The ‘animal‐advocacy agenda’: exploring sociology for non‐human animals

This paper focuses on sociology and the study of human non‐human animal relations. Using as a catalyst referees' comments on a previous paper about experiments using non‐human animal subjects, in this present paper three problematics are identified and discussed. These problematics centre on the ‘acceptable’ content of sociological inquiry, the ‘permissibility’ of advocacy‐oriented sociology, and the ‘admissibility’ of non‐human animal‐advocacy to advocacy‐oriented sociology. The three problematics are explored through the lens of reflexive and critical sociology. Two central questions are raised: first, should sociology include the study of non‐human animals and secondly, can sociology advocate for non‐human animals? The paper concludes with an affirmative response to both of these questions. The paper ends by stressing that sociology has so much to offer the study of human non‐human animal relations. Professional sociologists have a key role to play in enabling this work to move from margins to centre in published sociology.     

Sociology,the public sphere,and modern government: a challenge to the dominance of Habermas

There is an unfortunate tendency within some branches of sociology – particularly those usually called ‘critical’, that is, those associated with ‘critical social theory’– to treat with disdain the understanding of the public sphere that many modern governments use daily in making and implementing public policy. The majority of sociologists in those branches seem to prefer, as part and parcel of their normative commitments, Jürgen Habermas's Kantian understanding of the public sphere, which focuses primarily on reason and morality and insists that these two forces are of a higher order than politics and law. This paper offers a set of criticisms of the Habermas–Kant understanding, arguing that its focus on reason and morality, were it to become more widespread, would steer sociology into public policy irrelevance. The paper goes on to describe a very different understanding of the public sphere, a politico‐legal or civil‐peace understanding which operates as the public policy focus of those governments that have relegated questions of salvation (whether religious or ideological) to the private sphere. This understanding emerged from early modern attempts to carve out a domain of relative freedom and security against the deadly violence of religious disputation sweeping across Europe. The paper readily acknowledges that some ‘non‐critical’ branches of sociology already employ a version of this understanding.     

Pet grief: when is non‐human life grievable?

This study explores how pet owners grieve their pets and view their pets' transience. Drawing on Butler's notion of the differential allocation of grievability, I have analysed interviews with eighteen pet owners. Butler argues that grievability is made possible by a normative framework which allows for some human or human‐like lives to be grieved, while other lives are rendered ‘lose‐able’. All the interviewed pet owners say that they are capable of grieving a non‐human animal, but analysis suggests that they make their pets grievable and ungrievable by turns. I argue that by maintaining this ambivalence, the interviewees negotiate pets' inclusion in a human moral community while simultaneously defending human exceptionalism. The article concludes with a discussion of pet grief as a potentially destabilizing emotion. I suggest that grieving beings on the border between grievable human and lose‐able animal – ‘werewolves’ according to Giorgio Agamben – may be a powerful way of challenging normative frameworks which arbitrarily render some human and non‐human lives lose‐able.     

Knowing cows: Transformative mobilizations of human and non‐human bodies in an emotionography of the slaughterhouse

This ‘emotionography’ of the slaughterhouse elucidates how the identities of both human and non‐human individuals are constructed by line and lairage workers. Hegemonic masculine ideals that underpin slaughterhouse work mean that the emotions of workers as well as the emotional experience of cattle are either denied, diminished or repressed. Based on fieldwork in an Irish slaughterhouse, I articulate how the industrial slaughter of animals entangles human and non‐human life in metamorphic processes that seek to diminish the emotionality of individuals, maintaining the boundary between human/non‐human animals. These transformations simultaneously pacify the emotional toll of killing non‐human individuals and reinforce perceptions of cows as sellable, killable and edible in the commodification of bovine bodies. Amidst the relative absence of emotions in slaughterhouse ethnographies, this article reveals how emotions emerge, erupt and confound the act of slaughtering cattle for slaughterhouse workers unsettling categorizations of masculinity and ‘animals as food’.     

The idea of philosophical sociology

This article introduces the idea of philosophical sociology as an enquiry into the relationships between implicit notions of human nature and explicit conceptualizations of social life within sociology. Philosophical sociology is also an invitation to reflect on the role of the normative in social life by looking at it sociologically and philosophically at the same: normative self‐reflection is a fundamental aspect of sociology's scientific tasks because key sociological questions are, in the last instance, also philosophical ones. For the normative to emerge, we need to move away from the reductionism of hedonistic, essentialist or cynical conceptions of human nature and be able to grasp the conceptions of the good life, justice, democracy or freedom whose normative contents depend on more or less articulated conceptions of our shared humanity. The idea of philosophical sociology is then sustained on three main pillars and I use them to structure this article: (1) a revalorization of the relationships between sociology and philosophy; (2) a universalistic principle of humanity that works as a major regulative idea of sociological research, and; (3) an argument on the social (immanent) and pre‐social (transcendental) sources of the normative in social life. As invitations to embrace posthuman cyborgs, non‐human actants and material cultures proliferate, philosophical sociology offers the reminder that we still have to understand more fully who are the human beings that populate the social world.     

Shame and the city – ‘looting’, emotions and social structure

The sociology of violence is an emerging field but one in which there remains a tension between structural explanations and phenomenological‐situational ones that focus on the micro conditions of violence. This article proposes an analytical framework for connecting these levels through a critical appropriation of Scheff's theory of the shame‐rage cycle. It argues that while shame is a significant condition for violent action, Scheff does not have a theory of violence in itself but treats the connections between shame‐rage and violence as largely self‐evident. While emotions such as shame have agental properties, as Scheff and others argue, these need to be situated within structural and cultural conditions that are likely to evoke shame. Moreover, to develop Scheff's approach further, violence needs to be understood as being communicative and invoking normative justifications, which mediate the effects of shame‐rage. This analysis is developed with reference to recent instances of collective disorder, especially the English riots in August 2011, which is based on published research and media accounts from participants. The acquisition of consumer goods through ‘looting’ was public performance in spaces where a ‘moral holiday’ permitted a brief revaluation of the social order. Through this example the article shows how an underlying configuration of inequality, exclusion and shame coalesced into events in which the violence was a form of performative communication. This articulated ‘ugly feelings’ that invoked normative justification for participation, at least at the time of the disturbances. The discussion provides an integrated account of structural‐emotional conditions for violence combined with the dynamics of situated actions within particular spaces. It aims to do two things – to provide a framework for analysing the structural and affective bases for violence and to offer a nuanced understanding of ‘violence’ with reference to public disorder.     

More‐than‐human emotions: Multispecies emotional labour in the tourism industry

The concept of emotional labour has been subject to critique, evaluation, development and extension over the last 35 years, but it remains firmly anthropocentric. This article begins to address this shortcoming by illustrating some of the productive potential of extending the concept of emotional labour to include more‐than‐human and multispecies perspectives. Organizations are not solely human phenomena, but research usually fails to consider the role of non‐humans in work in contemporary capitalism. Using the example of trail horses in tourism, I argue that some non‐human animals should be considered workers, and that they do perform emotional labour in service to commercial organizations. More‐than‐human and multispecies perspectives capture some of the complexities of everyday organizational practices, and can inform feminist research attuned to the experiences of marginalized others, human and non‐human.     

Revitalizing sociology: urban life and mental illness between history and the present

This paper proposes a re‐thinking of the relationship between sociology and the biological sciences. Tracing lines of connection between the history of sociology and the contemporary landscape of biology, the paper argues for a reconfiguration of this relationship beyond popular rhetorics of ‘biologization' or ‘medicalization'. At the heart of the paper is a claim that, today, there are some potent new frames for re‐imagining the traffic between sociological and biological research – even for ‘revitalizing’ the sociological enterprise as such. The paper threads this argument through one empirical case: the relationship between urban life and mental illness. In its first section, it shows how this relationship enlivened both early psychiatric epidemiology, and some forms of the new discipline of sociology; it then traces the historical division of these sciences, as the sociological investment in psychiatric questions waned, and ‘the social' become marginalized within an increasingly ‘biological' psychiatry. In its third section, however, the paper shows how this relationship has lately been revivified, but now by a nuanced epigenetic and neurobiological attention to the links between mental health and urban life. What role can sociology play here? In its final section, the paper shows how this older sociology, with its lively interest in the psychiatric and neurobiological vicissitudes of urban social life, can be our guide in helping to identify intersections between sociological and biological attention. With a new century now underway, the paper concludes by suggesting that the relationship between urban life and mental illness may prove a core testing‐ground for a ‘revitalized' sociology.     

Resisting sexism and speciesism in the social sciences: Using feminist,species‐inclusive,visual methods to value the work of women and (other) animals

Visual methods offer social scientists some promising possibilities for valuing the work of women and animals in domestic homes and formal organizations, such as schools, hospitals, residential care facilities and other workplaces. In this article, we consider how visual methods might be used to ‘put women and animals in the frame’. We draw data and inspiration from our What is it About Animals study [2015–2016], which involved an online call for people over 16 years of age, to post pictures, poems, stories and videos depicting what animals mean to them. We pay attention to attempts to resist sexism and speciesism in the valuing of work, including emotional labour. We consider the possibility of post‐humanist methods for animal subject‐hood, and a sociology of animals, emotions and work. We end with a discussion of possible future visual methods projects to value the work of women and (other) animals.     

Functionalism and the survey: the relation of theory and method*

Many writers hold that research method is necessarily determined by theory, and it is common to suggest the relationship between functionalism and survey method in post-war US sociology as an example of this. This paper questions the extent to which that method and that theory were in reality meaningfully associated, and argues against the position that theory and method are in general invariably connected in the way suggested.     

Contextualizing Police Use of Force and Black Vulnerability: A Response to Whitesel

Whitesel ( 2017 ) argues that racialized stereotypes about black bodies were used as foundations for the killing and subsequent character assassinations of Eleanor Bumpurs and Eric Garner. In response to Whitesel, I offer several points to expand on the arguments raised, as well as some critiques that should enhance future research on policing and state‐sanctioned violence.     

Charitable giving and lay morality: understanding sympathy,moral evaluations and social positions

This paper examines how charitable giving offers an example of lay morality, reflecting people's capacity for fellow‐feeling, moral sentiments, personal reflexivity, ethical dispositions, moral norms and moral discourses. Lay morality refers to how people should treat others and be treated by them, matters that are important for their subjective and objective well‐being. It is a first person evaluative relation to the world (about things that matter to people). While the paper is sympathetic to the ‘moral boundaries’ approach, which seeks to address the neglect of moral evaluations in sociology, it reveals this approach to have some shortcomings. The paper argues that although morality is always mediated by cultural discourses and shaped by structural factors, it also has a universalizing character because people have fellow‐feelings, shared human conditions, and have reason to value.     

Sustainability and sociology

Sociologists have been slow to address directly the questions raised by the issue of sustainability, despite the prominence of the idea in other disciplines and policy fields. This article argues that sociologists are “missing the boat” by ignoring the questions that sustainability raises. In addition, it is suggested that sociology is uniquely equipped with the theoretical and methodological background to contribute scientifically accurate understandings of this phenomenon to a world much in need of such guidance. The article concludes that addressing questions of sustainability may nudge sociology into new and fruitful directions of inquiry. This research was supported in part by National Science Foundation grant number CMS-9312647, which is gratefully acknowledged. Thanks, also, to Gary Marx, Alice Fothergill and Sharon Erickson Nepstad.     

The sociologist and the state. An assessment of Pierre Bourdieu's sociology

This paper provides an assessment of Pierre Bourdieu's sociology based on a reading of his posthumously published lectures on the state in Sur l'État. It argues that the state was a foundational element in Bourdieu's rendition of the symbolic order of everyday life. As such, the state becomes equally pivotal in Bourdieu's sociology, the applicability of which rests on the existence of the state, which stabilizes the social fields and their symbolic action that constitute the object of sociology. The state, which Bourdieu considers a ‘meta'‐ordering principle in social life, ensures that sociology has a well‐ordered object of study, vis‐à‐vis which it can posit itself as ‘meta‐meta’. The state thus functions as an epistemic guarantee in Bourdieu's sociology. A critical analysis of Bourdieu's sociology of the state offers the chance of a more fundamental overall assessment of Bourdieu's conception of sociology that has relevance for any critical sociological perspective that rests on the assumption of a meta‐social entity, such as the state in Bourdieu's work, as a final ordering instance.     

Animals and anomalies: an analysis of the UK veterinary profession and the relative lack of state reform

The sociology of professions literature would predict that the contemporary state would not allow groups to continue unregulated or unreformed. However, this is indeed the case with the UK veterinary profession, with legislation dating back to 1966. Using an interdisciplinary analysis of published literature and reports, this paper assesses whether wider social, political and ethical dynamics can better explain this intriguing anomaly. We conclude with critical implications for the sociology of the professions. Furthermore, we argue that continuing to ignore the veterinary profession, and animals more generally, in sociological research will result in an impoverished and partial understanding of contemporary healthcare and occupations.     

Intimate Partner Violence during Pregnancy: What Does the Research Tell Us?

This article represents an interdisciplinary review of the current literature on intimate partner violence during pregnancy. Within the field of research, questions have been raised about whether or not women are at heightened risk for experiencing violence during pregnancy. We examined studies in both Western and non‐Western contexts to examine this question and consider prevalence rates, causal factors, and the consequences for victims and their fetuses. We found that even with variations in methodology, the literature indicates that violence against women during pregnancy is a serious and complex problem. Women's experiences of violence vary greatly, and while pregnancy may serve as a protective period for some women, for others, pregnancy has been found to increase the violence or even lead to changes in types of violence. However, most studies emphasize physical violence, while frequently neglecting women's experiences of sexual violence. We call for researchers in a variety of fields to continue their critical work into this pressing issue, with particular attention to broadening the type of violence addressed and to expanding the focus to the post‐partum period, improving the racial/ethnic diversity of samples, increasing the number of longitudinal studies, and recognizing variations between developed and developing nations.     

Science, Religion and Secularization

The persistence of religion among scientists is the background question from which is derived a number of theoretical questions previously explored only tentatively in the sociology of religion and less by the sociology of science. The examination, organized around the differences in style and subject of these two sociological specialties, argues that the social study of science could benefit from and supplement theoretical concepts recently developed in the sociology of religion. Propositions are developed on the idea of scientism as a general ideology functioning as a substitute religion, and the proposition that modern consciousness is more able to sustain normative dissonance, including dissonance between religious and scientific norms. The discussion is theoretical and programmatic rather than empirical.     

White settler death drives: settler statecraft,white possession,and multiple colonialisms under Treaty 6

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes histories of white settler colonial violence in Treaty 6 territory by arguing that the 1870 Hudson’s Bay Company charter and transfer of Rupert’s Land and the North-Western Territory to the Dominion of Canada helped to make past imperial violence an ongoing settler colonial terror structure into the present. It argues that this transition from imperial to settler colonial control of territory is best understood by using a multiple colonialisms framework, to examine the ways in which heteropatriarchal family structures transitioned from Indigenous-European to white settler kin networks that crystallized whiteness as a racialized means to control land as private property. Following Kanien’kehá:ka feminist scholar Audra Simpson’s work, I suggest that this territory’s multiple and overlapping colonial histories (French, English/British, and Canadian) are a crucial lens through which to understand the historical and ongoing formation of Canada as a white settler state, and that these histories still relationally drive anti-Indigenous violence and the settler killing of Indigenous peoples today. The essay concludes by arguing that the seeming daily placidity of white settler violence against Plains Indigenous peoples under Treaty 6 ultimately supports a relational violence that supports a killing state and its armed citizens in the name of protecting private property for white settlers.     

‘I myself had a sweetie …’: re‐thinking female same‐sex intimacy beyond the institution of marriage and identity politics

This article is understood as an intervention into current debates around the question of rights in relation to sexuality and in particular to issues of same‐sex marriages and alternative family structures. As the interpretation of rights in relation to sexuality generally focuses on gay identities, this article reflects on the effects of these discourses on non‐normative modes of sexuality and intimacy. More specifically the article focuses on interviews conducted in Johannesburg on ‘mummy–baby’ relationships. By contextualising these relationships in the historical and cultural framework of sexual cultures and cultures of intimacy, this article argues that the South African history and cultures provided and provide a space which accommodates forms of female same‐sex intimacy that are not necessarily linked to metropolitan sexual cultures. The article discusses the tensions between non‐lesbian same‐sex intimacy and metropolitan lesbianism by focusing on homosociality as a gender theory. The article questions the regulatory functions of identity and problematises the practice of ‘coming out’ as always being a liberating moment.