Sophie Woodward

Blue Jeans: The Art of the Ordinary

Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Life 2. Relationships 3. Fashion 4. Comfortable 5. Ordinary 6. The Struggle for Ordinary 7. Anthropology: From Normative to Ordinary 8. Sociology: The Ordinary and the Routine Bibliography Index

Object interviews, material imaginings and ‘unsettling’ methods: interdisciplinary approaches to understanding materials and material culture

This article aims to explore the possibilities and limitations of contemporary qualitative methods for understanding materials and material culture and how these can be expanded through interdisciplinary approaches. Taking the case study of an interdisciplinary project into old jeans, the article first considers the use of object interviews and life histories to explore how people ‘speak’ the material. Second, it develops the possibilities afforded by inventive material methods, such as socio-archaeological approaches of ‘material imaginings’. Finally, the article discusses the interdisciplinary project through the dialogues that took place around the methods of design and of textile technology and the data produced. Focusing upon dialogues offers a means of exploring the tensions and also connections between methods as a site for expanding qualitative understandings of materials as ‘live’ and vibrant. It aims to widen the remit of qualitative research methods to incorporate the material.

Digital Photography and Research Relationships. Capturing the Fashion Moment

This article focuses on the interactions produced by the use of the digital camera in a mass observation into everyday fashions in Nottingham. The research project includes a team of researchers, and so there is no single research relationship. Therefore this article uses the mass observation, which includes photographs and interviews with in excess of 800 participants, to highlight the complexities of the research relationship. The definition of this relationship is widened out to include the interactions between researcher and participant, the relationship participants have to each other, and the relationship they have to themselves.The digital camera is seen as a site of negotiation between researchers and participants; in turn, the research relationship is redefined as a web of interactions which are mediated by the camera and the photographic images.

Personal collections as material assemblages: a comparison of wardrobes and music collections

This article takes the case studies of music and clothing collections in the home to explore the possibilities for developing comparative research into everyday consumption by focusing upon personal collections. Drawing on two empirical research projects, it challenges dominant understandings of collections as ‘special’ or separated off from daily practices by considering music and clothing collections as the site for everyday consumption practices as well as the locus of memories. Collections are reframed as ‘assemblages’ to explore the diverse materialities and temporalities that constitute the collections. Agency is distributed through the assemblage which allows for a problematisation of notions of individual consumer choice as the article explores the logics of the collections themselves. Focusing upon ‘collections’ paves the way for comparative work on different genres of consumption and to explore the diverse materialities of things and their relationalities. It widens our understanding of consumption to incorporate the use of things both in the enactment of daily life and which are kept or stored.

Relational resolutions: digital encounters in ethnographic fieldwork

The articles in this special issue highlight the relationality existing between researchers, participants, cameras and images, with each article bringing complementary perspectives on the use of digital images in ethnographic fieldwork. These include reactivating archives through their digitization for visual repatriation, facilitating dialogue and understanding between participant and researcher, analysing the relation between participants and the virtual spaces of their self-representations and exploring the range of capacities for new research methodologies afforded by digital technologies. Individually and through their juxtaposition, the articles highlight the complexity of the interactions between researchers and participants in their digital encounters and open dialogical spaces, in ethnographic fieldwork and in visual anthropology, about access, participation and transparency in representational practices.

Book Review: Heike Jenss, Fashioning Memory: Vintage Style and Youth CultureJenssHeikeFashioning Memory: Vintage Style and Youth CultureLondon: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015, £85 hbk (ISBN: 9781472573964), 192 pp.

More than merely describing in detail the findings of her ethnographic research, the author seamlessly draws on different analytical traditions and concepts in her analysis of this scene. No one theoretical analysis is imposed upon the data. This is a book that would site equally well on a fashion studies course or a memory studies course. It also contributes to research on the body and is refreshingly promiscuous in the use of theory, bringing together different, and often opposing theoretical traditions, such as affect theory, insights from ANT and a material cultural sensitivity to questions of objects, meanings and value. Understanding the complexity of fashion-dress-body-self as an assemblage, the analysis never distorts the voices of the many, fascinating accounts collected. The ethnographic detail is fantastic. It draws one into the world of these 1960s stylers and captures the personal and cultural narratives that 1960s style mediates. This is also a delightful book to read. It is well written and organised with insightful reflections on fashion’s relationship to memory. The author’s analysis pays close attention to the interactions between style, memory (cultural and personal) and the body and does not fall into prioritising one over the other.

Doing Research: Live Methods and Memory Studies

Savage and Burrows’ (2007) much cited article suggests that empirical sociology is in crisis in light of the expansion of transactional data produced through digital technologies by commercial and other public bodies. Empirical sociology can no longer have the same claim to offer a unique understanding of social relationships that it once enjoyed through its methodological tools. There has been a renewed interest in the politics of methods, which continues to place methods at the heart of what the discipline of sociology is able to achieve. This debate is excited both by social changes which entail the proliferation of transactional data that Savage and Burrows discuss, and also through the movement of methods across disciplinary boundaries, including experimentation with the possibilities offered by the visual and sensory as ways of knowing about the world. The widening out of the methodological boundaries of the discipline of sociology raises questions about what is sociological about particular methods and how diverse methods are employed to ask sociological questions. The relationship of methods to disciplinarity is one which runs through both of the edited collections reviewed here; Back and Puwar address the core challenges posed by Savage and Burrows (2007) and explore how a revitalisation of methods is pivotal to how we conceive of the sociological imagination and enterprise. The collection edited by Keightley and Pickering is interdisciplinary in its scope drawing upon a range of disciplines in exploring what methods can be used through the substantive field of memory studies. Although very different in both their form as

The Hidden Lives of Domestic Things: accumulations in Cupboards, Lofts and Shelves

This chapter seeks to challenge the assumption that the accumulation of things that are not currently in use in domestic spaces is a sign of the ‘throwaway society’ (Cooper, 2010), or a product of frivolous consumers’ constant desire for the new. This assumption entails thinking about things predominantly in terms of use-value and also that consumption is a result of individuals’ choices and preferences. In the current media fascination with clutter — seen in programmes such as Channel 4’s The Hoarder Next Door — things that accumulate in domestic spaces, such as attics and cupboards, spill into whole rooms as a symptom of a psychological disorder. Having an excess of stuff that we do not use is seen as either wasteful or as a sign of an individual with a life that is out of control — an understanding that is mirrored in the multiple professional decluttering services. What is needed is a focus, not upon the extreme behaviour of hoarding that these programmes portray, nor individual consumers who continue to buy new stuff when they have an excess of things at home, but on what has been termed ‘ordinary consumption’ (Gronow and Warde, 2001). That is, the everyday patterns of use and storage of things within the home that is not spectacular but rather how people enact their everyday lives and relationships through things.

Introduction: Opening up the Debate

We are two people but related, as mother and daughter — Sophie is the youngest of Kath’s four children — and through our involvement and interest in feminism. We come from different generational positions and life experiences from which we seek to engage in a cross-generational dialogue about feminism and acknowledge and draw on our own situated experiences. We are not only related to each other, but each of us has a relationship with feminist ideas and the women’s movement, which we aim to bring together in this book, a project that arises from conversations between us. This book is a continuation of this engagement. Our aim is to open up and continue the debates started by others (e.g. Henry, 2004; Gillis, Mumford and Howie, 2007). In doing so, we are attempting to buck the trend of much writing that can be categorised as ‘third wave’, which would entail positioning Kath’s experiences in opposition to Sophie’s. In contrast, through a series of conversations, we aim to chart both the commonalities and the divergences in different historical moments of feminism. We are not attempting to elide the differences between us, and this is evidenced in how the book is written. Where the example or experience arises from one of us individually we write as I-Sophie or I-Kath; when it is something we both argue and write together, we write as ‘we’. We are therefore attempting to situate the ‘we’ and to explore the possibilities of cross-generational authorship. Thus our co-authorship is constitutive of the dialogue in which we are engaged, and the points of convergence as well as difference, ambiguities and contradictions which are part of the genealogy of feminist ideas and practices.

A Grown-up Politics of Difference

These two statements are taken from currently active feminist groups in the UK, and show the positions taken in relation to the participation in the groups and who can attend meetings. A slightly different policy is adopted in each case, with the London Feminist Network opting for ‘women only’ and the Sheffield Fems adopting the stance of ‘women identifying as women’. The former has come under scrutiny in the organisation of the Reclaim the Night march in London, because the event is exclusively for women (not only does it not include men, it also excludes transsexuals who were born male). The Sheffield Fems are clearly aware of potential questions of inclusiveness and as such have adopted the slightly more ambiguous stance of those who ‘identify’ as women, thereby protecting themselves against this accusation. This follows a debate over whether men should be included or not (for the last two years men have been allowed to attend). What these two examples highlight is that questions of difference matter, yet these same questions are also difficult and problematic to negotiate. Difference, as expressed in terms of differences between women and men, remain politically relevant in the twenty-first century, in a manner which does not deny the blurred spaces between gendered identities identified in earlier feminist accounts of difference (Maguire, 1985) or of the scope of differences which intersect in contemporary cultural, political and social spaces.