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Klappentext: Our culture is one that speaks rather than listens. From reality TV to political rallies, there is a clamour to be heard, to narrate, and to receive attention. It reduces 'reality' to revelation and voyeurism. The Art of Listening argues that this way of life is having severe and damaging consequences in a world that is increasingly globalized and interconnected. It addresses the question: how can we listen more carefully? Social and cultural theory is combined with real stories from the experiences of the desperate stowaways who hide in the undercarriages of jet planes in order to seek asylum, to the young working-class people who use tattooing to commemorate a lost love. The Art of Listening shows how sociology is in a unique position to record 'life passed in living' and to listen to complex experiences with humility and ethical care, providing a resource to understand the contemporary world while pointing to the possibility of a different kind of future. 'This is a wise and human piece of writing, concerned to break out of sociology's academic straitjacket and speak to a wider audience. . .If anything can recover the somewhat tarnished reputation of sociology amongst the general public, then it is a book like this.' (New Humanist) 'The Art of Listening is a rare book in its commitment to vitalize an ethical, global sociology for the twenty-first century. Students are encouraging their parents to read it. Everyone needs this book - especially jaded academics.' (Sanjay Sharma, British Journal of Sociology)

"The book also sets out the key antecedents contributing to the emergence of cultural sociology and presents students with a firm grounding in theoretical and methodological principles applied by cultural sociologists in their work"--

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Table of Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- 1 The metropolitan paradox -- Part I Racism, community and youth culture -- 2 "White flight": locality, nostalgia and the preservation of privilege -- 3 "Neighbourhood nationalism": Youth, race, nation and identity -- 4 Social context and racist practice -- Part II Transculturalism and the politics of dialogue -- 5 "Our area": community, resistance and multiculture -- 6 "Not something we're new to, it's something we grew to ...": youth, identification and alliance -- 7 Experiencing and parodying racism -- Part III Black music, youth culture and syncretism -- 8 "Inglan, nice up!": black music, autonomy and the cultural intermezzo -- 9 Future reality: racisms, new ethnicity and the millennium -- Appendix 1: The ethnographic sample -- Appendix 2: 1981 and 1991 census data and ethno-demographic structure -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

This article reviews some of the key political interventions by black and Asian theorists on the migrant experience and the politics of culture. Stressing the political dimensions of this work, it argues for a reconnection to the interventions made by Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy who introduced a repertoire of theoretical tools to understand migration, new ethnicities and multiculture. A case study of an anti-racist musical project based in Kent during the early 2000s is used to illustrate this argument. This initiative brought Asian dance music DJs from east London together with Czech and Polish Roma musicians and culminated in the making of a CD called Asylum. The article documents how the CD provided a resource used in anti-racist education in predominantly white schools in Kent. It argues that music is politically important because it can challenge the way migration and identity is understood and offer alternative expressions of multiculture and belonging. The article also stresses musical culture's capacity to organize social life differently in a way that bridges cultural differences and establishes a shared form of likeness and commonality.

This article argues that studying everyday life is valuable because it makes sociologists attend to the routine and temporal aspects of social life. The 'everyday' brings the seasons of society into view. It also brings to the fore how liveable lives are made in the midst of the social damage produced by widening class divisions. Drawing lessons from Erving Goffman's sociology, the article argues that attending to everyday life necessitates developing an eye for detail and attentiveness to the seemingly unimportant. It is also argued that central to the study of everyday life is the relationship between history, culture, class and biography. These arguments are illustrated through a discussion of a working-class estate in Croydon, south London where residents light up their home at Christmas in 'chromatic surplus'.

The article draws on recent debates about empirical sociology's methodological crisis that results from the emergence of sophisticated information-based capitalism and digital culture. Researchers face the challenge of 'newly coordinated social reality' in which social relations and interconnections exist across time and space. However, this challenge co-exists with an unprecedented opportunity to use digital multimedia to reimagine social research. In the face of these developments it is argued that the sociological craft needs to be invigorated by a renewed focus on its political purpose. Digital culture offers researchers the opportunity to develop new methodological devices. This vision is contrasted with a critique of dead sociology that is characterized as objectifying, comfortable, disengaged and parochial. The article argues for a live sociology, able to attend to the fleeting, distributed, multiple and sensory aspects of sociality through research techniques that are mobile, sensuous and operate from multiple vantage points. If researchers enact reality rather than simply reflect it, there is an opportunity to create sociological forms of representation that are more knowing and innovative than their antecedents.

This paper argues for the training of a global attentiveness that reconfigures the epistemic apparatus of sociology, to admit not only the legacy of empire but also an appreciation of how the dynamics of the British social formation are intimately tied to imperial and postcolonial networks. It argues not for provincialising British sociology and its modes of thought but for rendering explicit the implication near at hand and the postcolonial elsewhere. Sociological knowledge as a consequence needs to challenge what it dismisses as unthinkable - be it the history of empire in its own modern formation or the contemporary turn to the sacred and otherworldly - in order to extend its imagination to a truly global scale.