Love in the space-time of inequality: Attachment and detachment across unequal lives

Strong, Samuel

doi:10.1177/00380261221150085

Love in the space-time of inequality: Attachment and detachment across unequal lives

Strong, Samuel

Authors

Dr Samuel Strong samuel.r.strong@durham.ac.uk
Lecturer in Human Geography (Fixed Term)

Abstract

This article examines the changing experience of love at a time of deepening inequalities. Drawing on the ‘love story’ of one resident of London’s Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea—arguably the UK’s most unequal space—it builds a relational account of love to describe the forms of attachment and detachment that accompany everyday life in an increasingly divided place. This approach signals three wider contributions. First, by tracing love through life-course and life-world, this article conceptualises the sustained and far-reaching way inequalities are lived and felt in everyday life. Second, the foregrounding of love stories as methodology highlights the roles of agency and narrative in how we tell and write about inequalities. In drawing these points together, this article thirdly conceptualises inequality as processual, situated and contested—as an emergent process of ‘becoming unequal’ through which we can trace shifting relations between space, time and power.

Citation

Strong, S. (2023). Love in the space-time of inequality: Attachment and detachment across unequal lives. Sociological Review, 71(2), 370-386. https://doi.org/10.1177/00380261221150085

Journal Article Type	Article
Acceptance Date	Dec 24, 2022
Online Publication Date	Jan 30, 2023
Publication Date	2023-03
Deposit Date	Jan 19, 2023
Publicly Available Date	Apr 27, 2023
Journal	The Sociological Review
Print ISSN	0038-0261
Electronic ISSN	1467-954X
Publisher	SAGE Publications
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	71
Issue	2
Pages	370-386
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1177/00380261221150085

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This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).