Our growing Sociology list has a global outlook featuring high-quality research across emerging and established areas in the field, such as digital sociology, migration, gender, race and ethnicity, public sociology, and children and families.
Our series include Gender and Sociology, Global Migration and Social Change, Sociology of Children and Families, Sociology of Diversity and Public Sociology.
We publish leading journals in the field, including Emotions and Society in association with the European Sociological Association's (ESA) Research Network on Sociology of Emotions (RN11) as well as Families, Relationships and Societies and the Journal of Gender-Based Violence.
Sociology
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Intentional communities around the world are experimenting with new paradigms for human society, including participatory political practices, cooperative economic arrangements and holistic educational modalities. As such, they are perhaps the most compelling contemporary exercise of utopianism and certainly have something to teach us about attempting to foster positive societal change. This book examines Auroville, the largest, most diverse and long-standing intentional community in the world, internationally recognized for its holistic, progressive and inclusive ideals and practices. Located in Tamil Nadu, South India, Auroville uniquely draws on spiritual ideals to enact a prefigurative utopian practice applicable to all aspects of human society; the author, a scholar native to Auroville, offers an in-depth autoethnographic analysis of how its ideals have been, and continue to be, articulated, embodied and developed in realms as wide-ranging as the community’s political and economic organization, as well as various cultural practices. Responding to critiques that spirituality discourages activism, this work is revelatory of the strategic role and influence of spirituality in inspiring, informing and sustaining prefigurative political practice, while providing an honest analysis of the challenges of direct democracy, as well as prefiguring an alternative form of economic organization within a mainstream capitalist context. It raises important considerations pertaining to the perpetuation of prefigurative experiments, drawn from Auroville’s singular longevity and development trajectory, providing both theoretical and pragmatic insights into how communal utopian practice is enabled, challenged and sustained that are relevant for scholars and activists of prefigurative and utopian experiments alike.
The chapter outlines the key contribution of the book: an autoethnographic analysis of how communal utopian practice is enabled, challenged and sustained. It presents the overall structure of the book and the distinct theoretical and ethnographic foci of each chapter, distinguishing the research focus of this work from that of intentional community scholarship in general given that the latter tends to be limited to understanding and analysing alternative practices, rather than the processes that give life to these. The chapter introduces the intentional community of Auroville, its founding period and its development, challenges and achievements, and presents the community’s endemic understandings and practices of research. It discusses the author’s positionality as a native scholar, her autoethnographic research methods and how these are uniquely leveraged to offer a rich analysis of the process of engaging in utopian practice in an intentional community context.
This chapter revisits key findings and concepts that emerge from this work, and their relevance for the development of alternative societies in general. One is that of spiritually prefigurative utopianism: that a spiritual quest can underly, strategically articulate and sustain an evolving utopian project that engages with the challenges of human society. Another is that of prefigurative utopian practice: that utopianism can be engaged with as an evolutionary process, rather than as an attempt to realize a predetermined blueprint, and that this can be enacted by both spiritual or a-spiritual groups. In view of Auroville’s unique trajectory of prefigurative institutionalization, the chapter posits that such institutionalization may be key to the perpetuation of prefigurative projects.
The chapter contextualizes and examines the Auroville community within various prevalent frameworks and possible definitions – those of an intentional community or ecovillage, utopian community or ashram, and government project or neocolonial enclave – discussing and drawing parallels with other contemporary or historical examples of these to best situate and understand the nature of this particular experiment. In so doing, it highlights Auroville’s unique success as the largest, most diverse and among the longest-standing intentional communities in the world, and how it is distinct from historical utopian communities given its experimental ethos and absence of a predetermined societal blueprint. While acknowledging its roots in the Indian ashram tradition and the presence of a spiritual founding figure, the chapter distinguishes Auroville from an ashram or other forms of guru-centric organizations and communities on the basis of it being a self-governed collective eschewing religious rites or doctrines. The role of the Indian government in the development of the project is also discussed, alongside the critique that Auroville is a neocolonial enclave. The chapter concludes by outlining the original theoretical lens of (spiritually) prefigurative utopianism that serves to analyse and understand Auroville’s praxis in this work.
The chapter explores the conception of being ‘on-road’ as a gendered space, with historical antecedents. It explores the intersection of race and gender politics in early modern Britain, specifically the interwar period, which informed early youth penal reform. The analysis draws on documentary research from the Liverpool University Archives. In historicising and gendering the ‘on-road’ existence in this way, the chapter emphasises the importance of conceptual approaches expanding the explanatory scope about racialised youth’s contemporary contested positioning, beyond the customary suturing to crime and punishment. Historicising and gendering the logic of ‘the road’ enables exploration of racialised youth’s circumstances as part of a historic exclusion from the resources and opportunities associated with early modern justice reform.
This chapter is written as three sets of reflections by the editors on the preceding collection and the next steps for on-road scholarship. The editors each reflect on the aspects of the collection which speak most to them and our own work, and most importantly, what the next steps are for this field of study and what questions need to be further posed and answered. Levell’s section focuses on the use of feminist theory to understand subjectivity, relationality, love and community in the collection. She argues that this humanised previously stigmatised young people. Young looks at the contentions that result from the over-focus on gangs, including enhanced racial discrimination and over-policing. Earle weaves in his own journey to on-road scholarship with reflections on the chapters, and the undercurrents of music, inequality, Whiteness, racial capitalism, and the desire to see beyond youth criminality and instead focusing on the richness of their lives.
Intentional communities around the world are experimenting with new paradigms for human society, including participatory political practices, cooperative economic arrangements and holistic educational modalities. As such, they are perhaps the most compelling contemporary exercise of utopianism and certainly have something to teach us about attempting to foster positive societal change. This book examines Auroville, the largest, most diverse and long-standing intentional community in the world, internationally recognized for its holistic, progressive and inclusive ideals and practices. Located in Tamil Nadu, South India, Auroville uniquely draws on spiritual ideals to enact a prefigurative utopian practice applicable to all aspects of human society; the author, a scholar native to Auroville, offers an in-depth autoethnographic analysis of how its ideals have been, and continue to be, articulated, embodied and developed in realms as wide-ranging as the community’s political and economic organization, as well as various cultural practices. Responding to critiques that spirituality discourages activism, this work is revelatory of the strategic role and influence of spirituality in inspiring, informing and sustaining prefigurative political practice, while providing an honest analysis of the challenges of direct democracy, as well as prefiguring an alternative form of economic organization within a mainstream capitalist context. It raises important considerations pertaining to the perpetuation of prefigurative experiments, drawn from Auroville’s singular longevity and development trajectory, providing both theoretical and pragmatic insights into how communal utopian practice is enabled, challenged and sustained that are relevant for scholars and activists of prefigurative and utopian experiments alike.
This chapter presents a reflexive account of an ‘on-road’ criminologist who has operated both in prisons and the streets for over four decades. The ‘on-road’ criminologist inhabits the world of his/her research participants. ‘On-road’ dialogue takes place in shopping centres, barbershops, bookies, car parks, street corners and other locations within the confines of the inner cities. In light of the proliferation of ‘county lines’, violence during the (COVID-19) lockdown and the growing sophistication of the digital space, ‘on-road’ criminological research is a vital component in the way we understand the changing nature of our inner cities, which moves beyond the traditional ethnographic encounter. The author argues that a critical aspect of being an ‘on-road’ researcher is in the sociocultural identification and articulation of ‘political Blackness’. Blackness centres on the understanding of the history of Black oppression and subordination, combined with acquiring the psychic tools and ability to transcend its impacts. Central to the proposition therefore laid out in this chapter is the way the narrative of the ‘on-road’ criminologist is produced and produces change within our understanding of inner-city life and the wider criminal justice system.
This chapter discusses the founding spiritual and anarchic ideals for Auroville as a polity, and how these are linked to its aspiration of prefiguring a spiritualized society. It examines the evolution of Auroville’s political organization and practices since its founding years, the modes and institutions of internal governance developed by the community, and its flexible and prefigurative process of institutionalization. In so doing, it provides a revelatory case study of this exceptionally durable example of a horizontal, self-governing polity, while also considering concerns with, and recent points of departure from, the community’s heretofore horizontal processes of political organization. The chapter further includes a critical discussion on Auroville’s relationship with the Indian government, reflecting on how this historically enabled the community’s internal anarchic practice, while also addressing concerns of government co-optation.
Intentional communities around the world are experimenting with new paradigms for human society, including participatory political practices, cooperative economic arrangements and holistic educational modalities. As such, they are perhaps the most compelling contemporary exercise of utopianism and certainly have something to teach us about attempting to foster positive societal change. This book examines Auroville, the largest, most diverse and long-standing intentional community in the world, internationally recognized for its holistic, progressive and inclusive ideals and practices. Located in Tamil Nadu, South India, Auroville uniquely draws on spiritual ideals to enact a prefigurative utopian practice applicable to all aspects of human society; the author, a scholar native to Auroville, offers an in-depth autoethnographic analysis of how its ideals have been, and continue to be, articulated, embodied and developed in realms as wide-ranging as the community’s political and economic organization, as well as various cultural practices. Responding to critiques that spirituality discourages activism, this work is revelatory of the strategic role and influence of spirituality in inspiring, informing and sustaining prefigurative political practice, while providing an honest analysis of the challenges of direct democracy, as well as prefiguring an alternative form of economic organization within a mainstream capitalist context. It raises important considerations pertaining to the perpetuation of prefigurative experiments, drawn from Auroville’s singular longevity and development trajectory, providing both theoretical and pragmatic insights into how communal utopian practice is enabled, challenged and sustained that are relevant for scholars and activists of prefigurative and utopian experiments alike.
