Youth sports have been recognized as an arena for men to meet increased cultural expectations of being involved in their childrens lives. Indeed, in contrast to other child care practices, many men are eager to take part in their childrens organized sports. Drawing on an ethnographic study of middle-class families in the United States, this study examines how men juggle two contrasting cultur…
The return of austerity has provoked social conflict, political controversy and academic disputes. In this article we explore some of these through the metaphor of an alchemy of austerity that forms the foundation for strategies of state retrenchment through which the consent of populations is sought. We begin, in Magical thinking, by tracing some of the discursive repertoires that circulat…
The formation of the Coalition government in 2010 has resulted in unprecedented spending cuts presented as necessary austerity, together with the promotion of the Big Society as the panacea for social ills. This article argues that the cuts continue a thirty-year process of redistribution to the rich. Rather than being a necessary response to the economic crisis, they constitute a neo-liberal…
This paper considers the continuing resilience of the notion of community in social policy making and wider political commentary in the contemporary UK. Focusing in particular on the ways in which community is negatively and positively invoked and mobilized in narratives of the big and broken societies, it considers why the notion of community, so popular with the previous New Labour govern…
Emerging out of increased attention to gender equality within violence and HIV prevention efforts in South African society has been an intensified focus on masculinities. Garnering a deeper understanding of how men respond to shifting gender relations and rights on the ground is of urgent importance, particularly since social constructions of gender are implicated in the HIV/AIDS epidemic. As s…
Social scientists have provided rich descriptions of the ascendant cultural ideologies surrounding motherhood and paid work. In this article, I use in-depth interviews with a diverse sample of 40 employed mothers to explore how they navigate the intensive mother and ideal worker ideologies and construct their own accounts of good mothering. Married mothers in this sample construct scripts o…
This paper interrogates a concept at the core of a social policy agenda that has dominated thinking in the UK over the past decade. It argues that the notion of community cohesion is based on a fundamentally flawed interpretation of the sources of tension and conflict in Britains towns and cities. It overly ethnicizes societal divisions and essentializes ethnicity. Examining the development …
Evaluation utilization in conservation management emphasizes the use of appropriate information from the perspective of an expert provider. An alternative is to emphasize the information needs of recipients. Doing so ensures evaluation information is relevant to expected users and uses. The authors worked with an Australian conservation management agency to address barriers associated with en…
Human memory in the wild often involves multiple forms of remembering at once, as habitual, affective, personal, factual, shared, and institutional memories operate at once within and across individuals and small groups. The interdisciplinary study of the ways in which history animates dynamical systems at many different timescales requires a multidimensional framework in which to analyse…
“Collective memory” is an umbrella term for different formats of memory. Interactive and social memory are both formats that are embodied, grounded in lived experience that vanish with their carriers. The manifestations of political and cultural memory, on the other hand, are grounded on the more durable carriers of external symbols and representations and can be re-embodied and trans…
The appearance of digital photography in the late twentieth century raised a significant challenge to the most powerful idea attached to photography in the nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries, that it was a kind of memory and hence the source of reliable historical data. Traditional or analogue photographs were assumed to be reliable records of the past simply by virtue of bein…
An episode of social conflict between Russian and Estonian “mnemonic communities” is used as a framework for exploring issues of collective memory. In order to understand the strong Russian reaction to the Estonian decision to move a memorial statue, it is argued that the notion of “deep memory” is needed, a notion that is, in turn, grounded in the construct of a “narrative temp…
This article considers the power of food as a vehicle for memory by exploring the ways that food crosses the personal and the collective, the individual and the social. It examines these questions through the lens of certain Easter practices on the island of Kalymnos, Greece, concerning the preparation of lamb. The ovens and pots used to prepare lamb are a marker of Kalymnian identity, bu…
Collective memories are often formed through the conversations community members have with each other. The effectiveness of these conversations to transmit a memory across a community and to produce a shared and stable mnemonic representation is constrained by psychological factors. This essay examines the effects of speakers' retellings of past events (a) on listeners' memories and (b) o…
The people we call Europeans include many millions of European Union citizens, the Swiss, the Ukrainians, the Turks, the Norwegians, the Croatians, the Serbs, and the Albanians. Do they share memories and a common sense of history? Indeed, should Europeans share memories? Each of the European nations has accumulated a stockpile of tales and myths that allow its citizens to act in solidari…
In this essay, I argue that the political community’s identity and its sense of its own coherence as a responsible agent across time rest squarely on the work of collective memory. The protean volatility of the politics of memory reminds us that in our world (or perhaps it always and everywhere was so), memory is intertwined with power, interest and resistance precisely because it is so v…
History is not only on the curriculum, and it is not only in the subject of books, journal, radio and television progams, or public debates that explicitly deal with the past and with the question of how to remember it in an adequate way. History is also conveyed en passant. It is inscribed in the fabric of everyday life, in people's habits and routines, in things they live with and place…
An important role of memory, both individual and collective, is to remind us of what we owe to the past. To understand this role, we need to conceive memory not merely in cognitive terms, but also as what Nietzsche called “memory of the will.” It is this “conative” aspect of memory which explains the link between memory and identity. There still remain problems of how to explain h…
How do we explain consistencies in discourses about the past that transcend the different interests and experiences of their contributors? This paper explores the the problem of cultural transmission as it appears in Sigmund Freud's Moses and Monotheism, in which Freud claims that that the residues of repressed pasts can be preserved in the life of the collectivity through means other tha…
Voluntary programs intended to improve corporate environmental practices have proliferated in recent years. Why some businesses choose to participate in such voluntary programs, while others do not, remains an open question. Recent work suggests that companies’ environmental practices, including their decisions to participate in voluntary programs, are shaped by a license to operate com…