Tuesday, 13 April 2021, 10:15 – 11:30 PAPER SESSION 1 BSA Annual Conference 2021: Remaking the Future Tuesday, 13 April 2021 10:15 – 11:30 Paper Session 1 Cities, Mobilities, Place and Space Waiting for tomorrow: Walking in the post-disaster city Eirini Glynou-Lefaki (Gran Sasso Science Institute, L'Aquila Italy) Disasters continue to affect the areas and the local populations long after their occurrence. In the case of the Italian city of L’Aquila, a catastrophic earthquake that hit the city in 2009 caused many casualties, great damages in buildings and displaced the local population. More than ten years after, the city continues to recover from the effects of the earthquake. While anticipating its future “rebirth”, L’Aquila still struggles with the complexities inherited from the disaster. This presentation underlines the fact that it is important to return to the affected areas and examine catastrophic events such as earthquakes from a quotidian point of view, as disasters “inhabit” in the everyday. To address the contradicting elements of everyday life in the recovering city this paper is using a mix of sedentary and participatory walking interviews. Walking as a method has been widely praised in the literature as a means of sensing the city as well as for challenging the dominant representations by offering insights into the way places are lived. As it will be suggested, walking interviews can assist in the articulation of entangled landscapes, such as those that are recovering from a disaster as during the walks, memories of the past and hopes for the future emerge. Therefore this presentation will address the complex character of daily life more than a decade after the disaster in L'Aquila and discuss how the present and the future of the city are negotiated. Crises and the State: Multimodal Ethnography and the Co-production of the Future Alex Kirby-Reynolds (University of Sheffield) In the wake of austerity, climate change, racist violence, ‘the rise of populism’, and the pandemic, crisis and emergency are, for many people, part of the fabric of ordinary life. Such crises coincide with panics that the liberal state is under threat following the increasing prevalence of disaffection, cynicism and distrust. In engaging with the affective lives of protracted crises, scholars such as Ben Anderson (2017, 2018), Rebecca Coleman (2014), and Lauren Berlant (2011) variously draw our attention to the ways in which possible futures are brought into everyday life. In this capacity, forces such as hope, fear, boredom, weariness, pessimism, and anxiety create vehicles for action and inaction through which possible states of affairs can be realised or missed. Such an engagement should beg the question of how our research participants can use their everyday experiences to develop skills and resources that they will find useful in attempting to build these futures. Moreover, it should also ask how such commitments can be built into our research methodologies. This paper explores these questions, drawing upon ongoing multimodal ethnographic research into precarious workers’ everyday experiences of crises and the state. In doing so it brings into conversation multiple calls for a sociology that is at once public, inventive, messy, sensory, and co-produced. BSA Annual Virtual Conference 2021: Remaking the Future 70th Anniversary Tuesday, 13 April 2021, 10:15 – 11:30 PAPER SESSION 1 Picture this: ‘Collaging’ young adult migrant identities in Scotland Maggie Laidlaw, Marcus Nicolson (Glasgow Caledonian University) This presentation discusses the use of collage to investigate the identity negotiation processes of young adult migrants in Scotland. In collaborative research with a small group of young adults in Glasgow we explored how this group visualised their own identities and, also, how they constructed Scottish national identity. This co-investigative social research method encouraged the participants to think creatively about their everyday lives and world views. By its very nature, collage is about separation, forming, and joining together. It is a medium that speaks to the aspects of diversity, belonging, relationality, space and time - where images disappear, appear and reappear to create new narratives. This workshop was followed with semi-structured interviews using the collages to generate rich conversations about the participants’ lives, including the barriers faced to Scottish identity claims. Results from the workshop also suggest that young adults with more years of living in Scotland are more inclined to be critical of the local environment, and highlight shortcomings in relation to diversity policy and welcoming country narratives. Using our activity as an example, we are able to highlight the ways in which creative engagement encourages us to reach ‘beyond what we think we know, [and to] imagine, sometimes disturbing, ways of being or living together’ (Matarasso, 2016:5). In our talk, we also consider the benefits and potential of using collage, and other creative practice, across various contexts and groups: as inclusive and creative research methods to construct knowledge, and, that complement other, more traditional research methods. Listening-on-sea: Re-imagining the urban seaside Bethan Prosser (University of Brighton) The urban seaside is a distinct landscape that has undergone waves of re-imaginings from gentry resort to mass tourism through decline to regeneration. Historical perspectives help us understand how the seaside has been constructed and consumed as a unique place with early health practices, post-war carnivalesque behaviours and more recent hedonism epitomised by hen and stag weekends. But how are current seaside stories unfolding in times of Covid and what can they tell us about possible urban seaside futures? This paper will explore such questions drawing on doctoral research undertaken during the pandemic with residents of the UK south coast. Making a Covid-induced digital pivot, I have developed new sound and mobile methods to explore urban seaside gentrification and residents’ experiences of displacement. Residents have been supported remotely to carry out listening walks and listening-at-home activities and creatively capture their sensory experiences. Online and telephone elicitation interviews have yielded in-depth reflections on residents’ changing sense of place through spring lockdown, summer easing and into autumnal restrictions. Competing narratives play out in our media that swing between heralding the renaissance of seaside towns as a therapeutic bolthole and sensationalising images of ‘irresponsible’ masses on beaches. These tales thread through resident’s hopes and fears for their homes and neighbourhoods as they grapple with fluctuating tourist and residential im/mobilities. The rich textual, visual and audio material generated from my Covid-transformed methods will therefore be employed alongside deep listening techniques to delve into possibilities for living in liquid landscapes. Culture, Media, Sport and Food Symbolic Space and Symbolic Domination in Three Nations William Atkinson (University of Bristol) This paper reports on a comparative analysis of class, lifestyles and symbolic domination in three nations: Sweden, Germany and the US. Drawing on data from a specially commissioned survey and inspired by Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of 1970s France, it presents a model of the ‘space of lifestyles’ for each country and its homologies with indicators of BSA Annual Virtual Conference 2021: Remaking the Future 70th Anniversary Tuesday, 13 April 2021, 10:15 – 11:30 PAPER SESSION 1 social position. Mapped using multiple correspondence analysis and based on comparable indicators, the core conclusion is that, while there are some differences in substance, the fundamental structures of the three spaces and their relationships to class are the same – and, what is more, similar to those discovered by Bourdieu – and thus indicative of general features of Western capitalist societies. We are able, moreover, to document the prevalence and correspondence of symbolic domination in the spaces, finding that it is typically those with least cultural capital who tend to feel looked down upon by others. Reimagining our future: culture for all Maria Barrett (University of Warwick) The COVID pandemic has exposed and exacerbated existing inequalities in arts and culture as it has in our societies. Both cultural production and consumption have long been dominated by white, middle class people, and this is likely to be consolidated as effects of lockdown such as furlough and redundancy disproportionately affect those who are least well paid and most precarious. The devastating effects of COVID on the cultural sector will necessitate rebuilding. Rather than trying to recapture what was lost and replicating a broken model, this is our opportunity for arts and culture to ‘build back better’, to redress the balance and give culture back to all of the people. To do that, we need to understand what is at stake for marginalised people in our cultural spaces. The classed relationship with culture has been misrecognised by policy makers who have focused on an inability to pay at the expense of more deep-seated problems. Bourdieu illuminates issues around not only a class-related ‘taste’, but a conception of a classed field that signals belonging or otherwise to marginalised people who may respond by self-exclusion. As well as making spaces that welcome marginalised groups, we need to hand over the spaces to be