This study examines everyday fashion sharing through the lens of Erving Goffman’s concept of the sheath. Drawing upon 40 qualitative interviews, we extend the concept generatively, beyond its egocentric function as a personal bodily territory encasing the body, by establishing its social, utilitarian and hedonic functions in the social order of everyday fashion sharing. These functions enable consumers to express, strengthen, explore and perform the self in daily social situations. We thereby contribute the novel concept of the porous sheath for shared fashion items, characterised by additional functions, other-orientation and permeable co-territorialisation. We also contribute the concept of self-blending, which occurs when the porous sheath enables fashion sharers to assimilate perceived aspects of another’s self into their own. These concepts are significant in that they expand fashion sharing vocabularies and imaginaries beyond the sharing economy through a return to the dynamics of fashion sharing in everyday life.

This research examines how the co-existence of work and play can lead to meaningfulness and what this might mean sociologically. Drawing upon 40 qualitative interviews with autonomous neo-craft workers in Italy, we contribute the concept of playful work as a voluntary and subjective framing of autonomous work entailing the simultaneous interplay between the extrinsic material goals, utilitarian planning and outcomes that characterise work, and the intrinsic experimental purpose and focus on place and process that typify play. The experience of playful work is challenging and tensional due to the interaction between individual agency and broad structural forces. Autonomous neo-craft workers manage these tensions by ascribing worth and significance to neo-craft’s aesthetic ideals and to care and (com)passion values. This contribution is significant in that it expands sociological imaginaries and the potential for future research by framing playful work as a tensional pathway to meaningfulness.

Death is a highly and increasingly economised process in which individual, family, institutional and state finances play important, but often opaque, roles in shaping the contours of dying. Drawing on 44 in-depth interviews with people who are dying, their family and their healthcare providers, this article explores how economic rationalities profoundly shape almost every dimension of their experiences of the end of life. Circulating within this context are notions of scarcity, the spectre of rationing, personal financial in/security and intergenerational wealth transfers as ‘gifts of care’. Fostering ‘good (enough) deaths’, including for those who are less financially privileged, will require fully comprehending and ultimately addressing the pervasive reach of economisation into dying and care in ways that are, paradoxically, quite ‘costly’. The sociology of dying, in turn, must more deeply engage with the full effects of economisation across systems and contexts, including their enmeshment with other structural inequities.

This article draws on a collaboration with the Birmingham Royal Ballet to propose a dancing pedagogy for productive unsettlement. Developed within a sociology of consumption module, we show how art can bridge the sociological and empathic imaginations, encouraging learners to ‘feel themselves away’ from their individual experience and better reflect on the wider social structures that shape it. Ballet, an art form marked by financial, cultural and bodily exclusion, served as a lens through which learners could engage with the experience of being ‘out of place’ in confronting their own vulnerabilities and privileges in relation to structural marketplace inequalities. This fostered a transformative shift we term ‘productive unsettling’, whereby rather than accepting and staying in their place, learners were encouraged to try other places, transform place for themselves and make space for others, finding joy in the process of creating social change.

This article presents insights from a classroom exercise in an undergraduate Applied Social Research course, in which students explored how their lived experiences shape the ways they make sense of qualitative data, becoming aware of the situated nature of research. Through collective zine-making, they engaged with visual and narrative empirical material from earlier research on how young people’s daily experiences were reconfigured amid major changes in everyday routines and emotional life. By cutting, arranging and annotating fragments, students encountered interpretive tensions and the affective dimensions of working with qualitative data. Drawing on classroom observations and students’ reflections, the article explores how zine-making as a creative practice has fostered situated reflexivity. The article contributes to wider conversations on the teaching practices of sociology, showing how tactile, collaborative and imaginative engagement with research materials can encourage thoughtful engagement with data.

What makes up the figure of the ‘modern slave’ and why does it appear so regularly in discussions over both climate change and migration? In this conversation, Nandita Dutta and Maurice Stierl discuss how the modern slave emerges in their respective fields of research, what political function it plays and what colonial, racial and spatial imaginaries it is embedded in. This figure is not innocent – it marks out racialised others, chaotic places ‘elsewhere’ and legitimises specific moral and political interventions, often in the name of both protection and deterrence. In this conversation, the authors point to the risk of reproducing discourses about affected groups and populations as ‘slaves’, whose ‘vulnerability’ can quickly turn into a ‘threat’ if they dare to move across borders.

This review article synthesizes three distinct yet interconnected approaches to understanding and addressing social inequality. Drawing on Scott R Sernau’s macro-level analysis, Karen A Hegtvedt and Cathryn Johnson’s micro-sociological perspective and JoAnn Chirico’s global problem-solving framework, we explore the multifaceted dimensions and persistent characteristics of inequality. Sernau emphasizes intersectionality at structural and systemic levels, demonstrating how categories like race, class and gender intertwine to create complex forms of disadvantage. Hegtvedt and Johnson delve into the socio-psychological impact of inequality on individual interactions, identity and perceptions, highlighting micro-level mechanisms of reproduction and challenge. Chirico expands the discussion to global problems, showing how globalization deepens existing disparities while also presenting avenues for transnational cooperation and solutions, particularly through frameworks like the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Collectively, these works underscore that understanding inequality requires a multi-dimensional lens, encompassing structural, individual and global dynamics. The review concludes by stressing that effective solutions necessitate both accurate understanding and concerted action across all levels of society.

Friendship and social support are critical for mental health, yet little is known about how these relationships vary across socioeconomic status, especially during crises like the COVID-19 pandemic. This study examines the protective effects of friendship on well-being during the pandemic and how these effects differ by income level. Using data from the nationally representative DSL-COVID survey of US adults (N = 1862), we analyze the frequency of socializing with friends and its association with well-being across income groups. Higher-income individuals socialize with friends about 0.3 times more per week than their lower-income counterparts. Importantly, time spent with friends has a significantly stronger positive association with well-being among low-income individuals (β = 0.0385, p < 0.001). These findings suggest that friendships play a disproportionately protective role for economically vulnerable individuals, buffering the mental health effects of economic precarity. Our study highlights the unequal yet essential role of social relationships in mitigating mental health disparities during times of crisis.

This article explores the possibilities and challenges of teaching sociology ‘decolonially’ at the National University of Singapore (NUS), Singapore. Drawing on the classroom as a site of knowledge, it highlights how students’ diverse lived experiences and epistemic positionalities facilitate the deconstruction of foundational Eurocentric categories including race, religion and modernity. However, hierarchical learning models, competitive educational structures and reductive circulations of categories such as ‘Asian values’ pose significant barriers to decolonial pedagogy. NUS classrooms accordingly offer promising ground for pluriversal dialogue and critical engagement that nonetheless necessitates unlearning and undoing various complex and entwined constraints to foster liberatory alternatives otherwise.