One of the central interests of sociology is the relationship between self and society, and in particular how social change affects individuality, constraining or liberating the selves that we can be. This article proposes that because a sense of belonging plays a central role in connecting the person to the social, it can act as a window into studying the relationship between social change and the self. Furthermore, belonging offers a complex person-centred and dynamic approach that avoids reifying social structures, but rather depicts them as actively lived. A focus on belonging thus allows a dynamic examination of the mutual influence between self and society, and of how everyday practices are both regulated and creative, and hence generative of social change.

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Belonging is a fundamentally temporal experience that is anchored not only in place but also time, yet this dimension of belonging has so far remained under-researched. Based on an analysis of 25 British Mass Observation Project accounts I argue that a focus on the temporal location of belonging contributes to our knowledge about how memory is used to create a sense of belonging, and the consequences this has for the self. The paper is structured around two interrelated arguments. First, that the temporal location of belonging -either in the past or the present -has consequences for how time is experienced and how memory is utilised in creating a sense of belonging. Second, that nostalgic belonging from afar, of which three types are identified in the MOP accounts, should not be understood merely as a way of disengaging with the present. Past sources of belonging can endure in a virtual sense through the act of nurturing the connection in memories and can be used to 'warm up' and give vitality to the present. Thus this paper contributes to our understanding of how people can creatively use different forms of temporal belonging to create a sense of a continuous self.

This paper focuses on 'normative talk' about grandparenting. It is based on a secondary analysis of a study involving 46 interviews with grandparents. It identifies two main cultural norms of grandparenting that emerged from the data -'being there' and 'not interfering'. There were very high levels of consensus in the study that these constituted what grandparents 'should and should not' do. However, these two norms can be contradictory, and are not easy to reconcile with the everyday realities of grandparenting. The study found that norms of parenting and also of self determination were also very important for the grandparents in the study. They had a keen sense of what being a 'good parent' (to their own adult children) should mean -especially in terms of allowing them to be independentbut this could sometimes conflict with their sense of responsibility to descendant generations of grandchildren. Using the concept of ambivalence and drawing on the accounts of grandparents in the study, the paper explores and offers an explanation for both the coexistence and conflict between different sets of norms, as well as for the remarkably high levels of consensus about 'being there' and 'not interfering'. The paper concludes with a discussion of some of the limitations of the data and the analysis, and with suggestions for the development of further work in this area.

In recent years there has been a growing interest in person-centred, 'living well' approaches to dementia, often taking the form of important efforts to engage people with dementia in a range of creative, arts-based interventions such as dance, drama, music, art and poetry. Such practices have been advanced as socially inclusive activities that help to affirm personhood and redress the biomedical focus on loss and deficit. However, in emphasizing more traditional forms of creativity associated with the arts, more mundane forms of creativity that emerge in everyday life have been overlooked, specifically with regard to how such creativity is used by people living with dementia and by their carers and family members as a way of negotiating changes in their everyday lives. In this paper, we propose a critical approach to understanding such forms of creativity in this context, comprised of six dimensions: everyday creativity; power relations; ways to operationalise creativity; sensory and affective experience; difference; and reciprocity. We point towards the potential of these dimensions to contribute to a reframing of debates around creativity and dementia.

In this paper, we discuss findings from a study on intergenerational relationalities in order to examine some aspects of how people over 50 years of age experience belonging in their everyday lives. Belonging emerged not as a single unitary ‘thing’, but a complex intersecting of relational, cultural and sensory experiences. We explore how people, place, time and cultural context intertwined in people's sense of belonging to place. Although much previous research on belonging has largely focused on geographical movement, we found that temporal movement, at an individual level in the form of ageing and at a collective level in terms of generational change, proved to be an important layer of our participants’ experiences of belonging and not belonging. Furthermore, we argue that people often come to understand and speak of temporal shifts in belonging in embodied terms, based on their sensory engagement with the world. The paper concludes by considering the consequences of this additional aspect of the experience of belonging for the study of belonging as a social and personal process, and how our findings contribute to debates around ‘ageing well’.

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