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COVID-19 has caused unprecedented disruption to previously settled everyday routines, prompting a period of forced experimentation as people have adjusted to rapid changes in their private and working lives. For discussions regarding consumption, this period of experimentation has been interesting, as the apparent instability has disturbed the ongoing trajectory of consumption practices, and with it has created possibilities for a transition toward sustainability. In this article, we examine food practices (e.g., food shopping, preparation, and eating) in seven countries (France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, UK, and Vietnam) to assess what we can learn to accelerate transitions toward sustainable consumption. Grounded in a practice theoretical approach, our empirical analysis shows how disruption of everyday routines has generated socio-materially bounded experimentation. We demonstrate commonalities across contexts in how lockdown measures have restricted the performance of previously taken-for-granted practices. We also show diversity in experimentation as food consumption is entangled in other everyday practices. Our study, on one hand, portrays how the adaptation of food practices allows disruption to be managed, demonstrating creativity in working within and around restrictions to continue to provide services for everyday life. On the other hand, we reveal that the capacity of experimentation is not evenly distributed among people and this variation helps in identifying the wider socio-material conditions that constrain and enable opportunities for readjustment. Understanding disparities that affect experimentation (e.g., integration of food practices with work and caring practices) is informative when thinking about how to stimulate sustainability transformations in food practices and provides critical reflections on strategies to enable sustainable consumption.

The way in which time is produced and consumed during everyday life has crucial implications for sustainable consumption. Social practice approaches in particular have directed attention to the intersection of personal and collective temporalities as important for the patterning of everyday consumption. This article examines the temporal dynamics of daily practice-arrangement bundles experienced in “locked down” households in Germany, Ireland, Italy, Norway, and the UK during the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on 97 in-depth interviews with participants in all five countries, we investigate quotidian experiences of the breaking and (re-)making of daily routines in response to the pandemic. In doing so, we explore and document the temporal processes by which daily practice-arrangement bundles become undone, reassembled, and reconfigured. Our analysis reveals the institutional ordering of temporal relations between practices in terms of how they hang together, synchronize, or compete for householders’ time. Giving particular attention to socially differentiated lockdown experiences, we analyze how disruption-induced changes to social institutions and systems of provision impact the hanging together of daily practice-arrangement bundles and the strategies employed to restructure and rebundle them in unequal ways. We further consider varied experiences in temporal reorganizations of daily life that support sustainable consumption of food and mobility and reflect on the implications of the analysis for sustainability governance.[Figure: see text]

This paper draws on conceptual and analytical tools from cultural sociology to analyze media representations of the MMA right after the murder of a twenty-year-old boy, that took place in a small village in central Italy by a gang of young men, two of whom frequented a MMA gym. While often characterized as violent and uncivilized, MMA has a core following of fans who watch and practice MMA out of an interest in the effects of the sport in terms of health and well-being. Through in depth qualitative analysis of MMA media discourse offered by traditional and new media, this paper explores the way the MMA media constructs symbolic boundaries around different kinds of fights inside and outside the gym, through aesthetic and moral evaluations based on the hierarchical ‘distinctions’ between “violence” and “health” as possible outcomes of the MMA training process. Particularly, we carry out a discourse analysis based on Italian Newspapers, Magazines and Facebook groups dedicated to MMA, through which we frame the multiple representations of the discursive production built around the MMA in Italy. Our aim is to identify the different ways in which the discussion about this event provided narrative paths and points of view about the meaning of MMA, focusing on the reputational consequences concerning health, especially in its physical and mental expressions. This research may prove useful for scholars interested in MMA, culture, and sports media studies.

The paper present the so-called “practice turn in contemporary theory” and its possible and profitable sociological application to the field of food studies. Starting from the epistemological perspective that sees the concept of practice as the ongoing arrangement resulting from the social organization between different elements, I present a brief critical review of the research works about food culture that has drawn on a practice-based approach, in order to show how it affords to move from a “sociology of food” to a “sociology of food social practices”. Then, I discuss one particular approach offered by theories of practice, based on the category of “sociomateriality”. Finally, I briefly introduce, by way of example, the empirical analysis of the practice of professional cooking to show the potentiality of this approach. In conclusion, I will discuss the strengths and the vulnerabilities related to the analysis of food social practices, focusing in particular on the issue of symbolic power.

This work focuses on a tradition of empirical research on popular music that is still underdeveloped in Italy, at least for what concern the particular musical event that is the ‘live concert’. It is progressively diversifying its forms and manifestations and multiplying its presence on the national territory and it is eventually become more and more an object of fecund analysis. As a typical moment of the representation of popular music, then, this work, through an ethnography of the main music festivals existing on the contemporary Italian scene, questions the intertwining of the two dimensions – the commercial and the aesthetic one – which are at the base of this particular field of cultural production.

Drawing on the inspiring work by Wacquant about apprenticeship in boxing, I present data generated from a five-year ethnographic study of one Wushu Kung Fu Association in Italy. Drawing on a Bourdieusian version of theories of social practice, the aim is to investigate in depth the relationship between habitus and materials, as it seems an underestimated issue both in Wacquant’s presentation and in most martial arts studies developed from his work. The aim is to explore the relationship between the practitioner and the set of weapons—a chief part of the martial art training—as an endless work of conditioning. To this aim, according to what Wacquant calls “enactive ethnography”, I completely immersed myself inside the fieldwork in order to be able to explore the phenomenon and to personally test its operative mechanism. The challenge here is to enter the theatre of action and, to the highest degree possible, train in the ways of the people studied so as to gain a visceral apprehension of their universe as materials and springboard for its analytic reconstruction. Drawing on the difference between the cognitive, conative, and emotive components of habitus through which, according to Bourdieu, social agents navigate social space and animate their lived world, I show how conditioning works not only on the conative or cognitive components (learning techniques and incorporating kinetic schemes), but how a deeper psychological form of conditioning also comes into play, which aims to neutralize the shock due to the fear generated by the threat of a contusion. It is at this point, therefore, that the affective component of the habitus becomes crucial in constructing a sort of intimacy bond with the tool. The detectable transformation in the habitus of the practitioner, eventually, can be deciphered, starting from the characteristics of the tool that produces, in the ways and limits given by its material features, such a transformation. In the end, I stress the relevance of recognizing the active role of objects in transforming the habitus and I briefly discuss the potentiality of enactive ethnography in analyzing social practices.