double, doppelganger, shadow, or fetch - it troubles the notion of a unique, bounded self. This article draws on the indivisible intimacy of twins to examine the anxieties of influence and competition that disrupt claims within the ontological…
Durkheim as affect theorist
While the sociology of emotions has a long history, theories of affect claim to pose new questions about contagious currents of feeling. But the definition of affect as an autonomous force that is precognitive, outside of semiotic systems, inaccessible to interpretation and measurement, and resistant to structure and critique may present unnecessary limitations for social inquiry. The division between affect and structure has left some sociologis…
Enduring Divisions
The sociology of literature has a troubled history. Across the past 50 years, proposal after proposal has attempted to develop a method and bridge the cultural division between the social sciences and literary studies. Focusing on the most recent attempt to revitalise the field, this article examines the legacy of the 'two cultures' in current debates about the politics and value of method. Departing from the Marxist tone of preceding arguments, …
Troubling possessions and family reckonings
Inherited family objects are often precious or cherished, a source of warm emotions connecting us to ancestors across time. But sometimes the family keepsakes we possess, tangible or intangible, can generate more troubling emotions. They may transmit to us things that we were not meant to have or do not want. They might link us to pasts with which we would prefer not to be entangled or feel compelled to set right. In this article, I draw from a s…
Aunting as Family Shadow-Work
Women have long been known as family kin-keepers, sources of knowledge about family histories. Yet little has been written on the role of aunts within families, and more specifically on aunts’ domain over sensitive or secret family information. This paper develops the concept of family shadow-work to analyse labours that are unseen yet essential to family life. To do this it explores aunting practices around family secrets using ‘facet methodolog…
Keeping the Nation’s Secrets
Recent studies of the genealogy craze focus on how family historians appeal to ancestors to fashion their own identities, but practicing family history can also be a form of national identity-work. In this paper I explore how Larissa Behrendt’s notion of “colonial storytelling” might apply to the hi/stories told within families, as they seek to reproduce or challenge inherited narratives of settler colonialism. To do this, I analyze a sample of s…
From Paranoid to Reparative
From Paranoid to Reparative: Narratives of Cultural Identification in the Social Sciences Ashley Barnwell (bio) William was proud to be Scottish, proud to have lived the first two years of his life in Cammothmore, but he liked to tell the story that an ancestor of his had travelled to America on the Mayflower, and somehow got hold of real Red Indian blood. When he told this story he turned to show his profile, which was crooked with a hard slug o…
The Genealogy Craze
As the second most popular use of the internet, genealogy or family history research has become and is continuing to grow as a widespread, investigative life-writing practice. More than a benign hobby practised in the dusty basements of public archives and libraries, genealogy research is engaged in asking provocative questions about identity, authenticity, history, responsibility, and belonging. However, despite the significant interest in popul…
Unpacking the complexities’ of authorship on This American Life
Addressing questions about the ethics of genre and social processes of verification, this paper examines the popular radio podcast This American Life's recent, high-profile retraction of Mike Daisey's The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs. In his first-person monologue, Daisey seemingly recounts his confrontation with the horrific labour conditions of Shenzhen, China's manufacturing industry. However, Ira Glass, the programme's producer and hos…
Enduring Divisions
The sociology of literature has a troubled history. Across the past 50 years, proposal after proposal has attempted to develop a method and bridge the cultural division between the social sciences and literary studies. Focusing on the most recent attempt to revitalise the field, this article examines the legacy of the 'two cultures' in current debates about the politics and value of method. Departing from the Marxist tone of preceding arguments, …
Entanglements of Evidence in the Turn Against Critique
Over the past decade, a range of theorists have argued that critique, in its rigid pursuit of hidden truths, has become routinely dismissive of everyday attachments and geared towards a diagnosis of error. To explore the turn from critique, this essay revisits two of the most influential arguments against the hermeneutics of suspicion, by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Bruno Latour. It argues that while these theorists present a divisive account of me…
Method Matters
Convict shame to convict chic
This article highlights the significance of family history research for memory studies. It provides an overview of the economic and cultural impact of this popular practice as well as a survey of the interdisciplinary field of research emerging around questions of genealogy and identity. It then develops a framework for engaging with the intergenerational, socially responsive memory work of family historians drawing from Paul Connerton’s typograp…
Locating an Intergenerational Self in Postcolonial Family Histories
Historians acknowledge that since the 1970s family history research has driven individuals to confront the silences within Australia’s colonial past, including ‘the convict stain’. However, little attention is given to how the practice has been used by the Stolen Generations to deal with the fracturing impact of ‘protectionist’ social policies on family and life histories. To explore this, I bring the concept of the intergenerational self into di…
Family Historiography in The White Earth
In recent years, family history research has become a popular activity for many Australians. This imperative to connect with our ancestors extends into the field of literary production. In this essay, we examine one prominent novel that reflects this movement, Andrew McGahan’s The White Earth (2004). Looking through a lens of family history and historiography, the novel asks questions about postcolonial belonging, inheritance, and the violent fou…
Life Writing and the Life Course
More than just a journey from cradle to grave, life takes a complex course, marked by transitions and near misses and directed by the shifting values of the age. The life-course perspective, preval
Durkheim as affect theorist
While the sociology of emotions has a long history, theories of affect claim to pose new questions about contagious currents of feeling. But the definition of affect as an autonomous force that is precognitive, outside of semiotic systems, inaccessible to interpretation and measurement, and resistant to structure and critique may present unnecessary limitations for social inquiry. The division between affect and structure has left some sociologis…
Hidden heirlooms
This article explores how wider national narratives facilitate families' choices about what information to keep secret over time. I argue that attention to the ways family secrets operate reveals how social and moral codes are both sustained and challenged on an intimate scale. The article also makes an argument for using life writing and literature to explore the often-illusive contours of family secrets. To illustrate, I examine Lynette Russell…
Given it is all so remote from us’
This article examines how families relate emotionally to their ancestors as they deal with the discovery of past family secrets. In response to Eduardo Bericat’s (2012) call for sociologists of emotion to pay closer attention to the ways that ‘emotional experiences happen over time’, I explore how families imagine and register the emotions of the past. To do this, I draw on concepts from the sociology of the family and personal life and cultural …
What Is “Publicly Available Data”? Exploring Blurred Public–Private Boundaries and Ethical Practices Through a Case Study on Instagram
This article adds to the literature on ethics in digital research by problematizing simple understandings of what constitutes "publicly available data," thereby complicating common "consent waiver" approaches. Based on our recent study of representations of family life on Instagram, a platform with a distinct visual premise, we discuss the ethical challenges we encountered and our practices for moving forward. We ground this in Lauren Berlant's c…
Methodological intimacies and the figure of the twins
In mythology twins represent both dualism and entanglement. Saturated with archetypal meaning, the figure of the twins unsettles divisions between nature and culture and - in its various incarnations as the double, doppelganger, shadow, or fetch - it troubles the notion of a unique, bounded self. This article draws on the indivisible intimacy of twins to examine the anxieties of influence and competition that disrupt claims within the ontological…
Family Secrets and the Slow Violence of Social Stigma
This article uses Rob Nixon's theory of 'slow violence' to examine how families keep secrets to manage stigma over time. In an age driven by hurriedness and distraction, Nixon calls for scholars to attend to the uneventful injustices that slip beneath the radar, dismissed or postponed. While his concept addresses environmental pollution, I argue that it is also relevant to the temporal dimensions of other sociological problems. To understand the …
Critical Affect
A clear-sighted intervention into debates about affect theory and critique Addresses the important yet overlooked implications for critical methods in influential work on affect, non-representational, and actor-network theories Situates current debates within enduring ethical discussions about how to represent lived experience Foregrounds the contemporary, everyday purchase and pragmatic value of critical attention in both popular culture and soc…
Captured and captioned
This article examines how practices of family photography are being transformed in the digital sphere, specifically on Instagram. While research on ‘digital intimacies’ focusses on romantic or peer interactions, the digital practices of families – especially intergenerational interactions – remain understudied. We use Janet Finch’s notion of ‘family display’ to consider how Instagram affords new modes of performing and sharing family life. This c…
Keeping the Nation’s Secrets
Recent studies of the genealogy craze focus on how family historians appeal to ancestors to fashion their own identities, but practicing family history can also be a form of national identity-work. In this paper I explore how Larissa Behrendt’s notion of “colonial storytelling” might apply to the hi/stories told within families, as they seek to reproduce or challenge inherited narratives of settler colonialism. To do this, I analyze a sample of s…
From the Inside
In the settler colonial context, family histories can be key places to explore the relations between Indigenous and settler families, past and present. In this paper we examine this use of family history with reference to a historical photographic collection that links our two families. The Thomas Dick Photographic Collection (TDPC) was produced over a ten-year period, from 1910 to 1920, as a collaboration between the amateur photographer Thomas …
Aunting as Family Shadow-Work
Women have long been known as family kin-keepers, sources of knowledge about family histories. Yet little has been written on the role of aunts within families, and more specifically on aunts’ domain over sensitive or secret family information. This paper develops the concept of family shadow-work to analyse labours that are unseen yet essential to family life. To do this it explores aunting practices around family secrets using ‘facet methodolog…
Inheriting the family
This introduction to the special issue ‘Inheriting the family: emotions, identities and things’ briefly explores how attention to different forms of inheritance as emotional practices offers new ways to understand ‘intergenerational emotion’. It explains the importance of new methodologies to interrogating this emotion and introduces a range of possibilities that are taken further by the contributors in the issue. These include analysis of emotio…
I Can’t Imagine’
This essay explores the relation between emotion and imagination in sociology. While scholars have noted that imagination is under-theorised as a sociological concept, attention to sociological texts, most closely C. Wright Mill’s The Sociological Imagination , reveals the interplay of feeling and imagining across personal and social scales. I draw from Mills to explore the role of emotional speculation in qualitative survey data about experience…
Troubling possessions and family reckonings
Inherited family objects are often precious or cherished, a source of warm emotions connecting us to ancestors across time. But sometimes the family keepsakes we possess, tangible or intangible, can generate more troubling emotions. They may transmit to us things that we were not meant to have or do not want. They might link us to pasts with which we would prefer not to be entangled or feel compelled to set right. In this article, I draw from a s…
Family Estrangement and the Unseen Work of Not Doing Family
Family estrangement is a common yet understudied phenomenon, especially in the sociology of family and personal life. In societies where norms about 'the family' have moved on considerably to include non-biological kinship, blended families, chosen families and so on, an emphasis on close bonds and family rituals is often resilient creating stigma for those who are distant from family. In this article, I offer a sociological analysis of experienc…
Sociology (24 obras) · Art (12 obras) · History (12 obras) · Psychology (12 obras) · Aesthetics (11 obras) · Political science (11 obras) · Epistemology (10 obras) · Gender Studies (10 obras) · History (10 obras) · Genealogy (9 obras)