This article takes the fiftieth anniversary of the death of American sociologist C. Wright Mills as a cue to revisit his legacy but also the value of sociology today. It argues that the enduring relevance of Mills’ work is his cultivation of a sociological sensibility, which is both an attentive and sensuous craft and also a moral and political project. The article returns to some of the key aspects of Mills’ life and work, and focuses, in particular, on his influential (...) book The Sociological Imagination. Revisiting the opening and closing chapters of this book – entitled ‘The Promise’ and ‘On Intellectual Craftsmanship’ – this article argues that the contemporary social imagination needs to offer its students the capacity to open out to the world through a heightened sensory attentiveness, which in turn makes possible a different kind of social imaginary. In this way Mills’ gift to the future is a sociological sensibility furnished by its tradition, but one also that is constantly re-tuned to the circumstances and problems of the present. (shrink)

In Mills’ sociological analysis, a central notion is the ‘social milieu’ which encapsulates ‘the social setting of a person that is directly open to his personal experience’. For Mills, sociology should entail an investigation of the set of relations and practices that are a feature of human experience. Understanding the significance of Mills’ approach, we argue, requires grasping the way the notion of ‘milieu’ or ‘setting’ itself draws upon spatial and topological notions – notions that have become prominent in much (...) contemporary sociological thinking. From this perspective, Mills’ work turns out to be relevant as a corrective, both to the undue emphasis on empirical particularity that is evident in some contemporary sociology and to what Mills viewed as ‘abstract’ theorisation. A large part of the relevance of Mills’ work for contemporary sociological problems and challenges is thus to be found in the way his emphasis on situation (or ‘place’), as given through the idea of ‘milieu’, allows a more complex and encompassing approach. (shrink)

The introduction to this special issue addresses the production of intimacy in the labour of research. It explores the sensory, emotional and affective relations which form an integral, if often invisible, part of the process through which researchers engage with, produce, understand and translate `research'. The article argues that these processes inform the making of knowledge, shape power relations and enable or constrain the practical negotiation of ethical problems. These issues are not, however, often foregrounded in debates on methods or (...) methodology and are frequently erased from researchers' own accounts of their work. The article explores some of the possible reasons for this, which include institutional and cultural conventions of academic practice, the historical legacies with which disciplines often struggle, and the difficult issues and decisions that individual researchers face as they try to negotiate the relations between scholarly research and personal relationships across time, and between scholarly research and, for example, creativity, fiction, or sensationalism. The article concludes with a review of the main themes in the special issue, focusing in particular on the ways in which the contributors use the concept of intimacy to challenge the boundaries between creativity and analysis; spatial and temporal proximity and distance; freedom and censorship; subjects and objects. (shrink)

In his own words, Rancière’s method resembles Foucault’s. But, even if only in passing, Rancière has also touched on some of the divergences existing between his own work and Foucault’s. These aspects can be found in La Mésentente, along with two interviews—the first of which was conducted by Eric Alliez and the second with one of his translators, Gabriel Rockhill. Among the major points sketched in these texts—and on which this paper will be based—is Rancière’s brief but frank criticism of (...) the notion of biopolitics. The aim of the present paper is not to produce a systematic commentary on the similarities and differences that can be said to exist between these two thinkers, but rather to discuss Rancière’s criticism on the basis of an empirical case, namely contemporary claims made around autism as a form of subjectivity. The scope of the paper is thus not exegetical. Rather, what it shall seek to discuss is the operativity of Rancière’s critical remarks in fields studying subjectivities such as autism. Yet, as the criticism leveled at Foucault by Rancière is a corollary of a discrepancy present between their respective methods, and, moreover, as such a difference will be addressed through the lens of a central category from the latter’s theoretical repertoire—namely, the “distribution of the sensible”—it will be necessary to start with a brief account of its most fundamental points. (shrink)