Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
This final section aims to draw together the main ideas of the preceding chapters, integrating them into a coherent discussion that identifies some common themes. We summarize the distinctive contributions of each author’s chapter and highlight the various interpretive lenses that they bring to bear on the concept of identities. This clarifies to readers the different but related aspects of both intersectionality and negation as our two main dimensions of identities. We also highlight what is creative and innovative about each chapter, both theoretically and methodologically. The section ends with a reflection on the empirical and analytic richness of the chapters, and an appreciation of their contribution to broader conceptual knowledge.
This chapter integrates sociological understandings with studies from marketing and consumer research in order to engage with the question of how individuals navigate questions of (non-)identity and (non-)belonging through their (non-)engagement with the marketplace.
In the first part of the chapter these themes are explored in relation to distastes and the rejection of products and brands, and their associations with (negative) possible selves and associated out-groups within fashion, a consumption context inherent with symbolic meaning. The chapter then looks into circumstances where the product category itself (alcohol) is symbolic and consumers risk being negatively marked by their (non-)consumption practices. Individuals may demonstrate a reluctance to be identified by their rejection (consumption) decisions, particularly where their actions (or in many case inactions) are presumed by others to carry more (or different) meanings than intended. The chapter therefore asks whether it is possible to refuse the associated identity connotations of not consuming in a symbolic context.
This chapter focuses on how citizens, through identity work and activism, challenge images of what it means to be Norwegian and, more broadly, of a Nordic nation. The concepts of identity work, nationalism, and social imaginaries are central in analyzing how foreign adoptees and descendants of immigrants from the 1990s up until today understand, critique, and resist racism and feelings of outsiderness to the Norwegian nation. My empirical examples are drawn mainly from earlier and ongoing research in Norway, while illustrating tendencies central also to the other Nordic nations.
This volume brings together a selection of chapters from social scientists who use various interpretive lenses and analytic/theoretical perspectives to analyze the sociology of identities. Drawing on theories of power, intersectionality, un/markedness, and the sociology of nothing, the book explores the ways in which identities are socially constituted, negotiated, and reinforced in complex and multidimensional ways that are tied to cognitive and interactional dimensions of privilege and marginalization. The first section of the book contains chapters that address themes of power, privilege, and intersectional dis/advantage. The second section’s chapters focus on experiences of absence, loss, and missed symbolic objects that form negatively defined identities. In the Afterword, we draw out some common themes across these contributions and discuss how they contribute to new interpretive understandings of social identities.
This chapter provides an introduction to the main themes of the book, its aim and scope, and an overview of the contributors’ chapters. It begins with a discussion of the concept of identities, as viewed through an interpretive lens. We highlight the two theoretical dimensions of identities that the book explores: power, inequality, and intersectionality; and negation, disidentification, and nothingness. The chapter then reviews some classic theoretical works by Mead and Du Bois, alongside other scholars in the symbolic interactionist tradition. Next, it presents a discussion of the concepts of markedness/unmarkedness, and explains how these can be applied to intersectional analyses of identities. Scott’s sociology of nothing is then introduced, as the contextual background for Part II. The final section provides an outline of the contributors’ chapters, summarizing each author’s key ideas and arguments.
This chapter is concerned with how grievers conceive of their ‘selves’ after the traumatic death of a significant other. The chapter begins by highlighting the late-modern idealistic tendencies we engage in when addressing identity after loss. That is, we focus on how the self is relationally rebuilt or returned to after loss, in line with the self being idealized as an accumulative identity project. In this chapter, these idyllic practices are challenged by drawing on four experiential themes which followed the loss of a significant other: losing parts of self, losing interactions, losing further significant others, and losing anticipated futures. This is demonstrated with data collected as part of a wider research study on how social networks navigate feeling norms after traumatic loss. In applying Scott’s sociology of nothing, gaze is cast on the role of intangible social ‘no-things’ which no longer exist (parts of identity, interactional possibilities, significant others, futures), and how these intersect with others’ tangible things which continue to exist, asserting the disenfranchising effects of ideals of accumulating or restoring tangible social ‘things’ after loss.
This chapter examines older persons’ experiences of non-happenings, missed opportunities, disidentification, and disengagement processes during the first three months of the COVID-19 pandemic in Finland, using Scott’s theory of the sociology of nothing. The main aim of the chapter is to follow one participant’s ways of negotiating her identity in relation to age-specific restriction measures that were targeted at people aged 70 or over. The in-depth reading of her diary, which she started when the pandemic hit in Finland and ended when the restriction measures were lifted, reveals her struggle with being labeled as an older person. This label becomes a source of disidentification for her, revealing the previously unmarked societal norms regarding aging and how older age, in general, is viewed in society.
This chapter addresses questions of identity and belonging among ‘hyper-mobile’ professionals who have lived and worked extensively in several countries in the pursuit of their careers. In light of the challenges and opportunities associated with constant mobility, the chapter explores how mobile professionals make sense of their constantly changing social environments, their multiple local and global attachments, as well as their ethical concerns about how to engage responsibly with cultural Otherness in an increasingly globalized world. Discussing these questions helps to generate a better understanding of how global professionals discursively and practically maneuver through dynamic, complex, and socially demanding situations related to their mobility. Assuming that the increasing globalization of careers will not come to a halt in the near future, it is worthwhile to keep exploring such questions, as the ongoing identity projects of those who constantly cross national borders will require special abilities for navigating increasingly fluid conditions.
