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This paper explores the extent to which a manager can paradoxically develop a contestation to managerialist practices. By taking an autoethnographic approach, as a departmental head of a U.K. business school myself, I reflect upon the cultural, political, and individual tensions that emerged over a year from my attempt to develop a liminal space or place for my colleagues. This was initially framed as research development, called the "Shoreside Sessions," organized around a disconnected social and physical space. The intention was to understand whether this would lead to a respite from managerialism or any contestation to managerialist practices. Looking through a Lacanian conceptual lens, the research findings offer a tempered hope that middle management, which has been demonized by much of the critical management studies literature, could play a partial but pivotal role in providing a hysteric, questioning space for contestation to emerge. Such emergence is limited in a temporal sense, due to the growing conflicting managerialist, institutional agendas that department heads are increasingly expected to deliver. The paper's other main contribution lies in the role played by Lacanian discourses and psychic registers, which will help academic managers with the process of reflexivity around intent and impact of liminal spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) has started to gain popularity within sociology as a method of mapping 'fields' and 'social spaces' in the style of Pierre Bourdieu, its capacity to document multidimensional geometric relationships within data being a snug fit for the relational mode of thought he championed. There is a risk, however, of over-relying on MCA when the data suggest alternative methods and, as a result, drawing unsound conclusions. As a case in point, I take a recent analysis of political attitudes in the UK using MCA that drew bold inferences about the relationship with social class and reanalyse the same data with categorical principal components analysis (CatPCA). The results suggest the opposite conclusion to what was originally argued. I thus urge greater methodological flexibility and openness among those wishing to chart fields and social spaces and, more specifically, I make a case for CatPCA as a tool of geometric data analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This empirical study incorporates social space and gender into consumer behaviour research to explore consumer identities and consumption practices within the UK spa marketplace. The paper contends that the relationship between gender, consumption and space is intertwined and reciprocal. Semi-structured interviews with ten men who visit spas reveal that spas influence the construction of men's consumer identities in multiple ways through empowerment, struggle and resistance that exist in the social spa space. The proposed theoretical framework reflects the dynamics between space, men's consumer identities and their consumption habits. The perceived, conceived and lived experiences that emerge through the data suggest that spas can transform into a gender-inclusive marketplace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drill, a sub-genre of hip-hop that emerged out of Chicago but is now a mainstay of United Kingdom youth street culture, often includes violent lyrics designed to antagonise rivals. This article draws on a longitudinal study with several drill artists to expand the academic understanding of this culture. Within this study, young people's violent online personas are a response to inhabiting a social space that developed due to a nexus of factors, including social deprivation, a lack of informal guardianship and the rules of the online attention economy. This digital dynamic sees artists competing for viewers' limited attention by producing exaggerated violent depictions to show cultural competence and embodied street capital as they vie for attention in an antagonistic continuum with other groups. As young people experience social spaces, not governed by the rules of the street, they often realise that their violent online persona's utility is limited, leading to a rebranding of their digital self. The study concludes that young people's involvement in online violence is usually a temporary response to the offline social spaces they inhabit. Attempts to address such activities should focus on young people's offline and online experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the post-medieval letter graffiti present at historic sites in the UK, and carries out a statistical analysis of the markings across multiple sites, with a view to determining authorship and intent. The data from the graffiti inscriptions is also examined within the wider social history context of naming traditions within the UK and elsewhere, and concludes that a measurable and distinct gender bias is present amongst the historical graffiti that has wide reaching implications with regard to concepts of gendered space and social norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the Covid-19 pandemic, citizens self-organized at an unprecedented scale to support vulnerable people in neighbourhoods, towns and cities. Drawing on an in-depth study of an online volunteering group that emerged at the beginning of the pandemic and helped thousands of people in a city in the United Kingdom, we unpack how citizens co-construct social media spaces to orchestrate helping activity during a crisis. Conceptualizing a novel synthesis of classical garbage can theory and virtual space, we reveal how emergent groups use 'spatial partitioning' and 'spatial mapping' to create a multi-layered spatial architecture that distributes decision-making and invites impromptu choice occasions: spontaneous matchmaking, proximal chance connects and speculative attraction. Our insights extend the study of emergent organizing and decision-making in crises. Furthermore, we advance a new line of theorizing which exploits garbage can theory, beyond its existing application in classical decision sciences, to posit a spatial view of organizing that paves the way for its novel applications in organization studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Loїc Wacquant's concept of territorial stigmatisation has resonated widely across the social sciences and is increasingly called upon in analyses and critiques of contemporary modes of governing marginality. It forms a key part of his broader theorisation of the polarised city and urban scholars have responded to his call for comparative analyses of neoliberal state-crafting in applying it to other urban contexts. This paper focuses on non-urban deindustrialised and peripheral spaces in discussing the ways in which the shifting interdependencies, differing historical trajectories, geographies (including terrain), and social relations of such spaces mark them out as outliers within, but not necessarily incompatible with, Wacquant's schema. It focuses on the former coalfield communities of the Welsh Valleys in the UK as one such example of a peripheral, deindustrialised 'area of relegation' distinct from urban locales. We bring together a rich body of UK scholarship that articulates the coalfields as 'laboratories of deindustrialisation' with Wacquant's framework. In doing so, we offer a critique of Wacquant's integration of social, physical and symbolic space. We argue that terrain and landscape are weakly incorporated within Wacquant's theorising, and those influenced by his writings, and discuss the potential of the theory of affordances as a useful complement in more fully integrating physical space in accounts of territorial stigmatisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Germs have been visually represented in popular texts for over 100 years, yet little is understood about the dominant practices/concepts resident in such images. This article presents a new typology of popular germ representations from the UK consisting of three main types: Scientific, Carrier and Analogous. The first category pertains to the realm of the scientist, the second to domestic space and social norms, and the third primarily to the realm of the imagination. The study identifies a further 13 sub-types and discusses each in turn. The authors argue that a more varied range of germ images exist than the previous binary positioning of germ representations in the US would suggest. They account for the continued adoption of the Analogous Germ in relation to four key cultural forces and problematize the use of the Monster Germ and its alignment of ugliness and obesity with disease. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the start of the pandemic in the UK, reports emerged of illegal raves being held by young people in violation of social distancing regulation. Media discourse was laden with condemnation levelled at the public health risk and the perceived immorality and unfairness associated with the behaviour. Drawing on 11 semi-structured interviews with attendees, this study explores the motivations for going to and experiences of raves during Covid-19. Raves are unique social safe spaces for LGBTQ+ individuals to create community, emotional connections and express their sexual identity. Additionally, the pursuit of escapism via raves was no longer only symbolic, as individuals chose to escape the confines of lockdown. These findings illuminate the function of raves as social spaces outside normal society where participants can experience identity expression, connection, and freedom. They offer a more nuanced understanding of raves beyond stereotypes of hedonist youth and immorality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Telling transgender and gender-diverse stories is an increasingly common process. The stories that are told are situated reflections of individual lives. Nonetheless, these stories tell us something about the world we live in, since they are, simultaneously, conditioned by and an expression of the social, cultural and historical contexts that surrounds them. Drawing upon 58 transcribed in-depth interviews with transgender and gender-diverse people in Portugal and the UK, in this paper, I focus on the dynamics and complexity of coming out stories and their relation with specific spaces such as the 'private' spaces of the family, the 'virtual' and 'face-to-face' spaces of transgender and gender-diverse communities and the 'institutional' spaces of work and school within these individuals' lifecourse. I will consider these transgender and gender-diverse people's social positionings, specifically in terms of age and national contexts in order to understand how their stories are shaped by several interconnected and mutually inter-influencing factors that condition their experiences and fields of possibilities. I will argue that coming out processes are strongly interrelated with located social times and spaces and the significant, symbolic and generalized others that occupy them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The findings of this article emerge from an eight-month study examining career identity practices amongst a select group of fitness professionals in the U.K. We examine how the inter-relationship between physical and social space can denote how power is acquired, displayed, and used by individuals interacting in a shared space. The findings show that power is signified through spatial practices as individuals negotiate through triadic space, creating an identity of space and place for both trainer and client that identifies power, and signifies who has power. Fitness professionals with high levels of symbolic power are able to subvert organizational spatial norms to better serve themselves and their clients, while those with lower levels of symbolic power are forced to, or choose to, negotiate or abdicate space to others. These findings are relevant to a wide range of occupations where self-employment and contract workers interact in shared space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the need of social spaces, and the struggles for domestic architecture of stairs. Topics include that diverse sensory experiences can be felt within the same location by a wide variety of visitors at numerous points in time; and that stairs in English homes depict liminal architectural structure that resembles culture and stories occurred between storeys.

A new method is proposed here aimed at eliciting the mechanisms which maintain the relational positioning of people and places within social space. This 'mapping tool' is inherently relational by design and involves participants creating visual representations of their geographic imaginaries, encompassing their perceptions and preferences of different localities. This is followed by an interviewing approach wherein participants 'speak to' their map, producing 'thick' narratives detailing the ties that bind people and places. The method was developed and used as part of a 3-year study into the geographic imaginaries of young people in the UK, involving the collection of 1,000 maps, together with over 200 interviews, across 20 diverse localities. We draw on empirical examples of using the method from this study, including processes of differentiation within the middle classes and the place-based identities of towns, cities and localities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this theoretically oriented review is to examine the role of space and spatial thinking in the changing teaching and learning environments in higher education. The starting point is that educational space is not a pre-set institution or only a physical space but a social construction. As such, space is a crucial element in the learning process and student engagement. In the paper, basic concepts of educational space and spatiality are discussed. The complexity of the relations between spatial understanding and student engagement is demonstrated by referring to a specific drama and theatre course as a case example. The case was a joint master-level course between two European universities (in UK and Finland) where multiple online platforms were used. By the means of the learning space in the case, we discuss the nexus of spaces, comprising a dynamic spatial plurality across the learning environments. Blurring boundaries between formal and informal spaces seems to give room for meaningful and embodied experiences - social, situational and emotional connectedness with students in different places. Formal ICT solutions of digital learning do not automatically pay enough attention to spatial aspects of learning and engagement. Understanding the connections between spatial thinking and the meanings of engagement and senses of belonging brings vital elements to the development of digital learning and learning environments. Parallel with the discussions of the distinctive role of interaction and communication in digital environments, spatial understanding can offer an important contribution to increase understanding of personal meanings of learning. Based on the theoretical reflections of the presented case, bodily experiences of the sense of "sharing a space" appears to interrelate with the feelings of belonging and ownership in learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Field analysis and the relational approach to historical social-scientific explanation of which it is an instance – helps illuminate the administrative dynamics of empires. While most studies of imperial dynamics emphasize the ‘high imperialism’ of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this article extends field analysis to a crucial case from the second half of the eighteenth century: the English East India Company's transition from a (largely) merchant trading company to a territorial power. In this disordered space of administration, officials struggling with one another for metropolitan recognition provided moral accounts of themselves which, on the one hand, explained their behaviour in terms drawn from abstract, purportedly universal social spaces, and, on the other hand, claimed credibility through a personal ‘interest in disinterest’. I argue that these moral accounts helped delimit the boundaries of and shape the dynamics within a distinctively imperial administrative field. To analyse this transformation, I suggest a synthesis of three varieties of relational analysis: Bourdieu's field theory, Fligstein and McAdam's analysis of strategic action fields, and Padgett and Powell's work on network folding and robust action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Distinction, Bourdieu indicated that literary taste was just as homologous with social class as tastes in music, food or art, even if it received comparatively little attention. Recent scholarship across various nations aiming to test, update and refine Bourdieu’s thesis has generally confirmed a relationship between cultural capital and reading habits, but neglect of Bourdieu’s multidimensional view of class, as well as reliance on rather undifferentiated genre categories, has tended to limit the conclusions. On top of that, gender is often flagged as far more important to the structuring of literary taste than Bourdieu ever supposed. This article seeks to overcome the limitations of extant research and clarify the relationship between class and gender in structuring literary taste, and thus symbolic domination, by exploring data relating to reading preferences in the 2012 British Cohort Study using a Bourdieusian class scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper debates the role of performance in London at the turn of the twentieth century using a collection of archival photographs from London’s National Portrait Gallery. Taken by photographer Cavendish Morton, these images depict a variety of artists and performers associated with London’s artistic community between the years 1900–1910. Through an analysis of the broader social circumstances surrounding the production of these images, performance is illuminated as being an integral mode of cultural exchange in British society in the early twentieth century. The liminal or transitional space created through acts of performance gave entertainers of various genders, ethnicities and class the ability to exert their own agency, manipulate dominant stereotypes and influence British audiences. On space of the stage, the medium of performance had the capability to cross the borders of difference between people, culture and place. As a mode of critical inquiry, performance provides a method for conceptualizing the production of these intercultural artistic spaces in the present as well as a unique analytical tool for examining the performative aspects of the practice of photography, archival research, and the history-making process. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While racialized youth are often central in debates on citizenship, multiculturalism and belonging, those ascribed as ‘British Chinese’ are constructed as model minorities, lacking a hybridized culture but insulated from racism, and thus invisible in these discussions. This article argues, however, that the model minority discourse is itself a specific form of contemporary racialization that revives ‘yellow peril’ discourses on the capacities of particular ‘Oriental’ bodies. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, it examines how young people challenge these constructions, by drawing on popular culture to organize and participate in what they call ‘British Chinese’ and, more provocatively, ‘Oriental’ nightlife spaces. It analyses how through these spaces participants forge a sense of identity that allows them to reimagine themselves as racialized subjects. It demonstrates how these spaces constitute transient sites of experimental belonging, facilitating new cultural politics and social identifications that at once contest reified conceptions of British Chineseness yet also create new exclusions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Until now, British Asian popular music culture and leisure spaces have attracted little sociological investigation. This article redresses the lack of attention paid to this area by focusing on an ethnographic study of the ‘desi’ South Asian club scene in London. It explores the relationship between contemporary discourses of Asianness as they are constructed within an East London desi club space and made to matter through embodied social practices. Asian bodies are disciplined in the making of normative ethnic, gendered and sexual subjectivities, which demonstrates how discourses of difference create complex subjectivities and practices that theories of diaspora and cultural studies have not fully explored. It offers a rethinking of diasporic identities as lived and embodied experiences that are ambivalently constructed and performative projects, neither entirely resistant to white, dominant discourses nor wholly complicit with its existing norms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper draws on ethnographic research carried out in Birmingham, UK – a city significant for its sizeable Muslim population and its iconic role in the history of minority ethnic settlement in Britain – to consider how associations of place and ethnicity work in different ways to inform ideas about ‘Muslim community’ in twenty-first-century Britain. The paper charts happenings around a local event in an area of majority Asian settlement and how representations of the area as a place of Muslim community were used to implicate it in the ‘war on terror’. The paper goes on to show how this sensibility is disrupted by Muslims themselves through alternative engagements with space and ethnicity. The paper argues that these offer a ground for making Muslim community in ways that actively engage with histories and patterns of ethnic settlement in the city rather than being determined by them. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The increasingly diverse character of London's multicultural landscape has shaped how migrants interact with(in) the different spaces of the city. This process entails both settled and incoming migrants' participation in place-making; a mutual imbrication that might promote the long-settled migrants' evocation of a lost terrain. This article unpacks that process by looking at the Latin American social football scene of South London, specifically a space known asla cancha(the pitch). This was founded by Chilean political refugees during the 1970s and it has incorporated Latin American ‘economic’ migrants and ‘local’ Britons through time. Starting from the evocation of a lost ‘golden age’ ofla cancha, the paper unpacks this space's contested, complex and changing nature. It presents diaspora space, community and belonging as lived processes. Through this depiction, the assumptions of homogeneous and isolated migrant communities are challenged, as are the diaspora's nostalgic claims that also emerge from them. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article revisits recent debates about the responsibilities of public scholarship. The piece argues that writing in a range of fields has engaged with issues of racism, in particular as racism has been manifested in the ‘war on terror’, but that this discussion has been muted within the sub-field of race and ethnic studies. There is a discussion of the impact of pressures to demonstrate the ‘usefulness’ of research to a wider public and the limits that this can place on the formulation of research. This argument is expanded through consideration of the author's experience of researching and lobbying with community and campaigning groups. The piece goes on to consider the implications of the marketization of higher education for critical scholarship and concludes that there is value in a more ‘private’ sociology that may not be easily accommodated in the marketized university. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Family learning has been an important mode of education deployed by governments in the United Kingdom over the past 20 years, and is positioned at the nexus of various social policy areas whose focus stretch beyond education. Drawing on qualitative research exploring mothers’ participation in seven different family learning programmes across West London, this paper looks at how this type of education is mobilised; that is, how mothers are ‘encouraged’ to participate and benefit from this type of programme. Framed by a neo-liberal policy climate and Foucauldian writings on governmentality and surveillance, we explore how participating mothers are carefully ‘targeted’ for this type of learning through their children and through school/ nursery spaces, and how programmes themselves then operate as a supportive social space aimed at facilitating social networks, friendship and personal development linked to positions of gender, ethnicity, class and migrant status. It is the socio-spatial workings of ‘supportive’ power and power relations that enable family learning to be mobilised that ensures its popularity as a social policy initiative. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

ABSTRACT In less than a decade, online social networks (OSN) have revolutionised social communications worldwide. Nowhere is this more evident than amongst today's young consumers, so called millennial teens, who have snapped up these identity-making digital social spaces claiming them as their own. This article examines the range of strategies and resources employed by UK millennials for self-presentation in OSNs and the resultant implications on teenage identity construction in the postmodern era. An in-depth qualitative content analysis of 20 teen OSN profiles was conducted and analysed against extant theories of impression management, self-identity and self-presentation. Our analysis revealed that millennials were deeply immersed in self-presentation activities. They employed a wide range of 'intentional' self-presentation strategies and drew on colour, design and symbolism to create complex, elaborate and decorative versions of self, which we have termed the 'aesthetic self'. OSNs satisfy teen needs for intense social interaction with their peers, offer potential for copious identity experimentation and reduce the need to consume physical symbolic items in order to convey meaning, thus acting as an accelerator in the teen identity-making process. Our findings extend existing frameworks for teenage self-identity theory and moreover have significant implications for future marketing practice, particularly sourcing consumer behaviour data, brand management and marketing communications strategies. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on ethnographies of three areas of hospital life in the United Kingdom, this article explores the different logics played out through moments of access to hospital services. The authors make explicit the character of the hospital as heterotopia where different social actors are required to “fit” in with the organizational requirements of the hospital. What becomes clear is how the hospital as institution can accommodate particular logics at particular times that are incommensurate with the organization of the hospital and the “care” of patients. Such accommodation makes explicit the contestable characteristics of the hospital where alignments are made between multiple logics. Through processes of ordering, enrolling, or even dismissing potential patients (or even logics), the authors argue that divisions are labored across hospital life and are worked to accomplish particular social worlds. The issue of which social worlds are being labored and how they work for or against a logic of care is made explicit here. Through their ethnographic work, the authors show how through processes of ordering, enrolling, and dismissing persons, subject positions, and logics during moments of access, the hospital can be understood as a complex heterotopia that works politics through clinical and managerial practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores spaces of belonging of British-born Cypriots who have 'returned' to the parental homeland, Cyprus. Drawing on life narratives and ethnographic observations collected during fieldwork in Cyprus, the findings demonstrate the potential limitations of exploring notions of 'home' and 'belonging' within ethnic, national or primordial cultural boundaries. Rather, my analysis indicates the need to focus on the new spaces of belonging formed around personal and social relations. These migrants draw upon a variety of home, expatriate and international relationships to create a space made up by components to which they feel they belong, characterised by their time, place, views and experiences. The privileging of such experiences of belonging over 'traditional' classifications of identity (such as ethnicity, religiosity and nationality) brings about a sense of unity defined by one's relations to (actual and metaphorical) spaces, beyond the traditional 'here/there' and 'them/us' dichotomies. By negotiating 'essentialised' and 'non-essentialised' notions of 'home', participants establish new 'third-cultural spaces of belonging'-hybridised, yet located in Cyprus. Hence, being part of such a 'third-cultural space' and also of a 'localised space' are not mutually exclusive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a recent empirical project on 'the Bengal diaspora', the paper explores the construction and contestation of meanings around the iconic East London street, Brick Lane. Taking the 2006 protests around the film Brick Lane as its starting point, the paper draws on original interviews conducted in 2008 with a range of Bengali community representatives, to examine the narratives of space, community and belonging that emerge around the idea of Brick Lane as the 'cultural heartland' of the British Bangladeshi community. By exploring the representation, production and contestation of 'social space' through everyday practices, the paper engages with and contests the representation of minority ethnic 'communities' in the context of contemporary multicultural London and examines the process of 'claiming' and 'making' space in East London. In so doing, the paper contributes to a critical tradition that challenges essentialising and pathologizing accounts of ethnic communities and racialized spaces, or that places them outside of broader social and historical processes - redolent, for example, in contemporary discussions about 'parallel lives' or 'the clash of civilizations'. By contrast, this paper views social space as made through movement and narration, with a particular emphasis on the social agency of local Bengali inhabitants and the multiple meanings that emerge from within this 'imagined community'. However, rather than simply stressing the unfinished and processual nature of spatial meanings, the paper insists on the historical, embodied and affective dimensions of such meaning making, and a reckoning with the broader social and political landscape within which such meanings take shape. The focus on Brick Lane provides an empirically rich, geographically and historically located lens through which to explore the complex role of ethnicity as a marker of social space and of spatial practices of resistance and identity. By exploring Bengali Brick Lane through its narratives of past, present and future, these stories attest to the symbolic and emotional importance of such spaces, and to their complex imaginings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Translanguaging is both going between different linguistic structures and systems and going beyond them. It includes the full range of linguistic performances of multilingual language users for purposes that transcend the combination of structures, the alternation between systems, the transmission of information and the representation of values, identities and relationships. Translanguaing space is a space for the act of translanguaging as well as a space created through translanguaging. It is a space where the process of what Bhabha calls “cultural translation” between traditions takes place. The notion of translanguaging space embraces the concepts of creativity and criticality, which are fundamental but hitherto under-explored dimensions of multilingual practices. Using a combination of observation of multilingual practices and metalanguage commentaries by three Chinese youths in Britain, the article retells their experiences of growing up in a society which is dominated by a variety of monolingual ideologies, their multilingual practices and the creativity and criticality shown through such practices, the identity positions they construct and present for themselves, and the social spaces they create and occupy within the wider space they find themselves in. It examines the following themes: fun with words, from weekend bilingualism to flexible multilingualism, creating space and cultivating relationships, and transnational space. In examining these themes, a method, called Moment Analysis, is proposed, which aims to capture what appears to be spur-of-the-moment actions that are semiotically highly significant to the actors and their subsequent actions, what prompted such actions and the consequences of such moments including the reactions by other people. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Genomics researchers and policy makers have accused nutrigenetic testing companies—which provide DNA-based nutritional advice online—of misleading the public. The UK and USA regulation of the tests has hinged on whether they are classed as “medical” devices, and alternative regulatory categories for “lifestyle” and less-serious genetic tests have been proposed. This article presents the findings of a qualitative thematic analysis of the webpages of nine nutrigenetic testing companies. We argue that the companies, mirroring and negotiating the regulatory debates, were creating a new social space for products between medicine and consumer culture. This space was articulated through three themes: (i) how “genes” and tests were framed, (ii) how the individual was imagined vis a vis health information, and (iii) the advice and treatments offered. The themes mapped onto four frames or models for genetic testing: (i) clinical genetics, (ii) medicine, (iii) intermediate, and (iv) lifestyle. We suggest that the genomics researchers and policy makers appeared to perform what Gieryn (Gieryn, T.F. (1983). Boundary-work and the demarcation of science from non-science: strains and interests in professional ideologies of scientists. American Sociological Review, 48, 781–795.) has termed “boundary work”, i.e., to delegitimize the tests as outside proper medicine and science. Yet, they legitimated them, though in a different way, by defining them as lifestyle, and we contend that the transformation of the boundaries of science into a creation of such hybrid or compromise categories is symptomatic of current historical times. Social scientists studying medicine have referred to the emergence of “lifestyle” products. This article contributes to this literature by examining the historical, regulatory and marketing processes through which certain goods and services become defined this way. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

• Summary: This article explores relations of power in social work using insights drawn from the critical 'toolkit' emanating from work of French philosopher, Michel Foucault. The article discusses the relationship between Foucault's conceptual tools of 'knowledge and power', the emergence of 'the modern subject' and the concept of 'governmentality'. Despite ongoing pressures, professional expertise persists as a core element of neo-liberal government in the management of the population. We use a Foucauldian perspective to explore two issues central to contemporary practice: surveillance and discretion that epitomise dualism of power relations. On the one hand, surveillance brings with it a potentially problematic process especially in context of top down managerial power; yet, on the other hand, discretion is much more focused on what Foucault (1977) calls 'the microphysics of power' with opportunities for 'resistance' from the bottom up. • Findings: Professional expertise creates a paradox where surveillance and discretion operate within similar social space as the expression of power relations that encompass the matrix of users, carers and social workers. On one hand, surveillance restricts practice however; on the other, complexity opens the space for resistance and new formulations of power relations. • Applications: Exposing social work activity to a critical stance enables the exploration of relations of power identifying how commitments such as empowerment and anti-oppressive practice become detached from their original radical and humanitarian moorings to feature now as components of oppressive discourses they might once have challenged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the exception of academics, occupational groups within universities remain relatively under-researched. Based upon qualitative interviews with 27 research administrators in 19 UK universities, this article reports on a small-scale qualitative project to investigate the workday worlds of these 'boundary-crossing' and 'occupationally hybrid' staff. The article focuses specifically upon the organisational constraints imposed upon research administrators in terms of what has been termed 'moral exclusion' in the form of: negative labelling, rendering invisible, and stigmatising and blaming. The ways in which research administrators used their social agency determinedly to contest such exclusion and negative labelling are also portrayed. The article concludes with a discussion of the occupational social space offered by this particular role, which many interviewees recounted as being highly positive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article considers choices and opportunities to access the arts in the contemporary UK, connecting these to engagements in culture in relation to position in social space. The reflection is informed by the ESRC funded investigation of the Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion project, CCSE, which assessed the applicability to Britain of Pierre Bourdieu's work in Distinction (1984), 40 years after his original French study. While exploring the broader thesis the project probes and disagrees with many elements of Bourdieu's arguments. This article outlines the main thesis about how cultural capacity affects the structure of social inequality and explores how this takes shape in the current British context. After considering the broader picture emerging from the interplay of various cultural fields, based on Multiple Correspondence Analysis, the discussion focuses on the field of visual art. This has the aim to reflect about the links that this field has with broader cultural processes in the UK and its specificities. The field of visual art appears as one of the most distinctive fields of cultural practices, and one where the intensity of participation is highly relevant for social position. The engagements of individuals indicate powerful tensions in the ways people conceive visual art. Cultural capital is relevant for the kind and level of involvement in this field with individuals being positioned predominantly according to possession of cultural capital, but with inflections linked to particular demographics where divisions of gender, age and ethnicity, as well as biographical patterns are significant. These are mixed in different ways as resources for social position in the field of visual art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a contemporary shift in the institutional context of ‘disabled’ children's education in the United Kingdom from segregated special to mainstream schools. This change is tied to wider deinstitutionalised or reinstitutionalised geographies of disabled people, fragile globalised educational ‘inclusion’ agendas, and broader concerns about social cohesiveness. Although coeducating children is expected to transform negative representations of (dis)ability in future society, there are few detailed explorations of how children's everyday sociospatial practices (re)produce or transform dominant representations of (dis)ability. With this in mind, children's contextual and shifting performances of (dis)ability in two case study school playground (recreational) spaces are explored. The findings demonstrate that children with mind-body differences are variously (dis)abled, in comparison with sociospatially shifting norms of ability, which have body, learning, and emotional-social facets. The discussion therefore places an emphasis on the need to incorporate ‘intellectual’ and ‘emotional’ differences more fully into geographical studies of disability and identity. The paper has wider resonance for transformative expectations placed on colocating children with a variety of ‘axes of difference’ (such as gender, ‘race’, ethnicity, and social class) in schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author argues that health and healthcare inequalities in Great Britain can only be effectively addressed by a shift towards collective notions of wellbeing amongst people with learning disabilities (PWLD) that take seriously the social spaces and networks within which they live. He highlights the implications of a health policy based on individual consumption for PWLD. He points out the limitations of collective approaches to health. He describes the essence of wellbeing for PWLD.

This article reports research in three Nottingham schools, concerned with (1) ‘The school as fertile ground: how the ethos of a school enables everyone in it to benefit from the presence of artists in class’; (2) ‘Children on the edge: how the arts reach those children who otherwise exclude themselves from class activities, for any reason’ and (3) ‘Children's voices and choices: how even very young children can learn to express their wishes, and then have them realised through arts projects’. The research methodology was rooted in two modes of inquiry, philosophical investigation and action research. The article draws on this research to argue that arts-based work in school has helped disadvantaged and/or disaffected children to engage in activities (both arts-based and others), and to be able to lay the groundwork for exercising voice and agency as they did so. If social justice is to flourish there is a need for particular kinds of public spaces and a need to create conditions such that children can learn to participate in those spaces, whether or not they are comfortable with the usual settings for ‘rational argument’ or ‘deliberative democracy’. It is suggested that arts-based education, in some forms, is one good way of creating these conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Michael Hulme and Anna Truch's article on 'Interspace', is one in which a new field of social spaces in between the established ones of home, work and social lives is developed. Hulme and Truch argue that the mobility of the device allows what has previously been a transitory space to become a social field in its own right. Following on from spontaneous comments from the subjects in their study, they define this space as increasingly important. In this article, the way in which the mobile phone stretches boundaries of social time and space is explored. This stretching opens up a whole new territory, which becomes a place of negotiation that exists in the travels the individual subject makes between the more formalised spaces. Hulme and Truch define this space as one of transition between established, more formalised fields; one of overlapping fields--in interspace the individual is juggling roles from a variety of social fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If there was a single best way to design a house to live in, all modern houses would be the same, but they are not: typical modern Japanese houses are not the same as typical modern British ones. As cultural values vary, so do psychological needs; and house form changes accordingly. The basic boundaries in the house are expressions of social classifications which regulate human behaviour, and boundaries are a useful focus when considering the meaning and cultural variation of house design. In the present study, data on spatial boundaries (house plans) are interpreted in the light of the Japanese emphasis on the inside–outside classification, which not only forms a physical demarcation in and around the house but also creates and reinforces psychological boundaries in human relationships. The social boundaries which define and maintain this classification are also evident in phenomenological accounts of Japanese people resident in the United Kingdom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that cinema was an important social space for young, female munitions workers in Britain during the First World War. Unlike the public house, the cinema erected no social barriers to a female presence. Additionally, the cinema trade was promoting films to a youthful audience which was attracted to movies that emphasised active female roles such as those in the serial queen melodramas. In munitions areas such as Gretna and Carlisle in the Borders young female workers flocked to the cinema while attendances declined in some non-munitions areas. State-run cinemas in the Gretna area also encouraged their presence, but incurred the anger of the film trade by attempting to divert workers away from commercial outlets, with limited success, however. The wartime public visibility of young female workers in social spaces such as the cinema increased pre-war concerns about the content of film, particularly when dealing with themes of social relationships and morality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract In modern society natural objects like spiders or snakes have a primary role as the loci of specific phobias. Drawing on interviews with members of the UK National Phobics Society (NPS) and associated service providers, this paper explores the implications of the increasingly significant role played by new media, particularly Virtual Reality technologies, in the treatment of these ‘bio-phobias’. While advanced technological approaches provide new possibilities for individual sufferers to experiment with and control their phobic responses they also exemplify certain aspects of those specifically modern social relations that are the media within which bio-phobic behaviours develop. From a critical sociological perspective the techno-philic move to the medium of cyber-space may actually exaggerate characteristically modern social relations that seek (but never convincingly manage) to assert complete ‘cultural’ control over the unpredictable ‘natural’ elements threatening our cultural integrity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the conference "Spaces of Late Socialism" held on March 13, 2013, at Exeter University. According to the article, several scholars including James Mark, David Crowley, and Anna Kan discussed various methods by which social groups, political activists, and socialist governments conceptualized social space and its relationship to political opposition or conformity during the Cold War.

The article focuses on the expansion of coffeehouses in Great Britain following the introduction of a wondrous new elixir in London by Armenian named Pasqua Rosee in 1652. It is stated that there were more than 3,000 coffeehouses in Great Britain by 1675 from that single cafe at which the new drink grew rapidly in popularity. It is noted that often innovation emerges from many ideas that occurs in a social space and is not driven by the brilliant insights of a single person or small group.

This article examines the connections between gender and criminality by reconsidering the meaning of women's sudden visibility as legal subjects at mid-19th century Great Britain and the general politics of cultural visibility itself. During this period, the murdering mother became a generic figure in the courtroom, victimized by biology and poverty, and rescued from judgment by the law into the arms of medicine. This trend also reflects incoherences in the conventional gendering of social and conceptual space, as well as the difficulty of attributing any simple politics to the practices by which a culture makes the hidden visible. Both the advent of the divorce court and the trial of accused poisoner Madeleine Smith contributed to the visibility of Victorian women.