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The industrialized world is facing an ageing population. Sociology needs to focus on the social impact of demographic change, in particular, how seniors remain socially integrated and what this integration means. Gerontological research has focused on the role of seniors' centres in the US and Europe, but such research has been lacking in Australia. This article provides much-needed ethnographic research on a range of Australian seniors' groups which provide outlets for social participation. It develops a typology of seniors' groups through an exploration of organizational structures, funding models, and their impact on participation and sociality. It argues that because Australian groups prioritize leisure over service delivery, uneven divisions of volunteer labour emerge, which can lead to conflict. The article questions the current gerontological consensus that seniors' groups are sites of community, arguing that physical proximity does not equal intimate sociality. It addresses these challenges faced by seniors' groups and new ones posed by the mass-retirement of more 'active' baby-boomers.

As the world becomes increasingly urban, with denser cities, residents become subject to greater amounts of noise. Since the late 19th century, people have formed groups to oppose urban noise generated by industrialization, motor vehicles and jet-planes. This article gives the first detailed account of online noise-abatement groups through a case study of Quiet Australia. It maps the key aims of this group, which are to mobilize community support, raise awareness of noise-related problems, gather and exchange expert information, and promote political participation to reduce noise. I argue that there exists a moral geography of noise in which excessive noise-making is seen by Quiet Australia members as morally inappropriate and uncivilized behaviour, which leads to social disintegration. I theorize that such noise-abatement groups seek what I have termed a ‘residential ethics’ or consideration of others through either state-led or neoliberal self-governance to restore social order and uphold social ‘decency’.

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• This article explores the rise of do-it-yourself (DIY) amateur home renovation practices, within the context of cultural, media and leisure studies debates about amateurs, experts and the circulation of knowledge, and, in particular, the increasingly visible role of lifestyle media experts. Lifestyle television fosters a neoliberal system of governance at a distance which seeks to create enterprising citizens. Through a digital ethnography of the Our House DIY Club — a home-improvement online forum — this article argues that amateur DIYers enact this neoliberal discourse of enterprising and productive citizenship advocated by lifestyle TV experts. They produce an organic knowledge through a process of appropriating expert knowledge, and rearticulate it through narratives of personal experience, further promoting neoliberal Do It Yourself discourse. •