School of Social and Political Sciences - Research Publications
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ItemWhat is ‘publicly available data’? Exploring blurred public-private boundaries and ethical practices through a case study on Instagram(SAGE Publications (UK and US), 2020)This article adds to the literature on ethics in digital research by problematizing simple understandings of what constitutes “publicly available data,” thereby complicating common “consent waiver” approaches. Based on our recent study of representations of family life on Instagram, a platform with a distinct visual premise, we discuss the ethical challenges we encountered and our practices for moving forward. We ground this in Lauren Berlant’s concept of “intimate publics” to conceptualize the different understandings of “publics” that appear to be at play. We make the case for a more reflexive approach to social media research ethics that builds on the socio-techno-ethical affordances of the platform to address difficult questions about how to determine social media users’ diverse, and sometimes contradictory, understandings of what is “public.”
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ItemTowards a Sociological Understanding of Sexting as a Social Practice: A Case Study of University Undergraduate Men(SAGE Publications, 2020)This article makes the case for understanding young people’s engagement with ‘sexting’ as a social practice. Moving away from the dominant focus on teenagers and (sexual) risk and instead approaching sexting as an ‘everyday’ practice sheds light on how sexting is perceived and situated as a normalised part of contemporary youth culture. Drawing on 10 focus groups with 37 undergraduate men in Melbourne, Australia, our data reveal young men’s significant emphasis on consent, mutuality and respect, marking out ‘appropriate sexting’ practices as distinct from harassment or image-based abuse. Nonetheless, the centrality of a transactional approach to sexting questions those seemingly positive dispositions. Social practice theory permits sophisticated understanding of these nuances, seeing them as bound up and produced in correspondence with the broader meanings, embodied skills and material artefacts that are associated with sexting.
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ItemFigures in space, figuring space: towards a spatial-symbolic framework for understanding youth cultures and identities(SAGE Publications (UK and US), 2017)This article argues for a need for spatial analyses in the study of youth cultures and youth subjectivities. With this aim, we propose a theoretical framework drawing on concepts from cultural class analysis and human geography. Empirically, the article is based on 10 focus groups with young people (n = 80) in four different parts of Denmark. The interviews included a photo elicitation exercise and the analysis in this article focuses on one particular picture of two young ‘hipster’ men. By using the figure of the hipster as an analytical case, the article illustrates how individual and spatial identities are co-constructed, not just alongside each other (relationally) but also hierarchically. Hence, ‘place-making practices’ are also ‘people-making practices’ and vice versa. Through this, the article engages with discussions in youth studies as well as in human geography about the importance of paying attention to structural inequalities.
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Item‘”It feels as if time has come to a standstill”: Institutionalised everyday lives among youth with a mental illness’(Taylor & Francis (Routledge): SSH Titles, 2017)This paper focuses on the everyday lives of young people with a severe mental illness living temporarily at a social psychiatric housing facility in Denmark. In the paper we take a temporal approach to the analysis of this and we draw on Henri Lefebvre’s work on rhythm analysis to investigate the differences between the rhythms of everyday life within the institution and the rhythms of what is perceived as the everyday life of ‘ordinary’ youth. We also show how digital technologies play a central part in these institutionalised everyday lives by creating connections as well as disruptions between different time-spaces. Centrally, we point to the positive and negative consequences this has for the young peoples’ sense of self. Empirically, the paper is based on a four-month ethnographic fieldwork at the housing facility in 2014.
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ItemOut of sync: Time management in the lives of young drug users(Sage Publications, 2017)The paper analyzes young cannabis users’ experiences of time from two different perspectives, one looking at how their everyday life is related to social time structures and another looking at their actual time management strategies. The paper shows that intense drug use is a reason behind the interviewees’ underinvolvement in interaction time, institutional time, and cyclic time. Yet, drug use may also be an attempt at solving problems with time management, a strategy that again brings the users further away from the social time structures of society. We identify temporal synchronicity, or rather the lack of this, as a central challenge for the interviewees’ social identities and general feelings of a meaningful everyday life. Further, we argue that the young cannabis users are both social and temporal “outsiders” to society and that new time management strategies are key to reversing this process of social marginalization. The paper is based on qualitative interviews with 30 young cannabis users in outpatient drug treatment in Denmark.
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ItemPlaying the game or played by the game? Young drug users' educational trajectories(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2018)This article analyses the relationship between cannabis use and educational trajectories among 42 young drug users, recruited at addiction treatment centres in Denmark. Quantitative research shows regular cannabis use to be associated with poor school performance and drop-out. However, these studies do not pay much attention to differences between educational tracks or to the links between the educational field and other fields. Drawing on a Bourdieusian framework we analyse the interviewees’ involvement in four different fields: the academic field, the field of vocational schools, the labour market field and the artistic field. We contribute to the literature on post-16 educational trajectories by showing how successful ‘investments’ in education depend not only on available resources (capitals), but also on the ability to navigate in an increasingly complex educational system. Furthermore, we show how regular cannabis plays into the ‘illusio’ of different fields, challenging the interviewees’ playing of educational games.
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Item’I would never start a fight but…’. Young masculinities, perceptions of violence and symbolic boundary work in focus groups(SAGE Publications (UK and US), 2017)This article explores the link between masculinity and violence in socially integrated young men’s discussions about risk-taking and violence. Traditionally, violence, or rather the capability of violence, is depicted as a key cultural marker of masculinity. However, recent theoretical developments point to changes in the normative boundaries for performing appropriate masculinities not least among young people. These discussions about potential cultural changes form the backdrop of this article. By combining focus group methodology and an interactionist analytical approach, I investigate how the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate physical aggression is negotiated and how acceptable masculine identities are performed as part of these negotiations. Through this, the article sheds light on the narrow boundaries between “legitimate” and “illegitimate” violence, the highly situational character of these judgments and the intersections between gender and ethnicity in the performance of morally superior masculinities. The research is conducted in Denmark in 2013–2014.
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ItemNarrative sense-making and prospective social action: methodological challenges and new directions(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2020-02-17)The ways in which humans narratively make sense of their lives shape how they navigate the future. At least, that is what prominent philosophers like Sartre, Ricoeur and MacIntyre proposed. Philosophically this idea has roots in the long-standing thesis of mimesis; like art imitates life and life imitates art in the Aristotelian sense, so do life and stories imitate each other (Bruner, 1987). Despite the tenacity of the idea, relatively little research has explored the relationship empirically. How does narrative sense-making shape prospective social action? How can we best study the interplay between stories told and lives lived? What kind of methodologies can provide the means for social scientists to address questions concerning the future? In this special issue of International Journal of Social Research Methodology we turn our attention to these challenges in recognition of how fundamentally important these questions are. If stories actually shape what we do, then not only individual life trajectories but also collective futures depend upon it.
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ItemGendered and Generational Inequalities in the Gig Economy Era(Sage Publications, 2019-12-02)
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ItemImagining futures, imagining selves: a narrative approach to ‘risk’ in young men’s lives(SAGE Publications, 2019)This article proposes a narrative approach to studying ‘risk’. A narrative approach moves away from common attempts to identify individuals ‘at risk’ of social problems on the basis of static characteristics – risks – that are assumed to have uniform ‘effects’ on individuals. Instead, a narrative approach to analysing ‘risk’ entails a focus on how people make consequential links between events in their lives. By focusing on three cases from a qualitative study in Denmark the article analyses how young people who have extensive experience with ‘risky’ practices – mainly drug use – make sense of these experiences. A particular focus on imagined futures produces two types of insights. First, by analysing how past and present experiences are seen by young people themselves as pointing towards their imagined futures, the article demonstrates how seemingly similar events (risk-taking experiences) can be inscribed in very different future narratives. Second, analysing the process of imagining futures illuminates how the participants see themselves in the world, to what extent they see themselves as agents in their own lives and if their futures are seen as within or beyond their control.