Rupture and Rhythm: A Phenomenology of National Experiences

This article investigates how people make sense of ruptures in the flow of everyday life as they enter new experiential domains. Shifts in being-in-time create breaks in the natural attitude that offer the opportunity to register national—or, for example, religious, gender, or class—experiences. People interpret ruptures in perception and proprioception by drawing connections with domains in which similar or contrasting kinds of disruption are evident. Normalizing the transition, rhythm—as both cadence and overall flow—helps people adjust to new circumstances, align action, and smooth subsequent ruptures. Based on extensive qualitative fieldwork, I examine the specific case of how novice and experienced tea ceremony practitioners in Japan move into, interpret, and normalize action within tea spaces

What is an Event and Are We in One?

This article describes the temporal and spatial configurations and limitations of the rupture phase of historical events. It does so through a consideration of the intertwined forms and flows of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic and the social uprising against police violence targeting African-Americans in the United States. The article argues that these ruptures open up a "double exposure", one that makes problematic conventional categories associated with events, like those of past and future and inside and outside, thus challenging our ability to situate ourselves in relation to such events

Ontologies, methodologies, and new uses of Big Data in the social and cultural sciences

In our Introduction to the Conceiving the Social with Big Data Special Issue of Big Data & Society , we survey the 18 contributions from scholars in the humanities and social sciences, and highlight several questions and themes that emerge within and across them. These emergent issues reflect the challenges, problems, and promises of working with Big Data to access and assess the social. They include puzzles about the locus and nature of human life, the nature of interpretation, the categorical constructions of individual entities and agents, the nature and relevance of contexts and temporalities, and the determinations of causality. As such, the Introduction reflects on the contributions along a series of binaries that capture the dualities and dynamisms of these themes: Life/Data; Mind/Machine; and Induction/Deduction