Sarah Neal

This article explores institutional manifestations of non/religion in a primary school in South Wales. According to the 2021 Census, South Wales has some of the highest levels of ‘religious nones’ in England and Wales. Yet little is known about what non-religiosity looks like in these areas or the role institutions play in shaping non-religion. Drawing on empirical data, we analyse how religion and non-religion interact within the school environment to open up how non-religion becomes institutionalised through the lens of Veronica della Dora’s concept of the ‘infrasecular’, while recognising the residual traces of Christian cultural forms which persist. We show how religious repertoires continue to influence everyday school life while new forms of belonging and values provide insight into new configurations of the ‘sacred’ in a non-religious place.

Schools in the UK are reportedly facing an acute mental health crisis due to the ongoing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent cost of living pressures, leading to a renewed focus on therapeutic education and a growing prominence for wellbeing and emotion-based initiatives. These developments form part of a longer story about the increasingly dominant influence of psychology and the therapeutic ethos in late modern societies, but one that has been subjected to various critiques in recent years. This article approaches schools as a lens through which to interrogate the evolving nature of the therapeutic ethos and how it manifests in education, through a particular focus on pedagogies of citizenship and character formation. Drawing on in-depth qualitative data from four primary schools across Britain, it explores the nature and scope of therapeutic education in the post-COVID educational context, its relationship with citizenship and character education, and the role of religion as a significant case study for understanding these processes. It is argued that psychological and therapeutic sensibilities emerge as dominant influences on the development of young selves, but in rather more complex ways than is reflected in the existing literature, resonating with recent scholarship on therapeutic cultures emphasising their hybrid, heterogeneous nature. The article offers a sociological analysis of the continued rise of therapeutic education, while advancing wider theoretical debates about contemporary therapeutic cultures, the emerging relationship between religion and psychology, and the significance of schools as social institutions.

While informal sport may appear to be a poor relation of formal sport, participation in informal sport is now more popular than organised club sport. The special issue provides an opportunity to showcase international leisure studies research which variously explores the meaning and implications of informal sport as a growing form of collective leisure activity and the wider social affordances – and strains – of collective leisure practices. The Editors’ Introduction focuses on the ways in which informal sport and leisure depend on sometimes hard-won public (parks, city squares, designed leisure spaces) and reused incidental urban space (e.g. post-industrial areas). It sets out the ways in which informal sport and leisure involves marginalised and precarious urban populations, gives rise to co-ethnic and ethnically diverse identifications, secures senses of belonging and citizenship, is gender and age ex/inclusive and is attractive to policy actors. It outlines how the articles collected in the special issue address what are still under-examined aspects of the informal sport phenomenon.

The focus on ambivalence, places, the ordinary, the relationship between conviviality and community and conflict shape each of the reviewers’ responses to our recent monograph. These seem to us to ...

This article contributes to understandings of the conviviality which has dominated recent sociological approaches to urban multiculture. The article argues for conviviality’s conceptual extension by reference to recent rethinking of community as a profound sociality of ‘being with’ and a culture of urban practice. The article draws from a qualitative dataset examining sustained encounters of cultural difference and the relationships within social leisure organizations in three different English urban geographies. The article explores how the elective coming together of often ethnically diverse others, over time, in places, to do leisure ‘things’ meant these organizations could work as generative spaces of social interaction and shared practice through and in contexts of urban difference. The article concludes that putting conviviality as ‘connective interdependencies’ into dialogue with community as ‘being in common’ develops their sociological and explanatory power and counters the reductions and limitations that are associated with both concepts.

In an increasingly ethnically diverse society, debates about migration, community, cultural difference and social interaction have never been more pressing. Drawing on the findings from a two-year, qualitative Economic and Social Research Council funded study of different locations across England, Lived Experiences of Multiculture uses interdisciplinary perspectives to examine the ways in which complex urban populations experience, negotiate, accommodate and resist cultural difference as they share a range of everyday social resources and public spaces. The authors present novel ways of re-thinking and developing concepts such as multiculture, community and conviviality, whilst also repositioning debates which focus on conflict models for understanding cultural differences. Amidst highly charged arguments over the social relations of belonging and the meanings of local and national identities, this timely volume will appeal to advanced undergraduate students and graduate students interested in fields such as Race and Ethnicity Studies, Sociology, Urban Studies, Human Geography and Migration Studies.