Sociology > Sociology
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While the production of both meat and dairy products is ecologically harmful, the sociology of sustainable food consumption has largely focused on meat reduction. This article addresses that gap by exploring the deeply rooted role of cheese in the everyday lives of consumers. It argues that cheese deserves more critical attention due to the significant environmental impact of its production and the recent increase in cheese consumption in many countries. Inspired by practice theoretical literature on sustainable food consumption and meat reduction, the article examines how cheese is materially, practically and symbolically entrenched in food practices and their performances. It draws on 30 thematic interviews with Finnish consumers representing various diets and social backgrounds. The results of the thematic analysis are presented as three intertwining viewpoints. These viewpoints demonstrate the role of cheese in the routinised pursuit of everyday pleasure, elaborate the shared understanding of cheese as a ‘neutral’ object of consumption holding significant cultural value, and discuss cheese entrenchment in the context of ‘recipe adherence’. The article suggests that these aspects are worth considering in efforts aiming to reduce cheese consumption, at least in the Finnish context. More generally, the article corroborates practice theoretical literature on sustainable food consumption by suggesting that a shift towards a less cheesy future is more likely to occur when the responsibility is not solely left on consumers’ shoulders and when the distinct, yet interlinked, material, practical and symbolic dimensions of practices are simultaneously considered.
Although single-use food packaging is designed to be thrown away after one use, many households reuse it as part of mundane and tacit practices. However, this informal packaging reuse is hardly investigated compared to formal reuse systems like reusable packaging. Further, existing studies are mostly conducted in Western countries, where reuse and recycling are morally charged. Based on cultural anthropology and feminist theories, we argue, instead, that reusing also involves deliberate acts of revaluation and care. To analyse this ‘social life’ of disposable food packaging, we conducted in-depth interviews with 28 Brazilian households, including video documentation and pictures of household equipment. Results show that food packaging is reused, for example, for storing and passing on leftovers to neighbours or relatives, which is related to cultural logics such as the repetition of dishes. Through these interactions, disposable food packaging is transformed into a household object with not only practical but also emotional meaning. Our study contributes to the theorisation of the sociology of consumption, first, through empirically grounding the concept of culture-in-practice demonstrating that affects align the cultural and the material in domestic consumer practices. Second, we refine the concept of care-in-practice showing that packaging reuse enables the maintenance of care relationships with community members outside the homes. We conclude that recognising informal circular consumer practices – like packaging reuse – in countries of the global south can help achieve an inclusive circular economy.
The circular economy vision assumes that consumers will be increasingly turning into users of circular services, enabled by various digital platforms. Yet while apps can help to connect and educate consumers on circularity, the app market can be overwhelming. Moreover, many digital tools are designed for consumers as independent rational individuals, interested in self-gain and self-education. Our study combines social learning theory, literature on circular consumption and digitalisation to highlight the need for digital solutions that could reinforce existing social relations and serve as enabling tools for neighbourhood-based approaches of reusing, sharing, renting and recycling together with close circles of friends, relatives or neighbours. Empirically, we draw on everyday experiences of front-runner citizens who have been implementing circularity, zero waste and sustainable consumption principles to examine whether and how digital platforms have facilitated their circularity in everyday life. Our study is based on a set of 40 semi-structured interviews, analysing the circular experiences of eco-activists and eco-influencers from Finland and the city of St Petersburg (Russia) and their use of digital platforms for circularity. Our results show that despite the flourishing app market, the circular citizens from our data often relied on ad-hoc solutions developed through social media platforms and messenger apps to facilitate their circular consumption in local communities with shared values regarding circularity. While these solutions might lack the sophistication and technical flexibility for convenient search and filtering, they still remain attractive due to their capacity to embed circular consumption locally and among preferred social circles.
Resilience is a term often applied to students of refugee backgrounds having survived traumatic experiences of war, displacement and resettlement; but how is it acquired? To many, it is a function of some inner strength, a perspective that tends to ignore the considerable labour involved in acquiring the skills and capacities to be resilient. This article examines these differing understandings and their implications in working with students of refugee backgrounds in schools in New South Wales, Australia. In particular, it considers the different approaches they elicit and the affective dimensions of these, proffering a view that resilience is reliant on the accumulation of certain affects that sediment into dispositions ensuring a sound foundation for learning.
In this article, we delve into an examination of how the ethos of vulnerability is manifested within cultural practices related to young people in Finland, thereby shaping and determining the conditions of what is possible for the kinds of subjects that young people can become. We employed the term ‘affective subjectivation’ to elucidate the processes through which young people from diverse life situations are inclined to turn themselves into vulnerabilised subjects within the ethos of vulnerability, thereby amplifying the prevalence of highly individualised and psycho-emotional interventions and elements. Our affective-discursive analysis centres on two distinct categories of cultural practice: youth support systems and an extensive questionnaire survey about young men’s mental health. We scrutinise how the ethos of vulnerability operates within these contexts, influencing and shaping the conditions of possibility for young people. Moreover, we extend our analysis to examine how therapeutic power contributes to the affective landscapes of masculinity, and the ambivalences of young Finnish men’s gendered and therapeutic, vulnerabilised subjectivities.
The last ten years has seen increasing concern about the wellbeing of children and young people in schools across the globe. Growing evidence of anxiety and stress have accompanied falling levels of life satisfaction among school children. This article adopts a Bourdieusian analysis, working with concepts of habitus, field and symbolic violence to understand the affective consequences of class inequalities in education. As the article tries to show through a focus on schooling in England, there are different types of class thinking and feeling that characterise different social class positions within the field of education.
The aim is to theorise hope from a sociology of emotion perspective and propose a general framework for the analysis of discrete emotions – the emotive-cognitive chain of evaluation – that can be applied by analysing different types of hope. Hope is defined as the emotion of future possibility, distinct from self-confidence, faith and trust. Hope as a foreground emotion, subject to emotive-cognitive evaluation, arises in a bad present (target) as an outcome of past failed hopes. The object of hope is future improvement. Given limited agency in fundamentally uncertain circumstances, an external source of hope is located. Background import informs the assessment of the present as bad, what improvement to hope for (object) and the identification of sources. I argue that fear is a companion emotion of hope, and that a reasonable balance between hope and fear can make hope more in tune with real circumstances. Elaborating on the action continuum of hope, I propose that hope is never truly passive and that action itself generates hope. As a collective emotion, hope becomes collectively evaluated and mutually supported in a responsive social context. Responsive hope may, however, also be delusional. Different hope constructs are illustrated, drawing on findings in a project on the post-apocalyptic environmental movement. Theorising hope in the context of the climate crisis highlights the specific quality of hope as an emotion of future possibility and the significance of hope for present action and future object outcomes, its potential for social change and how we collectively create the future.
