Search

This essay opens with a creative response to Éilís Ní Dhuibhne's short story 'The Shortcut through IKEA' and continues with a reader's appreciation of her 2012 short story collection The Shelter of Neighbours. Consisting of fourteen stories, the collection is set in the fictional south county Dublin estate of Dunroon Crescent. Each story draws, in one way or another, on the Irish proverb ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine ('people live in one another's shelter'). Dunroon Crescent is a community in proximity, where connections have either been forged or exist solely because of geography. The estate's inhabitants are detached from themselves and each other but their lives also overlap and intersect, illuminated by the light of their pasts, by remembered loss and the legacies of earlier choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social connectedness among neighbours impacts health and well-being, especially during stressful life events like a pandemic. An activity such as neighbourhood walking enables urban inhabitants to engage in incidental sociability and acts of “neighbouring”—that is, authentic social interactions with neighbours—to potentially bolster the social fabric of neighbourhoods and strengthen relationships. With the potential of neighbourhood walking in mind, this article investigates how everyday encounters while engaged in routine neighbourhood walks strengthen and/or weaken social ties among neighbours. To this end, the article draws on three sources of qualitative data from neighbourhood walkers in Southwestern Ontario, Canada: (a) “walking diaries” in which participants took note of their walking routes, the people they observed on their walks, and other details of their walking experiences; (b) maps of their neighbourhoods that outlined the boundaries of their self-identified neighbourhoods, their routine walking routes, and the people they recognized during their neighbourhood walks; and (c) one-on-one interviews during which participants provided crucial context and meaning to the maps and their walking experiences. The findings provide evidence of how interactions among inhabitants, while engaged in neighbourhood walking, help generate greater social connectedness.

Studies find a direct association of collective violence with relational distance: lower the relational distance, lower the violence. Where people live as neighbours, spatial proximity provides more opportunity for contact. However, perpetrators of mass violence are often neighbours who had previously coexisted with their victims in apparent harmony. Neighbour-on-neighbour violence is a social violation: it shakes our confidence in the collective values of 'neighbourliness' and the strength of prior relations. In two state-orchestrated pogroms in India – against Sikhs in 1984 and Muslims in 2002 – the nature of prior neighbour relationships is delineated to identify why some neighbours participated in attacks, others in rescues. A qualitative analysis of 50 survivor affidavits and 41 in-depth interviews enabled reconstructing the texture of these relationships. Neighbourliness and situational factors (timing of attacks; built environment) provided a more nuanced understanding of behaviour. For democratic polities that authorise pogroms, findings challenge existing knowledge on contact and violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social connectedness among neighbours impacts health and well-being, especially during stressful life events like a pandemic. An activity such as neighbourhood walking enables urban inhabitants to engage in incidental sociability and acts of "neighbouring"--that is, authentic social interactions with neighbours--to potentially bolster the social fabric of neighbourhoods and strengthen relationships. With the potential of neighbourhood walking in mind, this article investigates how everyday encounters while engaged in routine neighbourhood walks strengthen and/or weaken social ties among neighbours. To this end, the article draws on three sources of qualitative data from neighbourhood walkers in Southwestern Ontario, Canada: (a) "walking diaries" in which participants took note of their walking routes, the people they observed on their walks, and other details of their walking experiences; (b) maps of their neighbourhoods that outlined the boundaries of their self-identified neighbourhoods, their routine walking routes, and the people they recognized during their neighbourhood walks; and (c) one-on-one interviews during which participants provided crucial context and meaning to the maps and their walking experiences. The findings provide evidence of how interactions among inhabitants, while engaged in neighbourhood walking, help generate greater social connectedness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article centres on the pamphlet The Life and Death of Griffin Flood informer (1623), which tells the career and execution through pressing of an informer and murderer working in early modern London. It outlines what archival research reveals about this figure, and thereby re-examines how far crime pamphlets were rooted in social actuality. Secondly, it shows that The Life and Death does not follow what historians have identified as the conventions of rogue literature and murder pamphlets, and that scholars' treatment of cheap print has often overlooked its generic instability and inconsistency of tone. Finally, it highlights how the representation of Flood's career as an informer casts new light on attitudes towards non-citizens within early modern London. The article concludes by arguing that The Life and Death (and many similar pamphlets) invoked communitarian understandings of justice, and emphasized neighbourliness, social peace, and charity, rather than the themes of redemption and divine retribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Antwerp, everyday interactions in ethno-racially diverse neighbourhoods have become the object of polarized debate and policy interventions that posit 'living together' as an ideal. Residents routinely use living together as a frame to assess themselves and their neighbourhood. They also bring divergent vernacular moral practices and sensory experiences to everyday interactions across difference. This complicates understandings of conviviality as a singular, demarcatable dimension of urban life. This paper delineates, instead, theoretical, methodological and textual manoeuvres for approaching conviviality in the plural. Methodologically, biographical interviewing and go-alongs are combined to explore diverging vernacular modes of engagement, and their intersections. Textually, the stylistic device of a collage of 'mobile monologues' – first-person, situated stream-of-consciousness narrations – works to recreate in writing a polyphony of embodied and moral modes of being, and their unfolding across myriad interactions. Finally, mobile monologues bring-out understudied dimensions of conviviality: (1) the situated performance of local narratives, (2) the circulation of moral economies of neighbourliness, (3) the contested political resignification of vernacular notions and practices in relation to discourses of living together. Conviviality emerges as heterogeneously assembled from a multiplicity of intersecting vernacular universes, whose political relevance in relation to living together is actively made and contested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Dansk Sociologi is the property of Djøf Forlag and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)