A sensory sociology of the future: Affect, hope and inventive methodologies Contribution to Special Issue of The Sociological Review on 'Futures in Question'.
The results indicate that the Movement ABC is a useful tool in discriminating among pre-school Australian children as young as 3 years of age. The differences between Australian and American children indicate that further studies comparing other age groups are warranted, but the differences did not appear to be sufficiently large to have clinical significance.
This article examines the relationships between austerity, debt and mood through a focus on temporality and the future. Its starting point is a poll, conducted in Britain in 2011, which showed an increase of pessimism about the future and led to suggestions that 'a new pessimism' had become the 'national mood'. Exploring this survey and other related examples, I ask whether and how pessimism about the future might be considered a mood characteristic of austerity in the UK, consider some of the implications of the future being imagined not as better but as diminished and, drawing on Berlant's concept of cruel optimism, propose a notion of hopeful pessimism. I explore the politics of pessimism about the future, focusing especially on the affects and emotions that some women and young people might feel. In these senses, I aim to turn around the focus of this special issue to inquire not so much about the future of austerity as about the kinds of futures that are imagined in the new age of austerity, and the affective experiences of such imaginations. 2Austerity Futures: Debt, Temporality and (Hopeful) Pessimism as an Austerity MoodIn November 2011, the UK research company Ipsos MORI published the results of a telephone survey, commissioned by the British Sunday newspaper The Observer, on British adults' attitudes towards the economic and social climate. The survey asked a representative sample of 1006 respondents six questions, ranging from their satisfaction with life at the moment to their opinion on whether or not it is necessary to cut spending on public services to pay off the national debt. Two of the questions asked respondents to imagine what the future would be like for the next generation. The results of the survey led The Observer's political editor Toby Helm to argue that 'concern about the economic crisis [has] harden [ed] into long-term pessimism' 1 (Helm 2011a). He describes the results of the poll as indicating a new 'national mood', which he terms 'the new pessimism'.In this article, I draw on this survey and other related examples taken primarily from the UK during the relatively early period of austerity from [2009][2010][2011][2012][2013], to explore the relationships between austerity, debt and mood through a focus on temporality and the future. There are three reasons for this focus. First, it is intended to pull through the questions in the survey, where attitudes towards the economic and social climate are assessed in part through imaginations of the future. Second, it is to consider the relationship between debt and futurity;as Lisa Adkins 2 among others argues, debt is 'defined by time' and in particular by 'a time which has not yet arrived, namely in the future'. Third, I suggest that attending to mood, affect and feeling is one way in which it is possible to unpack the cultural politics of austerity and indebtedness. The article picks up on arguments in contemporary social and cultural theory that see the affectivity of time, and especially the future, as a 'defining quality ...
The relations between women's bodies and images have long interested and occupied feminist theoretical and empirical work. Recently, much feminist research has focused on the relations between girls' and young women's bodies and images in "the media." Underpinning much of this research, I argue, is an oppositional model of subject/object onto which bodies and images are mapped. Developing Deleuze's concept of becoming and exploring my own research with a small number of white British teenage girls, I develop an alternative model of the relations between bodies and images. I suggest that while the subject/object model relies upon a notion of media effects, an understanding of bodies as becoming opens up feminist research to consider the ways in which bodies are not separate to images but rather are known, understood and experienced through images. If feminist research takes seriously this conception of bodies as becoming, its task is to account for how bodies become through their relations with images; what becomings of bodies do images limit or extend?An ongoing area of concern in feminist research is the relations between women's bodies and images. Feminist theory, for example, has long been occupied with the relations between women's bodies and mirror images (de ). Recently, much feminist empirical work has focused on the relations between girls' and young women's bodies and images in "the media." 1 This article considers some of this research, and its limitations, through an exploration of my own research with a small number of white teenage British girls. My aim in this article is to open up the possible ways in which the relations between girls' bodies and images might be conceived. In particular, I argue that existing feminist empirical and theoretical work is underpinned, usually implicitly and to greater and lesser extents, by an oppositional model of body/image, subject/object. In contrast, by developing Deleuze's concepts of becoming through my research, I propose an alternative model grounded not in oppositions but in process, relationality, and transformation. Such a model understands bodies and images not as separate and separable entities (subjects and objects, for example) between which relations operate, but as constituted through their relationality. I consider the ways in which bodies are known, understood and experienced through images, that is, the ways in which bodies become through their relations with images.My argument here is four-fold. First, in discussing some of the existing empirical research on the relations between girls' bodies and images, my concern is to explicate the
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