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How can we create possibilities for a generative moment between the research participants and ourselves? In a study about (day)dreaming, we searched for ways of doing our research in which we could meet and jointly explore the becoming of life and important matters through our experiences of dreaming. Inspired by Gaston Bachelard's phenomenology of dreaming and in particular his book The Poetics of Space, in which he emphasized the importance of small, intimate spaces for poetic moments to occur, we decided to buy a small countryside caravan. Through this inquiry into a new spatiotemporality for our research encounters, we experienced how the caravan offers a rupture from the mundane ongoingness enabling us to reconnect to the moment, the place, each other, and ourselves. This rupture awakens the verticality of time allowing us to be looking anew and making novel connections. What may be seen as self-evident, but it was not for us, is the recognition that in developing research practices for studying dreaming, we had to first start dreaming ourselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article spotlights four transversal principles that animate Pierre Bourdieu’s research practice and can fruitfully guide inquiry on any empirical front: the Bachelardian imperative of epistemological rupture and vigilance; the Weberian command to effect the triple historicization of the agent (habitus), the world (social space, of which field is but a subtype), and the categories of the analyst (epistemic reflexivity); the Leibnizian–Durkheimian invitation to deploy the topological mode of reasoning to track the mutual correspondences between symbolic space, social space, and physical space; and the Cassirer moment urging us to recognize the constitutive efficacy of symbolic structures. I also flag three traps that Bourdieusian explorers of the social world should exercise special care to avoid: the fetishization of concepts, the seductions of “speaking Bourdieuse” while failing to carry out the research operations Bourdieu’s notions stipulate, and the forced imposition of his theoretical framework en bloc when it is more productively used in kit through transposition. These principles guiding the construction of the object are not theoretical slogans but practical blueprints for anthropological inquiry. This implies that mimesis and not exegesis should guide those social scientists who wish to build on, revise, or challenge the scientific machinery and legacy of Pierre Bourdieu. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on Bachelard’s notion of “cosmicity” this article investigates the living conditions of Parisian working-class families in the second half of the nineteenth century. Nineteenth-century social critics claimed that the lack of privacy in urban apartments made decent family life impossible. However, evidence from judicial dossiers concerning attentat à la pudeur (intimate assault against children) illuminates the lived experience of children and their families in Paris apartments. Rather than a sharp divide between public and private, children experienced their apartment homes as the core of a social and spatial world under the surveillance of parents, neighbors, and other children. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article examines the impact of Gaston Bachelard's studies of poetic and material imagination on social theorists in France. Social theorists Henri Lefebvre, Jean Baudrillard, and Roland Barthes had used Bachelard's concept in the analyses of the advent post-war modernization in the country. Bachelard's work in narratives of post-war modernization was more on the effects of modern, post-Einsteinian science on the human mind. Thus, his concepts were considered as powerful tool for the prevalence of mass-produced commodities during the era.