Live methods and live things: cultivating attentiveness to dormant things to develop a vital sociology of the everyday

This article focuses upon unnoticed objects in the home, such as those stuffed in a junk drawer, to explore how we can be attentive to the everyday in cultivating a ‘live sociology’ which illuminates the close at hand, locating the shared, public and moral in the everyday. I argue that attentiveness to the vibrancy of everyday things can expand the possibilities of a vital sociology. Attentiveness is a way to retrain the ‘sociological gaze’ away from the unusual to the unnoticed elements of everyday lives and objects. I consider here both what we are attentive to – affects, connections, potentials, materiality – as well as how we can cultivate attentiveness – through ‘being-with’ data and forms of slow scholarship. I do this by drawing on fieldwork in the UK on objects that are kept but not currently being used. Forgotten things covered with dust on a shelf may seem ‘dead’ or inert, yet framing these as ‘dormant’ exposes their histories, hauntings as well as imagined futures. The article takes case studies of junk drawers, bags of old cables, and other unnoticed objects to explore what happens when we are attentive to dormant things and how a seemingly personal and private collection allows the possibilities for connection and can materialise people’s hopes, and expose social inequities. Finally, I develop the ethics of attentiveness as both a practical engagement in research as well as a core value of a vital sociology in how we tell people’s stories.