Sociology of Culture

This book illustrates how scholars use different interpretive lenses to study profound conflicts rooted in the past. Addressing issues of racism, genocide, war, nationalism, colonialism and more, it highlights how our interpretations of contentious memories are indispensable to our understandings of contemporary conflicts and identities.

This book explores neoliberalism in contemporary Latin America as a set of interrelated cultural forms, offering a transnational and comparative perspective on the ways in which neoliberalism has transformed public discourses of self and social relationships, popular cultures and modes of everyday experience.

This book, offering in-depth analysis from a native scholar, is a critical examination of the world-renowned community Auroville located in Tamil Nadu, South India as a site of spiritually prefigurative utopian practice.

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.

This edited collection provides interdisciplinary, global, and multi-religious perspectives on the relationship between women’s identities, religion, and social change in the contemporary world.

In this thought-provoking collection, Muslim and non-Muslim academics take a multi-disciplinary approach to humour in Islam. They draw on examples of comedy practices and styles to scope sociological, cultural, theological and political themes, consider humour’s role in fundamentalism, and correct misconceptions about laughter in the religion.

This powerful book documents the unspoken stories of a diversity of gender embodiments across the post-Yugoslav states, uncovering how they have navigated the murky waters of war, racism, capitalism and transphobia.

Exploring the creative and destructive ways individuals and groups make use of new digital and social media in democratic societies across the world, this book presents a much-needed critical theory of the public sphere as we enter the new digital age.

This book offers an empirically-based view on Europeans’ interconnections in everyday life. It looks at the ways in which EU residents have been getting closer across national frontiers. The book considers how people reconcile their increasing cross-border interconnections and a politically separating Europe of nation states and national interests.

In this pioneering work, Bill McClanahan provides a concise overview of visual criminology. With examples of the most prominent methods at work in visual criminology, this book explores the visual perspective in relation to prisons, police, the environment, and drugs, while noting the complex ethical implications embedded in visual research.

This book makes an unprecedented contribution to the field by explaining the interpretive processes through which subcultural phenomena are studied. Examining dimensions of interpretivism, it reveals how and why people decide to use specific conceptual frames or methodologies and how they shape their interpretations of everyday realities.

Written by experts in interpretive sociology, this volume examines semiotic models in a sociological context. Contributors offer case studies to demonstrate ‘how to do things’ with semiotics. Synthesizing a diverse and fragmented landscape, this is a key reference work for understanding the connection between semiotics and sociology.