Programme full

Wednesday 15 April 2015 16:00 - 17:30
PAPER SESSION 3
• Discuss the methodological issues concerning operationalizing and “capturing” the habitus.
• Present findings that demonstrate greater flexibility afforded by the habitus to trajectories, in contrast to the
charges of structural determinism.
Through a brief discussion of Bourdieu’s own epistemological position and the challenges he set for future
researchers, I will demonstrate the effectiveness of biographical research in locating the habitus. Stemming from
research findings, the paper will move on to discuss the friction between the theoretical habitus and empirical findings,
reflecting on the need to demarcate the habitus “on paper” and the empirical habitus. In an attempt to advance the
application of habitus the paper will focus on a specific conceptual group, from within the larger sample, of working
class graduates who have become socially mobile. Rather than trajectories occurring in spite of habitus their social
mobility was generated via the habitus. This paper will illustrate how significant environmental change can restructure
the class habitus whilst still operating as the habitus, or in Bourdieuian language, still remaining the “unchosen
principle of choice”.
Theorising and Researching the Youth Crime Nexus: Habitus, Reflexivity and the Political Ecology of Social
Practice
France, A.
(University of Auckland)
Throughout history the ‘youth crime problem’ has attracted substantial attention from within the social sciences. Much
work within criminology has been dominated by the search for understanding the motivations that underpinned the
actions of the ‘juvenile delinquent’. As a result contemporary theories and research methodologies that explore the
youth crime nexus are strongly shaped and influenced by criminological assumptions about ‘cause and effect’. This
presentation will offer a critique of this approach and explore the value of drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and
habitus in explaining young people’s relationship with crime.
The argument in this presentation will draw on research data and experience from the ESRC funded athways into and
out of crime programme. This research explored young people’s relationship with crime in highly disadvantaged
neighbourhoods in the UK. The analysis will outline the way that the concept of habitus helps make a bridge between
the empirical data and theory providing analytical insights into how history, values and local knowledge shape young
people’s perspective of the ‘rules of the game’ and how they feel they have to behave in certain contexts. The
discussion will show how this analysis overcame weaknesses of other approaches and also helped explain and
theorise both the power relationships embedded in the social practices of the young and the construction of choices
that seemed to be available to them. I conclude by arguing for an analysis that recognises the importance of a ‘nested’
ecological context of young people’s everyday relationship with crime.
Sociology of Religion
W622, HAMISH WOOD BUILDING
Disciplines of Engagement: The Strength of Moderate Churches
Smith, A.
(University of Warwick)
This paper builds on arguments made by Alexander Smith and John Holmwood in their recent edited collection
Sociologies of Moderation: problems of democracy, expertise and the media (2013, Wiley Blackwell). It takes up their
proposition that moderation, understood as a challenge to growing inequalities and forms of political and religious
extremism, is best understood as describing disciplines of engagement with diverse, divided and sometimes divisive
publics. In particular, the paper appraises the role played by so-called 'moderate' churches in the culture wars that
have consumed the USA in recent decades, in the seemingly socially conservative heartland of the American Midwest
especially. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork carried out since 2008 in northeast Kansas, it explores the role played
by Plymouth Congregational Church, a liberal-to-moderate congregation of some 1100 members in a Red State led by
one of America's most right-wing governors, Sam Brownback. Having played a formative role in the state's founding,
opposing slavery on the eve of the American Civil War, it has in recent years provided state-wide leadership on
campaigns for gay rights, the minimum wage and affordable health care. It has also opposed state government cuts
to welfare spending. The paper considers the cultural, political and social factors that contribute to Plymouth Church's
success before arguing for a reformulation of sociological approaches to appraising the role and strength of religious
moderation in political contexts characterised by electoral polarisation and right-wing extremism.
BSA Annual Conference 2015 136
Glasgow Caledonian University