Dawn Lyon | University of Kent (original) (raw)

Papers by Dawn Lyon

History of the Human Sciences, 2023

The COVID-19 pandemic has foregrounded the significance of time to everyday life, as the routines... more The COVID-19 pandemic has foregrounded the significance of time to everyday life, as the routines, pace, and speed of social relations were widely reconfigured. This article uses rhythm as an object and tool of inquiry to make sense of spatio-temporal change. We analyse the Mass Observation (MO) directive we co-commissioned on 'COVID-19 and Time', where volunteer writers reflect on whether and how time was made, experienced, and imagined differently during the early stages of the pandemic in the UK. We draw on Henri Lefebvre and Catherine Régulier's 'rhythmanalysis', taking up their theorisation of rhythm as linear and cyclical and their concepts of arrhythmia (discordant rhythms) and eurhythmia (harmonious rhythms). Our analysis highlights how MO writers articulate (a) the ruptures to their everyday rhythms across time and space, (b) their experience of 'blurred' or 'merged' time as everyday rhythms are dissolved and the pace of time is intensified or slowed, and (c) the remaking of rhythms through new practices or devices and attunements to nature. We show how rhythm enables a consideration of the spatio-temporal textures of everyday life, including their unevenness, variation, and difference. The article thus contributes to and expands recent scholarship on the social life of time, rhythm and rhythmanalysis, everyday life, and MO.

Sociology, 2023

This article contributes to sociologies of futures by arguing that quotidian imaginations, making... more This article contributes to sociologies of futures by arguing that quotidian imaginations, makings and experiences of futures are crucial to social life. We develop Sharma's concept of recalibration to understand ongoing and multiple adjustments of present-future relations, focusing on how these were articulated by Mass Observation writers in the UK during the early part of the COVID-19 pandemic. We identify three key modes of recalibration: fissure, where a break between the present and future means the future is difficult to imagine; standby, where the present is expanded but there is an alertness to the future, and; reset, where futures are modestly and radically recalibrated through a post-pandemic imaginary. We argue for sociologies of futures that can account for the diverse and contradictory ways in which futures emerge from and compose everyday life at different scales.

Time & Society, 2023

This short article shares the innovative pedagogic practices I explored and developed to nurture ... more This short article shares the innovative pedagogic practices I explored and developed to nurture temporal reflexivity in the classroom to engage students in the study of the sociology of time in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and a local strike. It takes the reader through the module as it was structured and delivered in two parts: from calendars to calibration; and from memory to procrastination. This is interspersed with details of the learning exercises we undertook in the classroom and the module assignments.

The Sociological Review, 2023

This article uses Henri Lefebvre's Rhythmanalysis as a foundational text for researching boredom,... more This article uses Henri Lefebvre's Rhythmanalysis as a foundational text for researching boredom, and offers a critical analysis of UK-based media commentaries about boredom and homeworking written during 2020 and 2021. We situate the discussion within the rhythmic rupture caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and foreground rhythm as a lens for understanding reported experiences and reflections on boredom and work. For non-essential workers, lockdown offered an opportunity to reconfigure working lives away from the constraints of commutes and everyday work settings, yet our findings highlight the narrative representation and experience of a particular type of boredom and inertia known as acedia. The analysis discusses the presence of acedia and absence of rhythm across three themes: acedia and being stuck in time and space; embodiment, movement and rhythm; and the relationship between the present and the future. We conclude by considering what the experience of boredom might mean for how we reconceptualise our post-pandemic working lives.

A graphic comic of the Power in Big Local Partnerships project findings. This report considers po... more A graphic comic of the Power in Big Local Partnerships project findings. This report considers power in Big Local partnerships and Big Local, a resident-led, place-based programme. It explores how decisions are made, by and with whom and in what contexts. It considers how particular ideas gather appeal, how some voices are heard more than others and importantly, identifies ways to strengthen decision making. An online comic has been designed alongside this report to visually demonstrate inclusivity and invisibility in decision making and how power and knowledge operate in community meetings

The Sociological Review Online, 2022

Rhythmanalysis: Place, Mobility, Disruption and Performance, 2022

This collection brings together new and original research on the concept and practice of ‘rhythma... more This collection brings together new and original research on the concept and practice of ‘rhythmanalysis’ in urban sociology as a means to analyse the relationship between the time and space of the city. It offers a context and introduction to rhythmanalysis and presents a range of studies which use it to analyse – and animate - urban life across Europe and the Americas.

Originally proposed by French philosopher and urban scholar, Henri Lefebvre and his collaborator, Catherine Régulier, in the twentieth century, rhythmanalysis continues to capture the attention of urban scholars today. This volume includes in-depth analyses of the rhythms of place-making from the City of London to the Caminito of Buenos Aires. It explores the production of rhythm on the move – in cars and on the street - in relation to urban atmospheres and the implications of mobility for climate emergency. It considers what happens when everyday urban rhythms are disrupted and reconfigured, as in the extended disaster of an earthquake or through tourism and migration. And it delves into the mobilisation of the body, materials and technologies to make and detect rhythm whether in the spontaneous interactions of arts festivals in the UK or a multi-ethnic dance space in Germany.

The collection seeks to spark new interest in using rhythmanalysis as a mode of sensing and making sense of the complex entanglements of time and space at the heart of everyday urban life. It will be of interest to scholars and students in urban sociology, social and cultural geography, mobilities studies, and the sociology and philosophy of time.

The Sociological Review magazine, 2021

Power in Big Local partnerships, 2021

This report is about the practice of decision making in a resident-led, place-based programme. It... more This report is about the practice of decision making in a resident-led, place-based programme. It explores the operation of power within decision making, how decisions are made, by and with whom and in what contexts. It considers how particular ideas gather appeal, how some voices are heard more than others, and how beliefs in ‘the right way’ to make decisions matter and can have unintended consequences of limiting agendas and imagination. Finally, it identifies ways to strengthen decision making in a community-led programme by developing new forms of participation and sharing power among all sections of the community.

Tim Edensor, Uma Kothari and Ares Kalindides (eds) (2020) The Routledge Handbook of Place, Abingdon: Routledge, 2020

This chapter is concerned with place-making at work, with particular attention to the role of rhy... more This chapter is concerned with place-making at work, with particular attention to the role of rhythm. It discusses how certain workspaces come into being as places and what kinds of workplaces are produced. The analysis draws on Henri Lefebvre's (2004) ideas of rhythm and rhythmanalysis as a conceptual and methodological means for tracing how work and workplaces take shape in space and time combined with Edward Casey's (2001) formulation of places as 'thick' and 'thin'. The chapter is based on empirical material collected through an audiovisual ethnography of London's Billingsgate fish market.

H Holmes and S Hall (eds) Mundane Methods: Innovative ways to research the everyday, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020

SAGE Research Methods Foundations, 2019

This entry is about rhythmanalysis as conceived by French philosopher, sociologist, urban scholar... more This entry is about rhythmanalysis as conceived by French philosopher, sociologist, urban scholar, and literary critic Henri Lefebvre (1901-1991). Rhythmanalysis can be thought of as a tool of analysis that shows how change occurs through the imprinting of new rhythms on an era (Lefebvre, 2004, p. 14). It has been described as both conceptual and corporeal since, on the one hand, it offers a critique of spatio-temporal relations in capitalist society and, on the other, it suggests a research practice. Rhythmanalysis has attracted considerable interest in the 21st century, since the publication in 2004 of the English translation of Lefebvre's short book, Rhythmanalysis, Space, Time and Everyday Life, which was first made available in French one year after his death in 1992. It is regarded by some scholars as the fourth volume in his hitherto three-volume work, Critique of Everyday Life. It adds a temporal dimension to Lefebvre's long-standing analyses of space. And it is credited with giving Lefebvre something of an afterlife, as his popularity in the Anglo-American academy has soared since its publication (Elden, 2006). Rhythmanalysis has been taken up and developed across the social sciences, notably within geography. It has been used in particular to study mobility, place, work, and nature as well as consumption and leisure practices, education, and identity. Rhythmanalysis is a 'strategy of inquiry' rather than a method per se. It draws on documentary, ethnographic, and audiovisual methods and can be used for the analysis of big data. Dydia Delyser and Daniel Sui (2012) argue that it cannot be captured within a qualitative-quantitative divide, and this fits with broad understandings of time and space as 1 both measurable and something that needs to be understood through subjective experience. Rhythmanalysis is nevertheless most often associated with a qualitative tradition, in particular with ethnography, and this entry focusses on the use of rhythmanalysis in qualitative research. The discussion is divided into four parts. The first critically presents Lefebvre's thinking on rhythmanalysis and how he advocated for it as a research practice centred on the body. The second discusses cultural historical rhythmanalysis using documents and materials. The third explores rhythmanalysis as a form of ethnography. The fourth focusses on audiovisual methods to document, perceive, and analyse rhythm. These approaches to doing rhythmanalysis are not mutually exclusive and may be combined. Lefebvre and the Development of Rhythmanalysis Lefebvre lived for most of the 20th century, from 1901 to 1991. His early years in southwest France stimulated his interest in agrarian life and cyclical time. He celebrated rural life and

K Hughes and A Tarrant (eds) Qualitative Secondary Analysis, 2020

The Living and Working on Sheppey project was funded by the HEFCE-financed South East Coastal Com... more The Living and Working on Sheppey project was funded by the HEFCE-financed South East Coastal Communities Programme. The project team included academics from sociology and arts at the Universities of Kent and Southampton, staff from the UK Data Archive, University of Essex, the artists group Tea, and members (staff and community volunteers) of the Blue Town Heritage Centre, an information, resource and visitor centre on the history of Blue Town and the Isle of Sheppey. Until his death in June 2011, Ray Pahl was an informal consultant to the project.

The Sociological Review

The street has long been a key laboratory for studies of social life, from the roots of urban soc... more The street has long been a key laboratory for studies of social life, from the roots of urban sociology in the ethnographies of the Chicago School to the diverse range of contemporary studies which consider the performative, affective and non-representational nature of street etiquette and encounter. For all this, the street remains only loosely defined in many studies, and sometimes disappears from view entirely, with social action often privileged over material and environmental context. This Special Issue is intended as a spur to take the street more seriously in contemporary sociology, and explores the importance of the street as a site, scale and field for sociological research. Recognising that the street is both contradictory and complex, the Introduction to this Issue draws out emerging themes in the shifting sociologies of the street by highlighting the specific contribution interdisciplinary work can make to our understanding of streets as distinctive but contested social ...

This article documents, shows and analyses the everyday rhythms of Billingsgate, London's wholesa... more This article documents, shows and analyses the everyday rhythms of Billingsgate, London's wholesale fish market. It takes the form of a short film based an audio-visual montage of time-lapse photography and sound recordings, and a textual account of the dimensions of market life revealed by this montage. Inspired by Henri Lefebvre's Rhythmanalysis, and the embodied experience of moving through and sensing the market, the film renders the elusive quality of the market and the work that takes place within it to make it happen. The composite of audio-visual recordings immerses viewers in the space and atmosphere of the market and allows us to perceive and analyse rhythms, patterns, flows, interactions, temporalities and interconnections of market work, themes that this article discusses. The film is thereby both a means of showing market life and an analytic tool for making sense of it. This article critically considers the documentation, evocation and analysis of time and space in this way.
** Direct link to article and film here: http://www.socresonline.org.uk/21/3/12.html **

This short ethnographic film about the everyday life of the wholesale fish market in Cagliari, Sa... more This short ethnographic film about the everyday life of the wholesale fish market in Cagliari, Sardinia (Italy) immerses the viewer in the material, sensory and affective atmosphere of the market space. It presents the broad temporal and spatial rhythms of the market. We see the fish arrive before daybreak, and later we watch as it is packed up and driven off to the next point of distribution or consumption. Within this narrative, the film focuses on the key social practices that underpin trade. At the beginning of the day, we witness the fish merchants’ labour of preparation and display – the act of ‘staging value’ - in readiness for exchange. Once the buyers arrive, they can be seen evaluating the fish with their ‘skilled vision’ or their touch. Negotiations are intense at times and happen in different emotional registers – challenge, anger, insult and humour (some of which appear to be embellished for the camera) – and through social relations which are animated by the market space and the alluring presence of the fish itself. Once trade is over, the remaining fish and the market space are the site of further care and work. The soundscape of the film is composed of multiple voices and the noise of actions and interactions but the film does not rely on language (with the exception of three subtitled exchanges with us), aiming instead to show how buyers and sellers of fish deploy their embodied knowledge and sensory perceptions in their everyday working lives.

This article discusses the findings of the Imagine Sheppey project (2013-14) which studied how yo... more This article discusses the findings of the Imagine Sheppey project (2013-14) which studied how young people are ‘oriented’ towards the future. The aim and approach of the project was to explore future imaginaries in a participatory, experimental, and performative way. Working with young people in a series of arts-based workshops, we intervened in different environments to alter the space as an experience of change – temporal, material, symbolic. We documented this process visually and made use of the images produced as the basis for elicitation in focus groups with a wider group of young people. In this article we discuss young people’s future orientations through the themes of reach, resources, shape, and value. In so doing, we reflect on the paths that our young respondents traced to connect their presents to what is next, what we call their modes of present-future navigation. We explore the qualities and characteristics of their stances within a wider reflection about how young people approach, imagine and account for the future.

Visual and arts-based methods are now widely used in the social sciences. In youth research they ... more Visual and arts-based methods are now widely used in the social sciences. In youth research they are considered to promote engagement and empowerment. This article contributes to debate on the challenges of using arts-based methods in research with young people. We discuss the experience of a multidisciplinary project investigating how young people imagine their futures – Imagine Sheppey - to critically consider the use of arts-based methods and the kinds of data produced through these practices. We make two sets of arguments. First, that the challenges of participation and collaboration are not overcome by using apparently ‘youth-friendly’ research tools. Second, that the nature of data produced through arts-based methods can leave researchers with significant problems of interpretation. We highlight these issues in relation to the focus of this project on researching the future.