Photographing Social Change

My wife and I recently spent a difficult period of six months living in a previously semirural English location that had since become an infrastructural node in our national and international networks of travel, work, and commerce. Thus, living very near an airport that serves and connects the region in question to the world at large, I used to be woken up every night by heavy air traffic, by cargo planes taking off with ferocious frequency between one and four o’clock in the morning. We had ended up in this location by accident, needing accommodation at very short notice, in a place that would be geographically fairly convenient for both my and my wife's commutes to work. Given the urgency of this at the time, we had to disregard the fact that the area in question had also acquired a reputation for its high levels of Brexit support. Two (self-defining) Europeans moving there, at the height of the furor created by the UK's uneasily unfolding exit from the European Union, was—in hindsight—always going to be difficult. And so it was. However, our problems extended far beyond restless nights and our deep uneasiness with the political positions held by many of our neighbors at the time. What many residents in this particular location, and probably many others like it around the globe, share is a usually unarticulated but locally inescapable experience of being squeezed by changes to the area being imposed from the outside.

The intentions of this chapter are threefold and interrelated. First, I will sketch some of the methodological questions raised by our recent experiences in the locality in question, wishing to point toward some possible ways of capturing recent and ongoing social changes in places such as the one described above and in what follows. Second, this discussion will draw on several conceptual strands in recent sociological theorizing that can help us make sense of the social changes at stake here and of how they impact on local lives. Third, in combining the empirical with the methodological and the conceptual, this discussion shows that examples such as the one that lies at the heart of this chapter strengthen the more general case for a reinvigorated sociological imagination and for a public sociology (Burawoy 2005) today.