This commentary is a response to a speech addressed to the Economic and Social Research Council which was made, in February this year, by the UK Secretary of State for Education and Employment, David Blunkett. The speech was entitled 'Influence or Irrelevance: can social science improve...

This article proposes and demonstrates an approach to understanding everyday life that takes as its starting point the sensory aesthetics of place. In doing so it advances a video-ethnography approach to studying 'invisible' elements of everyday domestic life through the prism of the sensory...

This paper examines personal experience as both a sociologist and forester collecting data in the southern state of Oaxaca, Mexico. It builds on writings where researchers have taken an introspective or auto/biographical approach to problematizing their own involvement. My findings illustrate...

AbstractAlthough re-studies are relatively rare in sociological research, they can be very valuable resources for understanding social change. However, they also raise methodological questions about the validity of comparison given the inevitable changes in both social and analytical contexts...

The central objective of this paper is to attempt to counter an overly-rigid theoretical approach in data analysis. Implicit in the push to identify and follow one proper theoretical stream is the idea that one\'s particular theoretical approach will always be plausible and contains an inherent...

This article is concerned with sociological conceptualisations of lesbian and gay sexualities as reflexive forms of existence, and identifies core problems with these. Our sociological narratives about lesbian and gay reflexivity tend to be partial in two senses. First, they talk about and...

In this paper we explore some current issues in, what has come to be called, the new sociology of childhood and how these relate to the process of researching children's lives in general, and to our own research in particular. We discuss the developmental model of childhood, before going on to...

This paper highlights some thematic reflections primarily based on two empirical research projects on lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) Christians and Muslims. It begins by discussing reflexivity by way of contextualising the subsequent exploration of specific themes. This is followed by a...