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This article examines the perspectives of student teachers from working class backgrounds about not becoming middle class. Little attention has been paid to conceptualisations of social class in teaching. In the context of drives internationally to diversify teaching populations, research is needed about the experiences of student teachers from working class backgrounds in their upwardly mobile trajectories. This article draws on a constructivist grounded theory study about the social class identities of 21 student teachers from working class backgrounds as part of a wider teacher diversity project in Ireland. Distinguishing between class 'mentality' and materiality, participants emphasised that one could not change class completely, rejected the middle classness of a teacher's social status and positioned working class 'mentality' as morally superior. Those from working class backgrounds do not simply relinquish aspects of their identity through upward social mobility, suggesting that habitus may not always be divided upon traversing class boundaries.

This article offers an exploration of migrant Black African youths' (MBAYs') experiences of racial microaggressions in Australian, predominantly White, workplaces. Data for this article are drawn from qualitative interviews conducted with 20 MBAYs working in Newcastle, a traditionally White working-class city. Drawing on a theoretical framework that approaches racial microaggressions through a Critical Race Theory lens, the article centres MBAYs' experiences of racial microaggressions in the workplace as a site of legitimate experiential knowledge. The findings of this article underscore how MBAYs perceive questions like 'Where are you from?' posed by their White colleagues and clients as a racial microaggression. They showcase how MBAY experience racial microaggressions in the workplace as an invisible, insidious and infantilizing process. Finally, the findings highlight how some MBAYs respond to racial microaggressions by accepting or contesting them in the workplace. The article concludes by reflecting on how these microlevel, subtle forms of racism contribute towards institutionalizing and sustaining White supremacy.

How should sociologists understand the everyday lives of those living in adversity, coping with the experience of structural violence? In this article, focusing on the urban experience, we suggest a perspective on 'everyday life' that can encompass corporeal, mental, relational and social dimensions, which we term 'niche sociality'. First, we use Gibson's niches and affordances to enrich the post-representationalist understanding of human beings as embodied/cultural/environmentally embedded organisms. Second, we enrich Gibson's niches and affordances with theories for 'small-scale' sociality drawn from social practice theory and interaction ritual chains. Third, we illustrate the productivity of these ideas throughout the article, by grounding our conceptual work in empirical examples that analyse the everyday lives and mental life of migrant workers in Shanghai. Niche sociality, we argue, is a way of framing the experience of the everyday, a perspective that could – perhaps should – provoke novel ecosocial studies of adversity.

In response to criticisms of whiteness and the privileging of middle-class South African experiences over the black majority and those in poverty, Johannesburg Pride expanded from a one-day event to include a 'Lifestyle Conference' in 2018. This article argues that rather than including broader South African LGBTQ+ experiences, rights and needs, the conference centred privileged and normative 'lifestyles' and emphasised individual agency, rather than making intersectional inequalities visible and a basis for collective action. Drawing from ethnographic research at Pride events, and interviews with Pride organisers and LGBTQ+ activists, this article builds on critiques and insights from social theory to analyse Johannesburg Pride's Lifestyle Conference; its aims, politics, marketing and messages. By exploring the raced and classed exclusions of Johannesburg Pride, this article addresses key gaps in the academic literature on Pride, and traces how the lifestylisation of LGBTQ+ identities obscures inequality and contributes to the neoliberal co-option of Pride.

Does sociology have anything to gain by returning to the concept of social role? Has this concept been irretrievably damaged by its significance in functionalist theory? This article aims to recover the role concept through a consideration of alternative perspectives on normativity, illustrated through research on motherhood. A pragmatist re-conception of role is defended as a way of focusing on those aspects of social structures which exert normative authority over agents, while remaining open to some degree of interpretation. This perspective treats roles not as fixed mechanisms of functional coordination or social reproduction, but instead as variable sites of mutual accountability. The article argues that a pragmatist version of the role concept supports explanation of non-determined agency and complex, uncertain and conflictual forms of normative authority. Treated in these terms, the role concept offers a valuable route to understanding the creative quality of agency and normativity.

This article examines lived experiences of food insecurity in the United Kingdom as a liminal phenomenon. Our research is set within the context of austerity measures, welfare reform and the precarity experienced by increasing numbers of individuals. Drawing on original qualitative data, we highlight diverse food insecurity experiences as transitional, oscillating between phases of everyday food access to requiring supplementary food, which are both empowering and reinforcing of food insecurity. We make three original contributions to existing research on food insecurity. First, we expand the scope of empirical research by conceptualising food insecurity as liminal. Second, we illuminate shared social processes and practices that intersect individual agency and structure, co-constructing people's experiences of food insecurity. Third, we extend liminality theory by conceptualising paraliminality, a hybrid of liminal and liminoid phenomena that co-generates a persistent liminal state. Finally, we highlight policy implications that go beyond short-term emergency food access measures.

This article explores changes to the domestic division of labour and how these are negotiated, following both female and male redundancy among heterosexual dual-earning couples in the north of England. Using a qualitative, longitudinal research design, we engage with and extend relative resource bargaining theory to consider its different manifestations in the negotiation process, in relation to 'silent bargaining' and collaborative decision making over time availability and earnings. Despite espousing egalitarian attitudes, couples were found to 'do' gender to varying extents, with women typically taking on greater shares of the domestic division of labour even in cases of male redundancy. In the absence of explicit negotiation, a range of implicit strategies to resist changes in the domestic division of labour was evident in some cases, alongside more overtly conflictual tactics to both evoke, and resist, change. In the main, men were found to be more instrumental in their attempts to secure a preferred domestic division of labour than women.

This article explores the paradox between Pope Francis's success as a critic of global markets and the limitations of his religious capital in his home country of Argentina. While for some observers it might be obvious that the pope can influence people's thinking about social and political matters, the findings of this article highlight the role of 'non-specialist', ordinary believers in setting limits to Francis's religious power. Using Bourdieusian theory and a 'lived religion' methodological approach, I explore the agency of ordinary believers in the religious field. By studying the limits regular believers established to the efficacy of Pope Francis's religious capital, we better understand how the agency of non-specialists operates in the religious field. This research is based on a non-random sample of semi-structured, in-depth interviews of 42 lower socioeconomic status interviewees, self-identified as Catholics, Evangelicals, Others and Non-Affiliated; conducted in Córdoba, Argentina from November 2015 to December 2016.

We compare environmental concern between people in the United States and China by analyzing two General Social Surveys carried out in 2010. The two surveys have the same questions about the environment that have been answered by national probability samples of respondents from each country. This study serves as a starting point to understand variation in environmental concern between these two countries that have major global environmental impacts. Our hypotheses draw on the measurement hypothesis and the theory of planned behavior. We found the Chinese report higher environmental concern when measured as environmental sacrifice and perceived dangerousness, whereas the Americans reported a greater frequency of pro-environmental behaviors. Results from structural equation modeling show that the connections between sociodemographic predictors and environmental concern vary depending on the dimension of environmental concern being examined. We discuss these findings in the context of existing literature and factors unique to each country.

Definitions of volunteering are widespread and complex, yet relatively little attention is given to volunteering as unpaid work, even though it intersects with the worlds of paid employment and the domestic sphere, cutting across individual/collective and public/private spaces. This article advances a typology of volunteering work (altruistic, instrumental, militant and forced volunteering/'voluntolding') that illuminates the complexity and dynamism of volunteering. Using qualitative data from a study of 30 volunteers to explore practices of volunteering as they unfold in daily life, the typology provides much-needed conceptual building blocks for a theory of 'volunteering as unpaid work'. This perspective helps transcend the binaries prevalent in the sociology of work and provides a lens to rethink what counts as work in contemporary society. It also invites further research about the effects of 'voluntolding' on individuals and society, and on the complex relationship between volunteering work and outcomes at a personal and collective level.

The following presents parts of an interview conducted with Maurizio Lazzarato discussing his 2012 book, The Making of the Indebted Man. In this interview, Lazzarato first elaborates on his theoretical inspirations. Drawing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari in order to connect Nietzsche and Marx, he develops a theory of debt suggesting that the power of credit, central to neoliberalism, requires the construction of an indebted subjectivity. Producing a responsible, guilty and thus hindered subject, this condition involves individuals and societies facing an infinite social debt. According to Lazzarato, post-Fordism should be understood through the ascending influence of neoliberalism, as the state has retroceded its power of money creation to private creditors. Through this process, the relation between capital and labour has been transcended by the creditor–debtor relationship. In the economy of indebtedness, the welfare state is transformed into an inverted Keynesian redistribution system that allows for wealth transfers from non-owners towards owners.

Domiciliary carers are paid care workers who travel to the homes of older people to assist with personal routines. Increasingly, over the past 20 years, the delivery of domiciliary care has been organised according to market principles and portrayed as the ideal type of formal care; offering cost savings to local authorities and independence for older people. Crucially, the work of the former 'home help' is transformed as domiciliary carers are now subject to the imperative of private, competitive accumulation which necessitates a constant search for increases in labour productivity. Drawing on qualitative data from domiciliary carers, managers and stakeholders, this article highlights the commodification of caring labour and reveals the constraints, contradictions and challenges of paid care work. Labour Process Theory offers a means of understanding the political economy of care work and important distinctions in terms of the formal and informal domiciliary care labour process.

Research often highlights the complex nature of 'lay' interpretations of family genetic history particularly regarding women and breast cancer. While clinical studies have established genetic links for certain diseases affecting men, less is known about men's understandings of family history and health. This omission relates perhaps to the focus in existing health research on hegemonic masculinity, whereby 'macho stoicism' inhibits men's ability to 'do health' productively. Drawing on survey data, this article shows that men frequently engage in positive health practices regarding family history. While not always clear on the specific role of genetics, men do make lifestyle changes and seek medical advice in response to patterns of hereditary disease. The article concludes that while men's views sometimes indicate hegemonic or 'macho' approaches to health, more often they suggest a departure from them. The implications of this should be considered in future theory and policy on gender, genetics and health.

Sociologists have emphasized that abrupt social changes can evoke subjective deprivation that can create subjective injustice and emotional distress. The global economic crisis offers an opportunity to examine this issue. This article builds on relative deprivation theory and proposes that economic crises evoke three subjective comparisons that influence distress: comparisons to 1) past outcomes; 2) the situation of others; and 3) expected future outcomes. Using a national survey obtained during the economic crisis in Iceland, we examine how these comparisons influence subjective injustice and emotional distress (anger and depression). Results indicate that perceived reduction in the standard of living has a more pronounced effect on subjective injustice and anger, 1) when individuals think that the crisis has harmed them more than others; and 2) when they have negative expectations about their future. The study implies that subjective comparisons can moderate the effect of sudden social change on distress.

Work exploring inter-species relating has offered a critique of the anthropocentrism evident within much social sciences research and also suggested that the coming together of the human and animal- Other may offer up potential for an opening-up of human existence. In this article we explore this theoretical move and push it to the limits by examining the relationship between the human and a very particular animal- Other, the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). Thus we move the focus from an analysis of companionate human-animal relating (Haraway, 2003, 2008) to what appears to be antagonistic species relating. This is empirically grounded through the story of one man living with this virus and how he has come to find a way to accommodate the animal- Other. This article aims to not only advance theory but also provide insights into how it might be possible to find new ways of living with a viral- Other.