Sociology, Philosophy & Anthropology
Welcome to the research outputs of the University of Exeter Department of Sociology and Philosophy, part of the College of Social Sciences and International Studies
Recent Submissions
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Occupying the Ontological Penumbra: Towards a Postsecular and Theologically Minded Anthropology
(MDPI, 2017-04-28)In the wake of the postsecular turn, we propose to reappraise both the religious as studied in anthropology and how anthropologists who have religious or spiritual interests can contribute to an emerging postsecular ... -
To eat or not to eat companion dogs: Symbolic value of dog meat and human-dog companionship in contemporary South Korea
(Taylor & Francis (Routledge), 2018)South Korea is widely regarded as a nation that eats dogs. Today, South Korean civil discourses emphasize a clear boundary between companion animals and livestock but an ethnographic approach to the South Korean dog meat ... -
‘For Me, the Biggest Benefit is Being Ahead of the Game’: The Use of Social Media in Health Work
(SAGE Publications, 2017-04-11)Using social media in the workplace raises a number of issues for any occupation, including those concerning professional identities, norms of behaviour, modes of communication and management of workload. In this article, ... -
Design, death and energy
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press (MIT Press), 2017)The paper examines two works by the design partnership Augur-Loizeau, the ‘Afterlife’ project and ‘Carniverous Domestic Entertainment Robots’. Understood as critical and speculative designs, these are used to throw light ... -
Creating Global Moral Iconicity: The Nobel Prizes and the Constitution of World Moral Culture
(SAGE Publications, 2017-04-21)Since at least the late 19th century, a world-level moral culture has developed, providing a space for certain persons to be presented as global moral icons. This global moral space was already pointed to by Kant as an ... -
Tropes of Fear: the Impact of Globalization on Batek Religious Landscapes
(MDPI, 2013-04-22)The Batek are a forest and forest-fringe dwelling population numbering around 1,500 located in Peninsular Malaysia. Most Batek groups were mobile forest-dwelling foragers and collectors until the recent past. The Batek ... -
Values of happiness
(HAU Society for Ethnographic Theory, 2015-12-23)How people conceive of happiness reveals much about who they are and the values they hold dear. The modern conception of happiness as private good feeling is the result of a long sequence of changes in dominant conceptions ... -
Frail, Independent, involved? Care and the Category of the Elderly in Japan
(University of Pittsburgh, University Library System, 2015-06-01)This article examines how the category of the elderly in Japan is constructed through diverse forms of care, understood as moral practices intrinsic to peoples’ senses of self. It offers an analysis of a range of informal ... -
The good life in balance: Insights from aging Japan
(HAU Society for Ethnographic Theory -, 2015-12-23)Happiness in the Japanese context can usefully be understood as deriving from a series of negotiations or “balancing acts” between contrastive values and orientations to the world. Of particular importance for older Japanese ... -
The Age of Decline? Anxieties about Ageing in Japan
(Taylor & Francis (Routledge), 2014-05-16)In the context of unprecedented life expectancy, the social position of the Japanese elderly is changing. Anxieties related to ageing are widely experienced by people of all ages and on a number of levels, including ... -
Introduction: reorienting hopes
(De Gruyter for German Institute for Japanese Studies Tokyo, 2016-03-02)- -
‘Depends on who’s got the data’: public understandings of personal digital dataveillance
(Surveillance Studies Network, 2017)Post-Snowden, several highly-publicised events and scandals have drawn attention to the use of people’s personal data by other actors and agencies, both legally and illicitly. In this article, we report the findings of a ... -
The Philosophy of Data
(Routledge, 2016-06-17) -
Gabriel Tarde's Neo-Monadology
(F. Steiner, 2017-10-01)300 years of G.W. Leibniz’ Monadology and more than 100 years after G. Tarde’s Monadology and Sociology we are not only living in a significantly changed world, but due to these changes, we are also be in a different and ... -
Enacting the ‘neuro’ in practice: Translational research, adhesion and the promise of porosity
(SAGE Publications, 2014-06-04)This article attends to the processes through which neuroscience and the neuro are enacted in a specific context: a translational neuroscience research group that was the setting of an ethnographic study. The article ... -
Speculative Method and Twitter: Bots, Energy and Three Conceptual Characters
(SAGE Publications, 2014-07-14)This paper aims to contribute to recent innovations in social scientific methodology that aspire to address the complex, iterative and performative dimensions of method. In particular, we focus on the becoming-with character ... -
Toward a Manifesto for the Public Understanding of Big Data
(SAGE Publications, 2015-10-13)In this article, we sketch a ‘manifesto’ for the ‘public understanding of big data’. On the one hand, this entails such public understanding of science and public engagement with science and technology–tinged questions as ... -
Notes Toward a Speculative Methodology of Everyday Life
(SAGE Publications, 2016-01-21)This article considers the sociological role of activities that seem to make no sense: what can be learnt from episodes ‘unhinged’ from the routines of everyday life? In particular, stressing a processual framework for the ... -
Enacting big futures, little futures: toward an ecology of futures
(Wiley, 2016-12-23)This paper concerns the ways in which futures are enacted, and thus mobilized, by publics, participants and practitioners, and especially by social scientists. In particular, the paper is interested in the assortment of ...