The Social Life of Nothing

Description

Cover Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents Acknowledgements Chapter 1: Being through nothingness Why does nothing matter? What and where is nothing? Nothing to do with sociology? How do we experience nothing? How does nothing happen? Meadian social selfhood Weberian social action Two ways of doing nothing Who does nothing with us? What does nothing produce? How does nothing affect society? Narratives of nothing Mapping the terrain of social nothing Chapter 2: Lost opportunities Relational non-selves Careers of social identity Negative trajectories: ‘becoming a non-’and ‘non-becoming’ Narrative and nostalgia ‘Becoming a non-’through dis-identification Non-becoming through non-identification Non-becoming asexual Non-motherhood Reversibility Chapter 3: Silence and quietness The art of silence Saying nothing: power and resistance Deceptive silences Secrecy Lying Muted and civilised emotions Politeness rituals: deference through indirectness Non-emotional labour Not saying anything: omissive silences Shyness, quietness and reticence Not speaking up, out, for and against Chapter 4: Invisibility and absence The art of unseeing The scientific unknown Disappearing acts Role distance Boredom Conspicuous absenteeism Invisible roles Being sick and doing sleep Non-persons The unseeing eye Hidden people and hiding places Hunting down, seeking out The cloak of anonymity Non-appearances: being unseen Not showing up Misrecognition Social death Ghostly figures and phantom reappearances Chapter 5: Holes, gaps and emptiness Five types of emptiness Commissive forms Omissive forms Grief and bereavement Childlessness Missing persons Giving up addiction Ageing and degenerative loss Living with dementia Caring for empty vessels Being not-old Self-engulfment Traumatic hair loss Solitude and loneliness Living in liminality Pause and poise Nostalgia Chapter 6: Stillness, rest and inactivity Mobility and modern culture Doing nothing: acts of commission Mindfulness and meditation The Slow Movement Refusing conventionality Eschewing technologies Non-doing: acts of omission Waiting, hanging and lingering Confinement and restricted movement Deciding on nothing Nothing, growth and human potential Bibliography Index