Navigating nothing: journeying through storied worlds of hidden, lost experience

What is the most important thing that is not in your life? No-bodies, no-things, non-events and no-where places can all hold significant meanings for individual identity. From lost relationships to missed opportunities, stolen dreams and thwarted ambitions, we all have an alternate, unlived life and a range of impossible selves. Developing my symbolic interactionist theory of ‘the sociology of nothing’, I present my latest research project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust. Narratives of Nothing is a qualitative study of 195 personal stories, gathered through the Mass Observation Archive and biographical interviews. Here I report on the findings, focusing on the narrative style, form and composition of the participants’ reflective accounts. I identify four types of emotional tale – passionate, enduring, transgressive and counterfactual – and observe some performative and communicative aspects of the storytelling process. We shall see how narrators engaged in ‘reverse biographical identity work’ through imaginative time travel across realms of lost experience. This invites a curiosity about the role of absent and missing phenomena in shaping our personal worlds.

About the lecturer

Susie Scott

Susie Scott is Professor of Sociology at the University of Sussex, UK. Her research is grounded in micro sociological theory, particularly Symbolic Interactionism and Goffman’s dramaturgy, with interests in self identity, social interaction, everyday life, narratives and emotions. She is best known for her work on the Sociology of Nothing, explored in, for example, Narratives of Nothing: Storying the Unlived Life (Springer Nature, 2026). The book examines how absences, missed opportunities and events that never happened shape identities, showing how people engage in “reverse biographical identity work” to make sense of their unlived lives. Her wider publications address topics including shyness, politeness, swimming pools and total institutions, and she also works in clinical practice as a qualified psychotherapist.

Sociology@MaU

Sociology@MaU is a seminar series that highlights sociological perspectives in research at, and beyond, Malmö University. Sociology@MaU brings together researchers and practitioners to discuss contemporary issues and spark interdisciplinary dialogue incorporating sociological perspectives. The aim is to encourage intellectual exchange about theories, methods and empirical fields, thus providing fertile ground for ideas about new – more just – ways of organising society. The seminars are open to all.

Sociology

In sociology, the human is studied in society. The social interaction between individuals and groups, societal structures and...

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