Society, Culture and Arts

Now a multi-million-dollar industry blending art, politics, and entertainment, drag's popularity has soared in recent years. Yet, despite its rise as a consumer product, research exploring the intersection of drag and markets remains scarce. This interdisciplinary collection fills that void, exploring drag's market impact.

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.

This imaginative collection invites readers to explore how a broader view of aesthetics can reshape areas like, medicine, arts and education, challenging how we think about knowledge. It is an agenda-setting contribution to understanding the significance of aesthetics in science and technology studies.

EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. Drawing on empirical data from US and UK as well as the unique example of Nordic countries where there is a high level of confidence in state and media institutions, this book shows how platforms and algorithms are transforming media, journalism and audiences’ civic practices.

Rather than being seen simply as social policy implementors, in recent decades there has been recognition of the unique insights that social workers can bring to policy formulation. This book offers a theoretical framework for understanding why social workers engage in policy, and the implications for research, education and practice.

Written by an international team of authors, this ambitious volume offers radical alternatives to staid ways of thinking on the most crucial global challenges of our times. Bridging real examples of political agency, collective action and mutual aid with big-picture concepts, the book encourages readers to ‘be a Zapatista’, wherever they are.

This is the first published research from the UK to address the neglected topic of the increasing settlement of Gypsies and Travellers in conventional housing. It highlights the complex and emergent tensions and dynamics inherent when policy and popular discourse combine to frame ethnic populations within a narrative of movement.

Written by leading experts, this collection examines representations of queerness in popular science and media, asks what it means for the field to ‘queer’ science communication theories and research agendas and offers practical examples and case studies for fostering radical inclusivity and equity in the science communication field.

Curating rigorous academic, policy and practice-based research, this book explores the response and adaptation of the UK voluntary sector to the COVID-19 pandemic and considers what can be learned to maximise its contribution in the event of future crises.