This article examines the ways in which the care-indifferent and gendered character of much political egalitarian theory has contributed to a disregard for the care-relational dimensions of social injustice within the social sciences. It demonstrates how the lack of in-depth engagement with affective relations of love, care and solidarity has contributed to an underestimation of their pivotal role in generating injustices in the production of people in their humanity. While humans are political, economic and cultural beings, they are also what Tronto has termed homines curans. Yet, care, in its multiple manifestations, is treated as a kind of ‘cultural residual’, an area of human life that the dominant culture neglects, represses and cannot even recognize for its political salience. If sociology takes the issue of relational justice as seriously as it takes issues of redistribution, recognition and political representation, this would provide an intellectual avenue for advancing scholarship that recognizes that much of life is lived, and injustices are generated, outside the market, formal politics and public culture. A new sociology of affective care relations could enhance a normatively-led sociology of inequality, that is distinguishable from, but intersecting with, a sociology of inequality based on class (redistribution), status (recognition) and power (representation). It would also help change public discourse about politics by making affective in/justices visible intellectually and politically, and in so doing, identifying ways in which they could be a site of resistance to capitalist values and processes.

This article explores affective formations of class consciousness. Through autoethnography and conversations and discussion sessions with working class women, the article contributes to a sociology of social class that recognises how people come to know their class positioning in spaces outside of waged relations. The article argues that affective relations and affective inequalities inform women’s experiences and consciousness of inequality generated by the class system. Their consciousness of the class system is narrated through their care relational identities, discontent with affective inequalities generated by the class system and their attitudes and actions for social change. This implies an affective formation of class consciousness referred to as care consciousness. Care consciousness takes seriously what is refused legitimacy at a sociological and political level yet articulated privately by the women as they discuss experiences of the class system.

In spite of widespread initiatives to improve access to education for girls, substantive concerns remain. While there is a rich and growing body of literature on gendered experiences of school in majority world contexts, absent is a focus on how this intersects with children's out of school lives. Further, research with children in rural communities is limited, including those who are in the earlier years of their schooling. This paper addresses these gaps, focusing on gendered dynamics in the everyday lives of children in five rural communities in Northern Sierra Leone. Drawing on Bourdieu, it explores the dialectical interplay between gendered and generational structures, understood as the gendered habitus, in a wider context of structural poverty, uneven and fragile post-colonial restructuring and development. This sets the groundwork for children's gendered dis/positioning, and ultimately capacity to engage with schooling.

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