Sociology

Exploring the relationship between humour and offensiveness, this book delves into offensive jokes, their impact, and the dark side of laughter. It blends cultural analysis, politics, and philosophy to offer an antidote to positive thinking and guide readers through offensive humour.

Supported by the editors’ popular podcast Narrative Now, this interdisciplinary volume explores the capacities and limitations of narrative research. It maps out new directions for the field while honouring its legacy.

Considering food consumption in a wider social context, this book offers an alternative understanding of class relations, which extends academic, political and public debates about privilege.

Using the example of Turkey, where neoliberal economics combined with authoritarian politics formed conditions that have profound social consequences, this book investigates Alternative Consumer Cooperatives (ACCs) as spaces for prefigurative food politics.

Based on in-depth interviews with over 80 precarious workers in Korea, this book introduces the concept of ‘melting labour’ and provides a real depiction of how workers lose control over their lives and experience precariousness in labour markets.

This pioneering work explores how in our digital age of connectivity, temporal acceleration and real-time simultaneity impact personal and institutional experience. Bringing memory and future studies into a unique dialogue, the book offers an intervention to the current ‘temporal crisis’ of social life and sociological debates.

Exploring the impact of climate change and the pandemic on people’s decisions to form families and their experience of having children, this book makes a valuable contribution to debates on contemporary planetary crises.

Drawing from longitudinal research, this book shows how the perspectives of people who have been in care can help us redefine the concept of family. Through a narrative analysis of the complexity of family lives, the author challenges the idea that some families are ‘ordinary’, while others are troubled, problematic and ‘other’.

This clear and concise guide provides the introduction to descriptive statistical analysis that all students need to draw insightful conclusions from their data. Assuming no prior expertise, it presents jargon-free and practical advice for analysing and presenting numbers.

What does mothering mean in different cultures and societies? This book extensively applies biographical and narrative research methods to mothering from international perspectives. Considering self-care, rapport, trust and self-reflection, the collection advances methodological practice in the study of mothers, carers and childless women’s lives.

Drawing on theoretical and empirical studies, this book offers a unique and timely reformulation of socialism adapted to current challenges. It makes explicit the ‘silent utopia’ of intersectionality theory and lays the conceptual groundwork for an emancipatory politics.