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The article is based on disability geography and draws on the social-geographic conception of relational space, which is perceived as being constantly created, never finished, heterogeneous, and embodied, and not a space that is given and everywhere the same. It offers a specific way of linking the discursive and material dimensions of disability, which intersect in the concept of social space, and refers to Lefebvre's trialectics of production - spatial practices, the representation of space, and spaces of representations. To analyse the mutual production of social space and social bodies, we use Goffman's concept of civil inattention. We ask how such social practices as gazing, addressing, asking, or dodging that co-create the social space of electric wheelchair users influence their movement through material space, and through the spatial reactions of wheelchair users responding to unwanted attention we trace the homogenisation and differentiation of space. The text is based on a long-term study (2010-2018) of the temporal/spatial behaviour of five electric wheelchair users (four men and one woman) diagnosed with muscular dystrophy who live in the City of Brno.

It is a philosophical truism that we must think of others as moral agents, not merely as causal or statistical objects. But why? I argue that this follows from the best resolution of an antinomy between our experience of morality as necessarily binding on the will and our knowledge that all moral beliefs originate in contingent histories. We can address this antinomy only by understanding moral deliberation via interpersonal relationships, which simultaneously vindicate and constrains morality’s bind on the will. This means that moral agency is fundamentally social. I model an attitude toward our causal nature on sociologist Erving Goffman’s concept of ‘civil inattention’; our social practice of agency requires that we give minimal attention to the contingent origins of moral judgments in ourselves and others. Understood this way, seeing ourselves as moral agents requires avoiding appeal to causal aetiology to settle substantive moral disagreement.

Treating uncivil encounters as breaches of the ritual contract of civil inattention (Goffman 1963), this article connects ritualized interaction between strangers in everyday life and the production and maintenance of moral order more generally. The ongoing enactment of the ritual of civil inattention maintains and characterizes the particular kind of moral order that strangers collectively produce in urban public spaces.Drawing on select empirical materials – from unsolicited commentary to queue-jumping – gathered under the auspices of the Researching Incivility in Everyday Life (RIEL) Project this article builds upon the ‘everyday incivilities’ approach pioneered bySmith, Phillips and King (2010)to examine moral dimensions of everyday encounters between strangers. Preliminary analysis of the RIEL data indicates that ritual dimensions of interaction between strangers in public space provide interactants withmoral affordances, that is, opportunities to align themselves with an idealized moral order through projective moral action.

Societies evolve practices that reflect social norms of appropriateness in social interaction, for example when and to what extent one should respect the boundaries of another person’s private sphere. One such practice is what the sociologist Erving Goffman called civil inattention—the social norm of showing a proper amount of indifference to others—which functions as an almost unnoticed yet highly potent privacy-preserving mechanism. These practices can be disrupted by technologies that afford new forms of intrusions. In this paper, we show how new networked technologies, such as facial recognition (FR), challenge our ability to practice civil inattention. We argue for the need to revitalise, in academic and policy debates, the role of civil inattention and related practices in regulating behaviour in public space. Our analysis highlights the relational nature of privacy and the importance of social norms in accomplishing and preserving it. While our analysis goes some way in supporting current calls to ban FR technology, we also suggest that, pending a ban and in light of the power of norms to limit what is otherwise technically possible, cultivating new practices of civil inattention may help address the challenges raised by FR and other forms of digital surveillance in public.

Background Internationally, women report challenges breastfeeding in public spaces. This study aimed to investigate the social-spatial aspects of public spaces in one UK city, Cardiff, in order to suggest possible barriers and facilitators to breastfeeding in public spaces. Methods The study observation location guide prioritised places that had been reported as hostile to breastfeeding or breastfeeding friendly in the existing literature. Data were collected between April and September 2018 at various times of day, in several areas of the city, and included transport (n = 4), transport hubs (n = 3), high streets (n = 4), cafes (n = 2), a large city centre shopping complex, comprising of three joined shopping malls and a large city centre department store containing a third café. Low inference field notes were written on an encrypted smart phone and expanded soon after. Data were analysed thematically using deductive codes based on the observation schedule. Additional inductive codes relating to places were added. Results Overall, public transport and the city centre were inhospitable environments for those who might need to breastfeed, and even more so for those who need to express breastmilk. The core barriers and facilitators across locations were the availability of appropriate seating coupled with either high privacy or politely unimposing strangers (civil inattention). The one variation to this model arose from the department store café, where civil inattention was not performed and there was low privacy, but breastfeeding occurred anyway. Conclusions This research highlights the physical and social barriers to breastfeeding within one urban city centre in the UK and its associated transport links. It is clear that there is an urgent need for change in urban city centres and public transport if countries are to meet their aims in relation to increasing breastfeeding rates. Interventions will need to be multifaceted, accounting for social norms relating to infant feeding as well as changes to the physical environment, policy and potentially legal change. Further research should be undertaken in other countries to examine the extent to which hostile environments exist, and if correcting these could facilitate breastfeeding and reduce gender-based violence.

Everyday surveillance work is increasingly performed by non-human algorithms. These entities can be conceptualized as machinic flâneurs that engage in distanciated flânerie: subjecting urban flows to a dispassionate, calculative and expansive gaze. This paper provides some theoretical reflections on the nascent forms of algorithmic practice materializing in the Australian cities of Darwin and Perth, and some of their implications for urban relations and social justice. It looks at the idealization – and operational black boxing – of automated watching programs, before considering their impacts on notions such as ‘the right to the city’ and ‘the right to the face’. It will argue that the turn to facial recognition software for the purposes of automating urban governance reconstitutes the meanings and phenomenology of the face. In particular, the fleshly and communicative physicality of the face is reduced to a measurable object that can be identified by a virtualised referent and then consequently tracked. Moreover, the asymmetrical and faceless nature of these machinic programs of recognition unsettles conventional notions of civil inattention and bodily sovereignty, and the prioritization given to pattern recognition renders them amenable to ideas/ideals from phrenology and physiognomy. In this way, algorithmic governance may generate not only forms of facial vulnerability and estrangement, but also facial artifice, where individuals come to develop tacit and artful ways of de-facing and re-facing in order to subvert the processes of recognition which leverage these modes of bio-power. Thus, the datafication of urban governance gives rise to a dynamic bio-politics of the face.

Social media provide many opportunities to connect people, but the kinds of personally identifiable information that people share through social media is understudied. This paper presents findings from a content analysis in which we coded the amount and kinds of personally identifiable information of public Twitter messages. Overwhelmingly, public Twitter messages do not include identifiable information such as phone numbers, email, and home addresses. Using Goffman's [(1963). Behaviors in public places: Notes on the social organization of gatherings. New York, NY: Free Press] concepts of public order and civil inattention, we also coded for whether people articulate the kinds of information that are communicated with others in public space, including locational, temporal, and activity-related information. Our findings suggest that people do share similar kinds of personal information on Twitter that they do in others kinds of physical public spaces, suggesting that people may also be mapping old practice...

Crammed together in tight folds of humanity, the suburban rail passengers of Mumbai, India, experience the most densely crowded trains in the world (Basu & Hunt, 2012). Whilst the immediate physical descriptors of crowdedness in Mumbai are well understood (Hirsch, 2016), there is little knowledge of the effect this has on the multitude of passengers. This is an important omission, as the effects of crowding on passengers impact their attitudes, travel behavior, and travel decisions. This paper therefore seeks to discern the physical, emotional, and behavioural effects of rail passenger crowding in Mumbai, India. To achieve this, a qualitative methodology, including 49 face-to-face interviews and 48 hours of ethnographic and autoethnographic observations in Mumbai were conducted. Mumbai is an ideal place to study these effects as it has high-density crowding, the likes of which are not experienced elsewhere. Additionally, there is a limited understanding of the effect of crowding on passengers in non-Western societies. With increasing rail ridership worldwide, the experiences of Mumbai's passengers within high densities may align with the future experiences of passengers in other Western and non-Western countries. For academics and service providers, understanding the specifics of the crowd, such as the density, passenger perceptions, and culture is important. With that knowledge, strategies to improve the experience of crowding would be more effective. Keywords: Rail Passengers, Crowding, Effects, Behaviour, Emotion, Transportation The Effects of Crowding on Humans Since the 1970s, a range of disciplines has studied human crowding. These studies encompass mundane crowding, such as being on a crowded train (Gomez-Jacinto & Hombrados-Mendieta, 2002) and extraordinary crowding, such as at festivals, or stadium stampedes (Davis Associates, 2003). Despite this variability, there is agreement on the definition of crowding. Crowding is a "group phenomenon" (Epstein, 1981, p. 370); for crowding to occur, a space must be shared with others. Reduced freedom of movement and an increased demand on physical coordination is an outcome of the shared space (Baum & Paulus, 1987; Saegert, 1973). This, coupled with people's feelings and experiences in that space result in crowdedness (Thompson, Hirsch, & Rainbird, 2011). Much psychological research adheres to a negative view of crowding, claiming it to have antisocial (Lee & Graefe, 2003; Punpuing & Ross, 2001; Le Bon, 1985, in Reicher, 2002; Ryan & Cessford, 2003) and other negative emotional and behavioural impacts on people (Langrehr, 1991). The aloof and unfriendly manner attributed to many dwellers in large, busy cities (Milgram, 1974) reflects this. The phenomenon of increasing interpersonal detachment in association with increasing numbers of people has been observed for decades. The particular tactics employed by individuals to create and maintain social distance (or reduce and avoid unwanted social connection) have been the subject of much research. For example, Goffman's Theory of Civil Inattention (1963) and Hall's Theory of Proxemics (1966) describe how people use tactics to actively avoid the attention of, and engagement with strangers in public. These can be seen in relation to train riding, when people avoid eye contact with passengers or change their posture to disengage from their surrounds (Evans & Wener, 2007; Hirsch & Thompson, 2011b): Erving Goffman's Theory of Civil Inattention (1963) described particular codes - subtle behavioural changes - that strangers in public follow to assign their own personal boundaries and remove the necessity of facing, or imposing on others. Through this behaviour, people in public spaces are able to maintain a comfortable social order. Goffman's observations were based in the US and UK during the 1950s and 1960s. He stated that considerations need to be taken into view in case of possible infractions to the theory, when looking at other countries, other cultures, and other times. …

This communication discusses how the use of locative media in urban public settings allows users to recognize one another’s proximity on screen. Such “on screen encounters” make simultaneously relevant the categories of passer-by and mobile user, thus creating a tension between an orientation towards civil inattention or engaging in focused, face-to-face interactions. Such a tension is characteristic of the interaction order of urban settings experienced as location- or proximity-aware “hybrid ecologies”.

Made available in DSpace on 2017-07-10T19:07:34Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissert Thayna Davilla Savio2.pdf: 2651873 bytes, checksum: e70439a3e1b991557cbb5fce33204228 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016-03-21 This dissertation s main objective is to analyze street harassment as a violation of social rules, and also its negative effects in the life of harassed women. Despite changes in relationships between men and women and the conquest rights directed to women, street harassment remains a common practice. Street harassment is studied from women s perspective as an undesirable interaction in public spaces, that shows the different ways men and women occupy this space. The argument presented is the glamorization of street harassment, the reinforcement of masculinity and the relationships between harasser and the harassed female that coexist with incresing critics from the media and from women. Street harassment is, therefore, analyzed as a tension between the reputed juridical equality and gender performativity, which is experimented through ambiguities. Synthetizing, street harassment is, at the same time, a violation of civil inattention rules e and an intensification of gender performativity. The data for the research was obtained through bibliographic sources, questionnaires applied in 97 students from a superior education institution and other sources obtained in the internet and social networks like facebook. Esta dissertação tem como objetivo analisar o assédio de rua enquanto modalidade de violação das normas sociais, bem como seu efeito negativo na vida das mulheres assediadas. Em que se pese as mudanças nas relações entre homens e mulheres e a conquista de direitos específicos às mulheres, o assédio de rua permanece uma prática presente. O assédio de rua é estudado do ponto das mulheres como interação não desejada no espaço público, o que evidencia modos diferentes pelos quais homens e mulheres ocupam esse espaço. O argumento apresentado é a glamourização do assédio, o reforço da masculinidade e as relações entre o assediador e a mulher assediada na rua convivem com crescentes críticas da mídia e das mulheres. O assédio de rua é, então, analisado como uma tensão entre o suposto da igualdade jurídica e da performatividade de gênero, tensão experimentada por ambiguidades. Sintetizando, o assédio de rua é, ao mesmo tempo, uma violação das regras sociais da desatenção civil e uma intensificação da performatividade de gênero. Os dados para a pesquisa foram obtidos de fontes bibliográficas, questionários aplicados a 97 estudantes universitárias e outras fontes obtidas em sites da internet e redes sociais como o facebook.

Based on two years of observations and engaging in informal conversations with passengers on Greyhound Line buses, this article describes the long-distance bus journey and the ways in which people actively disengage from others over the course of the ride. Using the Greyhound buses and stations as a microcosm of other such public spaces, I examine its unspoken rules and behavior. I paint a picture of the buses and stations, the patrons, the employees, and the transactions that take place between them. Using ideas from Goffman's civil inattention theory, Lofland's thoughts on strangers, and symbolic interactionism, I explain what I call “nonsocial transient behavior” and “nonsocial transient space.” The reasons nonsocial transient behavior emerges and thus encourages disengagement are identified as follows: uncertainty about strangers, lack of privacy or absence of a personal space, and exhaustion.

This article makes a contribution to the sparse literature on the ethnography of fear. Using observation and focus groups, we compare men and women’s perceptions of danger in relation to a specific civic space—public toilets. Here, it is men, rather than women, who express a marked concern about the threat of physical assault. We attempt to understand the nature and social origin of this fear, and its relationship to the arrangement of space. In so doing, we help sketch out what Tuan (1979) called ‘landscapes of fear’. Places that take us outside of, or lie at the margins of, regular social space can be particularly fear-inducing. Civil inattention is a core means of dealing with this problem and we analyse its functions in allaying fear. We also suggest that spaces in which private behaviour can be surreptitiously surveyed or where there is an indeterminate relationship between private and public space can prompt a pernicious sense of worry. Indeed, being watched and being mistakenly perceived to be watching emerge from our data as really important correlates of fear of violence. We employ Sartre, Berger and Mulveys’s ideas about the gaze to analyse the psychosocial effects of this. Finally, we stress the importance of seeing the experience of fear—including its relationship to spatial arrangement—as socially contingent. The discussion section of this paper suggests that we understand men’s fear of violence in public toilets as a reaction to what Turner calls an ‘inter-structural’ social situation, namely the temporary suspension of the usual gender hierarchy.

This paper engages with an emergent literature on multiculture and concepts such as conviviality and negotiation to explore how increasingly ethnically diverse population routinely share and mix in urban places and social spaces. As part of a wider ESRC funded, two-year qualitative study of changing social life and everyday multiculture in different geographical areas of contemporary England, this paper draws on participant observation data from three branches of franchised leisure and consumption cafe spaces. We pay particular attention to the ways these spaces work as settings of encounter and shared presence between groups often envisaged as separated by ethnic difference. Our findings suggest that corporate spaces which are more often dismissed as commercial, globalized spaces of soulless homogeneity can be locally inflected spaces whose cultural blandness may generate confident familiarity, ethnic mixity, mundane co-presence and inattentive forms of conviviality.

The article takes on a less developed aspect of the sociology of the stranger: the normalized non-relations people in urban settings establish in their effort to stay strangers for one another. How is their “civil inattention”accomplished in practice? What is the social orderliness of “asocial” relations? In order to answer these questions the article uses the elevator as a sociological research instrument allowing for a highly detailed investigation in structural problems of public encounters: bodily navigation, contact avoidance, feigned preoccupation, and the blocking of the automatism by which co-present bodies start interactions. The setting used for the investigation also raises questions about how the artifact and the bodies present are integrated into the interaction order. The “heteromobile” of the elevator offers specific sociotechnical scripts for interaction. While the human actors work hard at doing nothing, their bodies seem to take over their agency. The specific challenge of elevator riding for the enactment of indifference is the vanishing of actors: undoing presence.

The examples of rooms without walls presented in this chapter range across a number of scales: from the setting of a park, to a street, to a public bus and to food court table. These invisible ‘rooms’ are often temporary and transient formations, arising in some instances once a year, several times a week or at prescribed times of the day. What emerges as key in all examples, however, is how these socio-spatial and temporally delineated formations mark and ‘make’ public space. The permeable boundaries of ‘rooms’ allow for affinities to form and be displayed within a heterogeneous public arena. Through their repeated formation, they are indicative of patterned ways in which interactions in diverse spaces exist. These affinities do not only mark the performance of an urban civil inattention, but this form of ‘separate togetherness’ is also a significant way in which private interests, prejudices and affiliations order themselves in public space. In the examples below drawn from fieldwork in New York, Singapore, and Johannesburg, we analyse the dynamic ways in which affinities emerge in interactions and discuss how they are observed and understood in public space.

International audience; The sociability of very young children reveals a neglected dimension of relations and interactions in public, and highlights issues associated with ordinary urban contact that often go unnoticed. Civil interaction exhibits an inclination towards friendliness, a concern for others and the surrounding world, which, while admittedly limited and sometimes disputed, nevertheless contributes to an ordinary sense of belonging to a moral and political community.

International audience; The sociability of very young children reveals a neglected dimension of relations and interactions in public, and highlights issues associated with ordinary urban contact that often go unnoticed. Civil interaction exhibits an inclination towards friendliness, a concern for others and the surrounding world, which, while admittedly limited and sometimes disputed, nevertheless contributes to an ordinary sense of belonging to a moral and political community.

International audience; This article examines the diverse ways in which people experience being strangers in public space. Based primarily on the journal entries of teenagers in New York City on their trips, we show the different ways in which riders experience being a rider amid diversity and norm violations. Some teenagers see being a rider as an engaging role, some as a detached role, and others as a precarious role. All the teenagers use folk theories to navigate the social world, but how they use them varies depending on how they experience being a rider. Finally, riding in groups shifts their experiences and interpretations in complex ways that make riding more enjoyable, but filled with additional emotional tensions. Building from previous theories and studies on strangers and public spaces, this article contributes to longstanding debates in sociology over how people interact with others in urban environments.

This study examined the patterns of avoidance and recognition in pedestrians as they passed a confederate. Specifically, the effect of condition (avoid, look, look and smile) on passing pedestrians was examined in a field study of 70 participants. The confederates adopted three conditons of varying levels of attention during the passes. Participants glanced at the confederate more frequently in the look condition. Female participants were more likely to look at a female confederate. Thirty-seven of sevenry participants glanced at the confederate within the twelve feet observation zone. Thes suggests that the use of civil inattention is common in pedestrian passing.

Urbanization has created transient, ethnically-varied, and densely-populated communities where meaningful human contact is difficult. Urban social norms such as "civil inattention" --- a deliberate display of unwillingness to become more familiar with strangers --- discourage social interactions among strangers. While these norms help reduce anxiety or fear in overcrowded urban centers they hinder meaningful social interactions in public spaces (coffee shops, museums, and malls, etc.) and events (conferences, galas, etc.) where such interactions should occur. This paper describes CommonTies, a simple technological nudge that managers of interaction spaces and organizers of social events can use to leverage contextual information to encourage social interactions among strangers.

As noted in Chapter 3, Thompson suggests that in mediated interpersonal interaction, if you are aware that your message is going to an indeterminate audience this might be a source of ‘uncertainty and trouble’ (J. B. Thompson, 1995, p. 97). A sense of the size, composition and attitude of the audience for what you write online would help you determine whether the online space in which they can be found should be considered ‘front stage’ or ‘backstage’, for example (Goffman, 1959) — of particular importance when communicating material about yourself that is potentially sensitive and therefore not normally delivered ‘front stage’. On the other hand, Goffman also suggests there are a number of ways in which the perception of ‘threat’ in an environment where inappropriate audiences may overhear conversations can be defused — either by the overhearers exercising ‘civil inattention’ (Goffman, 1963a, pp. 83–88) or by the overheard assuming that the overhearers will not use what they hear to cause harm (Goffman, 1971a). As this illustrates (and as was discussed in more detail in Chapter 3) the nature of interactions is not influenced directly by the nature of the communicative space but indirectly by the awareness of and attitude towards that space that communicators have. This can also be influenced by broader forms of what Feenberg terms either ‘constitutive’ (inherent) or ‘implementation’ (socially shaped) bias (2008) in the way a given social media site is used.

Summary Research shows that HR practices play a crucial role in postmerger integration by facilitating employees’ identification with the new company. However, the effects of identity and identification dynamics upon these practices have yet to be examined. We draw on an ethnographic study of a merger among four different banks to outline the challenges that identification processes among employees create for these HR practices. Specifically we underscore the possibility of dis-identification among employees from different premerger organizations and explore the obstacles it rises to HR practices which seek to foster postmerger identification. Our findings show that HR practices can, unexpectedly, result in initial dis-identification and disrupt integration in multiple ways. We integrate our findings into a model, which maps the mutually constituted processes of identification and dis-identification. Employees of the pre-merger companies experience human resource practices by framing and enacting them to create differences with the others, and by elaborating postmerger encounters enabled by HR practices into occasion for dis-identification and civil inattention.