Human agency and social suffering

Frost, Liz; Hoggett, Paul

doi:10.1177/0261018308095279

Cited by 148 publications

(103 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…Structural change, particularly in (largely) working class communities such as Salford, has resulted in a loss of what Frost and Hoggett (2008) have termed "second order agency", that is, the opportunity to act with others to both achieve more than individual agency would permit and to feel part of something wider than the individual self. It is not just tangible resources such as jobs or the protection of trades unions which are salient e there is also a loss of collective narratives that can be drawn upon to make sense of the world and crucially, to facilitate action and change.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The group continued to work with the data on completion and further analysis was conducted by an individual researcher "reporting" to the group. Space does not permit a detailed exploration of the process of analysis and sense making, but the method of analysis was modelled upon the approach employed by Hollway and Jefferson (2013) and Frost and Hoggett (2008). Here we focus on the findings associated with relationships and connections between inequality and neoliberalism.…”

Section: The Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Dependency denied: Health inequalities in the neo-liberal era

Peacock

Bissell

Owen

2014

Social Science & Medicine

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The ways in which inequality generates particular population health outcomes remains a major source of dispute within social epidemiology and medical sociology. Wilkinson and Pickett's The Spirit Level (2009), undoubtedly galvanised thinking across the disciplines, with its emphasis on how income inequality shapes the distribution of health and social problems. In this paper, we argue that their focus on income inequality, whilst important, understates the role of neoliberal discourses and practises in making sense of contemporary inequality and its health-related consequences. Many quantitative studies have demonstrated that more neoliberal countries have poorer health compared to less neoliberal countries, but there are few qualitative studies which explore how neoliberal discourses shape accounts and experiences and what protections and resources might be available to people. This article uses findings from a qualitative psycho-social study employing biographical-narrative interviews with women in Salford (England) to understand experiences of inequality as posited in The Spirit Level. We found evidence for the sorts of damages resulting from inequality as proposed in The Spirit Level. However, in addition to these, the most striking finding was the repeated articulation of a discourse which we have termed "no legitimate dependency". This was something both painful and damaging, where dependency of almost any sort was disavowed and responsibility was assumed by the self or "othered" in various ways. No legitimate dependency, we propose, is a partial (and problematic) internalisation of neoliberal discourses which becomes naturalised and unquestioned at the individual level. We speculate that these sorts of discourses in conjunction with a destruction of protective resources (both material and discursive), lead to an increase in strain and account in part for well-known damages consequent on life in an unequal society. We conclude that integrating understandings of neoliberalism into theorising about inequality enriches sociological perspectives in this area.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

Dependency denied: Health inequalities in the neo-liberal era

Peacock

Bissell

Owen

2014

Social Science & Medicine

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“…As we have seen, Butler argues that if the symbolic means of representing and working through loss are unavailable then the loss will remain ungrievable. We believe this melancholia is an element of what Bourdieu (1999) calls 'social suffering', an abiding affect of the oppressed, excluded and marginalised (Frost and Hoggett, 2008).…”

Section: Ressentiment: the Vicissitudes Of Affectmentioning

confidence: 95%

Politics and affect

Crociani-Windland

Hoggett

2012

Subjectivity

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Until very recently Political Studies has largely ignored the role of the human passions. Understanding the difference between emotion and affect seems vital to this task, as without the latter emotion becomes cognitivised and over-civilised. In this article, we examine some of the contributions of psychoanalysis and continental philosophy to our understanding of affect. We examine the corporeal and ambivalent nature of affect, which provides the basis for what we call the vicissitudes of human feeling, that is, the way in which different feelings connect or disconnect from one another in complex, indeterminate and surprising ways. We use a detailed examination of the vicissitudes of grief and grievance as they contribute to ressentiment, a sentiment that is a particular characteristic of reactionary forms of populism. Passion can only ever be partly tamed and civilised and this is what provides politics with its excitements and terrors.

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“…The FANI method is a "psycho-social" approach which means holding onto the social as part of a constant dynamic with the individual. In a study of social suffering which employed a psychosocial approach Frost and Hoggett (2008) propose that "the "psycho" and "social" elements are not two parallel paradigms, but represent a whole epistemological shift into theorising the passionately rational subject...impacting on and impacted by its social world" (Frost and Hoggett 2008: 440). In our study, this perspective allowed for a novel way of understanding participants in talking and thinking about food and weight -areas which are known to be morally loaded and potentially difficult and shaming.…”

Section: The Studymentioning

confidence: 99%