Niche Sociality: Approaching Adversity in Everyday Life

How should sociologists understand the everyday lives of those living in adversity, coping with the experience of structural violence? In this article, focusing on the urban experience, we suggest a perspective on ‘everyday life’ that can encompass corporeal, mental, relational and social dimensions...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inSociology (Oxford) Vol. 57; no. 1; pp. 72 - 95
Main Authors Manning, Nick, Birk, Rasmus, Rose, Nikolas
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published London, England SAGE Publications 01.02.2023
Sage Publications Ltd
Subjects
Adversity
Coping
Everyday life
Frame analysis
Migrant workers
Organization theory
Productivity
Rituals
adversity
affordance
urban
Shanghai
migrants
mental
niche
practices
sociality
everyday
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Summary:How should sociologists understand the everyday lives of those living in adversity, coping with the experience of structural violence? In this article, focusing on the urban experience, we suggest a perspective on ‘everyday life’ that can encompass corporeal, mental, relational and social dimensions, which we term ‘niche sociality’. First, we use Gibson’s niches and affordances to enrich the post-representationalist understanding of human beings as embodied/cultural/environmentally embedded organisms. Second, we enrich Gibson’s niches and affordances with theories for ‘small-scale’ sociality drawn from social practice theory and interaction ritual chains. Third, we illustrate the productivity of these ideas throughout the article, by grounding our conceptual work in empirical examples that analyse the everyday lives and mental life of migrant workers in Shanghai. Niche sociality, we argue, is a way of framing the experience of the everyday, a perspective that could – perhaps should – provoke novel ecosocial studies of adversity.
ISSN:0038-0385
1469-8684
DOI:10.1177/00380385221094770