Abstract
In this article the authors ask what it would mean to think sociologically about the window as a specific material and symbolic object. Drawing on qualitative analysis of a series of comparative interviews with residents in three different streets in a diverse local area of Glasgow, they explore what the use and experience of windows tells us about their respondents’ very different relationships to the places where they live. On the one hand, the window, as a material feature of the home, helps us grasp the lived reality of class inequality and how such inequality shapes people’s day-to-day experience. On the other hand, windows are symbolically charged objects, existing at the border of the domestic and public world. For this reason, they feature in important ways in local debates over the appearance, ownership and conservation of the built environment. The article explores these struggles, and shows what they reveal about the construction of belonging in the neighbourhood, a process which is both classed and racialised at one and the same time.
Highlights
In this article we explore what it might mean to undertake a sociology of the window
Our analysis here has been informed in certain respects by Bourdieu’s famous sociological critique of the supposed neutrality of ‘taste’ but we have sought to qualify his approach in two significant ways
As we saw in our historical account, the glassed window signifies in particular ways: by virtue of its transparency, for example, and by virtue of its bordering qualities or its fragility
Summary
In this article we explore what it might mean to undertake a sociology of the window. Drawing on evidence from a qualitative study of the dynamics of class and racialisation in the Glasgow neighbourhood of Pollokshields, we identify the glass window as a significant material and symbolic object. The data discussed within this article demonstrate how a seemingly aesthetic response to the built environment is never as ‘pure’ as it appears. Reflecting on this evidence we argue that windows are good to look through, sociologically speaking, drawing attention both to the ways in which social relations of domination are materially experienced, and to the symbolic reading and misreading of such relations
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