📋 Tender Overview
Towards A Sociology Of Loss: Disposals And Dead-Ends In Lineages Of Social Innovation And Change
Funded Under
European Research Council (Erc)
Total Cost
€ 2 498 955,00
Eu Contribution
€ 2 498 955,00
Coordinated By
National University Of Ireland Maynooth
Ireland
Objective
This study aims to provide a new understanding of how losses, disposals and dead-ends shape the direction of social change at moments of rupture, and to develop a formal theory of social loss. Sociologists have shown that people respond to crises by reconfiguring cultural understandings, narratives of self and social relationships. However, we have not paid sufficient attention to how what is disposed of shapes future pathways. LINLOSS will address this gap in the sociological imagination. It will develop new explanations of how loss generates change at multiple, intersecting societal scales: in the transformation of cultural and institutional patterns across generations; within changing configurations of relationships across genealogies and social networks; and in the reconstruction of pasts and futures within biographies. The research will be a comparative, cross-national community study of two ‘exurban’ districts in Ireland and Poland. The main form of data collection will be mixed biographical interviews, combining unstructured and formal elements, connected within genealogical support networks. The analysis will take place across two iterations: a comparative analysis to trace the effects of breaks and losses within and between social lineages at multiple scales; and a thematic analysis to identify how instances of loss are tied together by a common social pattern.
