Cultural Values and Politics: Social Cohesion and Expertise
Workaround: In current version of Panels 3.8, it seems this body field needs to be populated in order for title above to appear. This note is hidden by custom CSS style. Jack Latimer.
Overview
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This theme took its point of departure from a series of topical ideas, both in academic writing and in popular understanding, which we exposed to sustained anthropological, sociological, historical and geographical scrutiny. Ideas that we are becoming more 'individualised', that there is social fragmentation and weakening social bonds, and that expertise and technological developments bring about social development have a widespread currency which is often taken for granted. In this theme we conducted a series of detailed case studies, including ethnographic fieldwork outside the UK, qualitative case studies, statistical analyses of trends, and historical inquiries, to assess whether these stereotypes are misleading.
The distinctiveness of this theme arose from our concern to draw on a series of linked empirical projects, often using unusual and innovative methodologies, to allow us to elaborate a sustained evaluation of contemporary arguments. We were thus concerned to relate theoretical reflections with both quantitative and qualitative methodologies.
What we have done so far
Research within Theme 4 has focused on three intersecting areas of concern, (i) social cohesion, exclusion and fragmentation (ii) the cultural politics of knowledge and (iii) new formations of value.
Both archival and ethnographic work has shown that social and cultural participation is not primarily driven by the cost benefit calculations of individual actors. Rather, differing levels of emotional engagement and divergent perceptions of what is at stake not only influence what people do, but also how difference is perceived and understood by others. In comparative international contexts we found that standard measures of participation fail to recognise or acknowledge significant cultural spaces of intense engagement. Reluctance to manifest engagement is also related to fluctuating commitments over time from state agents and capital interests.
We approached the cultural politics of knowledge through comparative research on expertise and technical knowledge and the values associated with knowledge forms and informational devices. Several projects found that while technical expertise is valued, so is an aptitude for reading between the lines. A focus on visualisation and information technologies also links several projects that engage with how knowledge is configured as an economic and public good, how intimate relations are made explicit within the family, how information is presented and understood, and how the increased accessibility of certain data forms via the internet offer novel means to reproduce familiar concerns. Our focus on new formations of value looks at how knowledges, localities, bodies and the moral valence of difference are reconfigured in relation to technological, legal and regulatory change.
Theme Convenors: Mike Savage and Penny Harvey
Projects
Below is a list of the projects run by this research theme. Click on the title of the project for more information.
Mobilising Matter and Engineering Social Change
Through a cluster of interrelated research projects we are concerned with investigating the effects of strategic investments in infrastructures, public spaces and cultural facilities which aim to promote social change and to tackle poverty. This research cluster explores the dynamics of regulation and creativity in the material transformation of territories and of bodies. Our aim is to bring together a range of discrete research projects which are looking at transformative projects of social change to extend our capacity to think critically about contemporary problems of social cohesion/exclusion and fragmentation. In particular we will be focusing on issues of how class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and age get mobilised and transformed in large-scale state/corporate interventions like regeneration and engineering projects. We are working collectively to explore the question of how to re-describe or re-approach sociological categories like class and community in such a way as to get beyond a focus on elective dynamics of participation. The research projects which support this conversation also examine how the invention of new materials – including new kinds of numerical orderings, emergent data aggregates, materials science patents, and new engineering products - emerge out of and become directed towards projects of social and environmental change. These projects are allowing us to explore the ‘potential’ of new kinds of materials such as chemicals, concrete, carbon, data, and DNA in terms of their transformative promise, and the dangers of their toxic or excessive effects as they appear as pollution, corrosion, climate change, identity theft, and other kinds of aberrations or mutations.
Mobilising Matter and Engineering Social Change
Through a cluster of interrelated research projects we are concerned with investigating the effects of strategic investments in infrastructures, public spaces and cultural facilities which aim to promote social change and to tackle poverty. This research cluster explores the dynamics of regulation and creativity in the material transformation of territories and of bodies. Our aim is to bring together a range of discrete research projects which are looking at transformative projects of social change to extend our capacity to think critically about contemporary problems of social cohesion/exclusion and fragmentation. In particular we will be focusing on issues of how class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and age get mobilised and transformed in large-scale state/corporate interventions like regeneration and engineering projects. We are working collectively to explore the question of how to re-describe or re-approach sociological categories like class and community in such a way as to get beyond a focus on elective dynamics of participation. The research projects which support this conversation also examine how the invention of new materials – including new kinds of numerical orderings, emergent data aggregates, materials science patents, and new engineering products - emerge out of and become directed towards projects of social and environmental change. These projects are allowing us to explore the ‘potential’ of new kinds of materials such as chemicals, concrete, carbon, data, and DNA in terms of their transformative promise, and the dangers of their toxic or excessive effects as they appear as pollution, corrosion, climate change, identity theft, and other kinds of aberrations or mutations.
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This project is an anthropological study of road building in Peru, based upon ethnographic fieldwork which was funded by the ESRC (Award Number RES-000-22-1418). The research aimed to improve our...
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An ethnographic study of the burgeoning interest in genealogy and family history in the north of England. The study reveals a number of salient aspects of contemporary British life, for example...
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This project conducts a detailed case study of a particular leisure practice which is known to be increasingly significant in Britain: use of gyms. Using aggregate data on gym use, allied with...
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This project developed conceptions of social capital using social network analysis and a concern to locate activists spatially. It involved a case study of three organisations in Manchester,...
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This pilot research project focuses on the digital models currently being built and used by urban designers in Manchester. The project asks how such models render diverse realities and knowledge...
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This project aims to make an intervention into narratives of feminism, specifically those narratives which have proclaimed the death or end of feminism, and which emerged in the early 1990s. In...
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A theoretical exploration of the meanings of social change that result or are implied when social movements are analysed. He shows how social movements research is able to connect everyday life...
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A study of the material culture of self-published print media, media objects whose material properties problematise the conventional image of political communication and act as points of...
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‘The Renaissance view of work, which sees it as intrinsically meaningful, is centred in the technical craftsmanship – the manual and mental operations – of the work process itself’ ...
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The project uses the archived qualitative sources of several post-war community studies to elaborate how community relations were historically conflictual but that this generated significant...
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This project explores how domestic life and the technologies it involves connect individuals to each other and to the home environment in which they live. The focus is on the kind of persons...
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A major integrating interest has been in how various social network approaches and methods can be used to develop new insights into social cohesion. We have conducted a literature review to...
Publications
Below is a list of the publications produced by this research theme.
Book Chapters
Refereed Journal Papers
Working Paper
People
Below is a list of CRESC staff working on this research theme.
Research Fellows
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Affiliated Academic Members
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Ex members of Staff
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Centre Directors
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Ex members of Staff, Honorary Research Members
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