Skip to main content Skip to navigation
ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change

Theme 4 Research Projects

(1) Roads to Development? Uneven Modernities and the Politics of Knowledge

Penny Harvey and Hannah Knox

This historical and ethnographic study of road building in Peru reveals the fluctuating connectivity of marginal spaces, characterised by cycles of intense engagement and abandonment in relation to both state and capital interests, with important implications for how ordinary people identify (or not) with ‘public’ works. The study also shows how the abstractions crucial to the elaboration of technical knowledge are problematic in the context of practical action. Specific practices of translation and negotiation are required for technical procedures to ‘work’, revealing the particularities on which expert knowledge depends.

(2) Genealogy, Kinship and Social Change

Jeanette Edwards

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: the role and place of the internet both as a tool facilitating research and a medium in which social relationships are conducted; debates over what constitutes Englishness and who and what gets excluded when the focus is on ‘ancestors’; the ways in which social class is rendered visible in links to past, place and person; and how expertise is constituted through a combination of technical, emotional and embodied skills.

(3) Digital Visualisation and the Promise of Post-Representational Cartography

Penny Harvey

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 forms compatible and what the creation of this compatibility implies. Despite the descriptive simplification that such models necessarily entail, they can nevertheless engender new perspectives and new conversations precisely because they can juxtapose things that could not otherwise be brought together in a single representational space.

(4) Material Values in Self-published Political Media

Nick Thoburn

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 displacement, affect, and sensation in relations between their creators, environments and users. Focusing on three self-publishing and archiving projects in London and Copenhagen the project addresses: the values of use and uselessness in political objects; the place of sensation in the politics of the book; the impact of the agency of objects on conceptions of the political public. A3.4.48, A5.104.

(5) Social Movements and Social Change

Tim Jordan

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 and dramatic events, refusing the separation of the mundane from the extraordinary, and connect social continuities and discontinuities. Furthermore, consideration of the nature of collective identity within social movement research offers a way to approach the ethical concerns of social movements as they emerge at times self-consistent at times fragmented. Social movements provide a valuable object for the analysis of social change.

(6) Eco/feminism, Essentialism and the Future of Feminism

Niamh Moore

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 much of the feminist literature ecofeminism has largely functioned as feminism’s abject and disavowed other, because of its alleged essentialism, frequently read through maternalism. The project draws on fieldwork with women environmental activists campaigning against clear-cut logging in Clayoquot Sound, on the west coast of Canada, when in summer 1993 over 900 people were arrested. Drawing on the strengths of ethnographic research, oral history, narrative analysis and genealogical critique, this project opens up debates about ‘women and nature’ beyond essentialism (or even antiessentialism). My readings of interviews with these women, specifically around those moments of women’s lives which are most frequently naturalized, motherhood, childhood, and women’s association with ‘home’, suggest that readings other than the reinscription and reproduction of essentialist discourses are possible.

(7) Critical Concepts of Social Capital

Mike Savage, Gindo Tampubolon and Alan Warde

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, which showed, counter-intuitively, that the organisation with the most conflict and internal factions was also the one with the greatest levels of aggregate activism and involvement.

(8) Popular Identities in Post War Britain

Mike Savage and Gillian Evans

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 forms of solidarity. The project examines the rise of what is termed more individualised 'elective belonging' where people come to identify with their place of residence because it seems appropriate for 'someone like me'. The relationship between this ethos and middle class cultural values is elaborated.

(9) Contingencies of Value

Bev Skeggs

Using the government’s ‘Respect Agenda’ as the focus, this project located the concept of respect within political rhetoric and wider discourses of respectability. Groups who were less invested or positioned as not invested in practices of respectability were recruited to engage their accounts of the current moral climate in the UK. Care, family, loyalty, friends and working were the main sources and performances of value. Respect was gained, assessed and attributed locally. And they judged that values that the working-class once stood for had been used again them.

(10) (Net)Working Out: Embodiment, Individualisation, the Self and the Gym

Nick Crossley

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 ethnographic study of one gym, the idea is to show how new kinds of social solidarities may be emerging around this leisure practice which could challenge nostalgic claims that we are increasingly ‘bowling alone’. The survey data has now been analysed and ethnography continued.

(11) Technologies and Personal Lives

Elizabeth B Silva

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 assumed to be embedded in the technologies used everyday in the home; the morality embedded in the technology in relation to that expressed by dilemmas of negotiation in everyday home life; and the kind of methodologies that can be used to explore these issues.. Documentary evidence about developments in the patterns of innovation of selected household technologies, including market reports, magazines, newspaper feature articles, selected interviews and statistical trends has now been collected. Previously collected data, comprising an ethnographic study of 23 families centered on their uses of technologies in domestic everyday life, has also been examined.

(12) Anthropology and Economies of Public Knowledge

Alberto Corsín Jiménez

An ethnographic study of the production of knowledge and scholarship in regimes of economic innovation. The research inquires into the modes of organisation that recognise the appearance of knowledge as an economic and public good. The study compares the work of academic scholars at an elite international research centre with those of management consultants. The comparison throws light on the political and anthropological economies through which innovation, production and knowledge are recognised as valuable social objects in different situations. This further allows a better understanding of the terms under which the value of knowledge is recognised as a public good.

(13) The Malanggan's Claim: Ethics, Aesthetics and Property Relations in Cultural Artefact

Karen Sykes

This project elaborates the role of visuality in a theory of property relations that accounts for the possession of the image, focusing on the public display of Malanggan carvings, a notable funerary sculpture distinguished by its immediate destruction in ritual burning. The project addressed the ‘value paradox’ at the heart of cultural property, namely that objects that are detached from the moral values of the communities that make them to circulate in alternative circuits of legal and economic value, subsequently become objects of new emotional and moral attachments.

(14) Knowing Social Networks

Hannah Knox, Penny Harvey, Mike Savage

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 examine the use of networks in social network analysis and social anthropology in order to highlight enduring problems and difficulties of network thinking, as well as its potential. We show that despite the methodological virtuosity of social network analysis and its genuine potential to operationalise network ideas, it paradoxically operates as a bounded community rather than as a network, and that one implication is that it does not unravel significant differences in approach amongst its own ranks.

(15) Social Simulation and Evolutionary Change

Andrew Trigg

This project considers how far simulation methods can be applied to cultural change and evolution, focusing on the well known Axelrod culture model. There are two main strands to the project. First, the Axelrod model is being adapted to model the evolutionary dimension of Bourdieu’s social theory. This model is being compared with data gathered by the ESRC project, ‘Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion’, for which Andrew Trigg is an associate researcher. Second, this evolutionary approach is used to look at changes in behaviour and attitudes of women carers. A new software platform to simulate the Axelrod model was developed, but given the more extensive changes required in this project it was decided that RePast should be used, since it is fully supported by user groups in the social simulation community. The model is now working effectively.

 

Skip to main content Skip to navigation