Ethno-national and religious identity and violence dominate modern politics, from Northern Ireland to terrorism in Sri Lanka, the former Yugoslavia or Afghanistan and Iraq.
Written in the temporal and political context of the British New Labour Government's ongoing reliance on the word community, academics and activists critically engage here with the range of ways in which contemporary ideas of community are being used and contested.
Drawing on the work of Raymond Williams, Valentin Volosinov and Mikhail Bakhtin, the book examines key issues for working-class studies including: the idea of the 'death' of class; the importance of working-class writing; the significance of place and space for understanding working-class identity; and the centrality of work in working-class lives.
Transformative learning is a process in which we question all the assumptions about the world and ourselves that make up our worldview, visualize alternative assumptions, and then test them in practice.
The book focuses on the design of rigorous trials rather than their statistical underpinnings, with chapters on: pragmatic designs; placebo designs; preference approaches; unequal allocation; economics; analytical approaches; randomization methods.
In this new collection of essays, a range of established and emerging cultural critics re-evaluate Richard Hoggart's contribution to the history of ideas and to the discipline of Cultural Studies.
Internationally renowned media and literature scholars, social scientists, game designers and artists explore the cultural potential of computer games in this rich anthology, which introduces the latest approaches in the central fields of game studies and provides an extensive survey of contemporary game culture.
This volume brings together original work from internationally recognized scholars that critically engages with the full range of Jameson's work, including: Sartre, Lukacs, 'Third World' literature, architecture, postmodernity, globalization, film, dialectics and Brecht.
Citizenship and Political Education Today brings together a collection of essays from around the world; including discussion of politics and education in Australia, The United States of America, New Zealand, Norway, England, France, Germany and the wider European Union.
Written in a clear and accessible style, this book presents a broad ranging enquiry into various methodological issues associated with contemporary youth research.
An original exploration of how the relationship between society and 'nature' is conceptualized, focusing on theories of social exclusion and difference.
The Aesthetics of Free Speech: Rethinking the Public Sphere is one of the first books to theoretically explore the relationship between free speech and the public sphere.
Jonathan Bignell presents a wide-ranging analysis of the television phenomenon of the early twenty-first century: Reality TV, exploring its cultural and political meanings, explaining the genesis of the form and its relationship to contemporary television production, and considering how it connects with, and breaks away from, factual and fictional conventions in television.
Uncovering how cash-in-hand economies are composed of not only the underground sector (work akin to formal employment conducted for profit-motivated purposes), but also a hidden economy of favours more akin to mutual aid, this book displays the need to transcend conventional market-oriented readings of cash-in-hand work and radically rethink whether seeking its eradication through tougher regulations is always appropriate.
The central concern of this ambitious study is to understand the impact of social change on people's lives - in the vital areas of economy, politics and civil society.
The authors examine the relationship between social science and philosophy and ask what sort of work social science and an accompanying philosophy should do.
This volume brings together nine essays by established and new scholars from Russia, Britain and North America to explore the historical contexts and current relevance of the work of the Bakhtin Circle for social theory, philosophy, history and linguistics.
Using a unique combination of cultural studies research, neo-pragmatist philosophy, and psychoanalytic theory, the author sheds light on the formation of a social identity and the important role that mass media play in this process.
In this timely study, high profile researchers contribute to the burgeoning field of the social studies of childhood with original and often surprising perspectives and approaches.
Offering readers the most complete and authoritative critical introduction to Leisure Theory and written by one of the major figures in the field, the book provides an exciting and reliable guide to leisure forms, leisure practice and the representation of leisure.
The persistence of war as a feature of modern life is examined through issues of identity and difference, that is, the construction of 'self' and 'other' as individual or community.
While the historical development of symbolic power has benefitted humanity enormously, there is an insidious and seldom recognised price that goes beyond environmental degradation and cultural disintegration.
This book brings together essays on modernity, social integration, social differentiation and social exclusion by Lockwood, Mouzelis and other eminent social theorists.
The main theme of this book is collective subjectivity, analysed especially in connection with the work of Marx, Parsons, Giddens and Habermas, but also addressing the manifold tendencies of sociological theory, from its inception to the present.
It is common to hear that we live in unique, turbulent and crisis-ridden times and this turbulence, transformation and crisis are said to be deeply significant - perhaps threatening - for the human sciences.
A new and innovative account of British sociology's intellectual origins that uses previously unknown archival resources to show how the field's forgotten roots in a late nineteenth and early twentieth-century debate about biology can help us understand both its subsequent development and future potential.
This book presents an integral, cross-cultural reflection on the social reality of children's rights and citizenship, giving an insight into new perspectives on the history and different concepts of children's rights in a contextualized and localized manner.
This collection explores the contested meanings and diverse practices of social research in the context of contemporary theoretical debates in cultural and social theory, addressing fundamental questions facing those working in the social and human sciences today.
This book explores the social and political significance of contemporary recognition contests in areas such as disability, race and ethnicity, nationalism, class and sexuality, drawing on accounts from Europe, the USA, Latin America, the Middle East and Australasia.
This collection focuses on the real life experiences of conducting emprical research about families and relationships, with an emphasis on the actualities of doing research and the experiences of being a researcher.
This book examines neighbourhoods and networks between the diverse people of contemporary Europe who live in a globalized and globalizing world, across different types of borders: physical and mental, geopolitical and symbolic.
An exploration of the concept of utopia in Latin America from the earliest accounts of the New World to current cultural production, the carefully selected essays in this volume represent the latest research on the topic by some of the most important Latin Americanists working in North American academia today.
