Psychoanalytic Reflections on Politics: Fatherlands in mothers' hands is a playful exploration of how people's desires, fantasies, and emotions shape political events and social phenomena.
Exploring notions of the person through a wide range of anthropological literature, Cathrine Degnen analyses how personhood is built, affirmed, and maintained during various life stages and via multiple cultural forms and practices.
Modernity theory approaches modern experience as it incorporates a sense of itself as 'modern' (modernity), along with the possibilities and limitations of representing this in the arts and culture generally (modernism).
In recent decades, the rise of world markets and the technological revolutions in transportation and communication have brought what was once distant and inaccessible within easy reach of the individual.
Cultural Analysis and Bourdieu's Legacy explores the achievements and limitations of a Bourdieusian approach to cultural analysis through original contributions from distinguished international scholars.
Terry Eagleton's book, in this vital new series from Blackwell, focuses on discriminating different meanings of culture, as a way of introducing to the general reader the contemporary debates around it.
Watching people protest, one hypothesis is that underlying these actions for specific justifiable causes is a sense of wishing to belong, of wishing not to be alone.
This revised edition of Pip Jones's extremely popular introduction to social theory, now benefiting from the collaboration of Shaun Le Boutillier and Liz Bradbury, has been carefully and thoroughly updated with the latest developments in this continually changing field.
This comprehensive introduction to the study of war and genocide presents a disturbing case that the potential for slaughter is deeply rooted in the political, economic, social and ideological relations of the modern world.
Love seems like the most personal experience, one that touches each of us in a unique way that is more personal than social, and hence it is not surprising that it has been largely neglected by sociologists and social theorists.
In this new book, Ulrich Beck and the journalist Johannes Willms engage in a series of accessible conversations that reveal and explore the key elements in Beck s thought.
The core of this book is a set of five lectures delivered by Habermas at Princeton in 1971 under the title 'Reflections on the Linguistic Foundation of Sociology'.
In this book Axel Honneth re-examines arguments put forward by Hegel and claims that the 'struggle for recognition' should be at the centre of social conflicts.
Today we hear much talk of crisis and comparisons are often made with the Great Depression of the 1930s, but there is a crucial difference that sets our current malaise apart from the 1930s: today we no longer trust in the capacity of the state to resolve the crisis and to chart a new way forward.
Twenty years ago Ulrich Beck published Risk Society, a book that called our attention to the dangers of environmental catastrophes and changed the way we think about contemporary societies.
Michel Foucault is recognized as one of the twentieth century's most influential thinkers, however the authors in this volume contend that more use can be made of Foucault than has yet been done and that some of the uses to which Foucault has so far been put run the risk of and occasionally simply amount to misuse.
All the great ideals that gave life meaning in earlier societies - God, the nation, revolution, freedom, democracy - are in disarray today, questioned by many and rejected by those who have lost faith in them.
Bruno Latour s long term project is to compare the felicity and infelicity conditions of the different values dearest to the heart of those who have never been modern .
A tension between the desire to be respected as an equal and the desire to distinguish oneself as a unique person lies at the heart of the modern social order.
In this lively and accessible study, David Lyon explores the relationship between religion and postmodernity, through the central metaphor of 'Jesus in Disneyland.
This book reassesses theories of agency and gender identity against the backdrop of changing relations between men and women in contemporary societies.
The works of Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) are widely acclaimed as being among the most original and provocative writings of twentieth-century critical thought, and have become required reading for scholars and students in a range of academic disciplines.
In this major theoretical statement, the author offers a new and provocative interpretation of the institutional transformations associated with modernity.
In this book, one of the world s leading social theorists presents a critical, alarmed, but also nuanced understanding of the post-traditional world we inhabit today.
Today the smallest details of our daily lives are tracked and traced more closely than ever before, and those who are monitored often cooperate willingly with the monitors.
Siblings and all the lateral relationships that follow from them are clearly important and their interaction is widely observed, particularly in creative literature.