SOCIAL SCIENCE / Sociology / General
Death’s Social and Material Meaning beyond the Human
This book provides an alternative focus for death studies by looking beyond traditional perspectives of a nature/culture binary. Bringing together a range of international scholars, it sheds light on topics which have previously remained at the margins of contemporary death studies and death care cultures.
The Trouble with Jokes
Humour and Offensiveness in Contemporary Culture and Politics
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.
Feeding the Middle Classes
Taste, Class and Domestic Food Practices
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.
The Muscle Trade
The Use and Supply of Image and Performance Enhancing Drugs
The health and fitness industry has experienced a meteoric rise over the past two decades, yet its slick exterior conceals a darker side. Using ethnographic data from gyms, interviews and social media platforms, this book investigates the growing use of image and performance-enhancing drugs (IPEDs) and their role in masculine body image.
Exploring New Temporal Horizons
A Conversation between Memories and Futures
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.
Beyond Bars
A Path Forward from 50 Years of Mass Incarceration in the United States
The year 2023 marks 50 years of mass incarceration in the United States and this timely volume addresses the ramifications of this policy on justice-impacted people and our communities. It offers practical solutions for advocates, policy and lawmakers for addressing mass incarceration and its effects to create a more just, fair and safer society.
Interpreting the Body
Between Meaning and Matter
Written by leading social scientists, this ambitious volume asks what individuals’ “handling” of bodies reveal about inequality, social order and cultural change in societies.
Adult Safeguarding Observed
How Social Workers Assess and Manage Risk and Uncertainty
Applying sociological and ethnographic research to adult safeguarding for the first time, this book considers how frontline practice is developing, exploring safeguarding adults assessments and multi-agency work. The book is essential reading for those wishing to understand risk management and how current practice can be improved.
Incarceration and Older Women
Giving Back Not Giving Up
For the first time, this book offers qualitative research on the lives and social relationships of older imprisoned women. In-depth interviews with 29 female prisoners in the south-eastern United States show that older women both engage in generative behaviours, or 'giving back', in prison and also wish to do so upon their release.
The Gentrification of Queer Activism
Diversity Politics and the Promise of Inclusion in London
Tracing the extensive LGBTQ+ venue closures in the 2010s, this book explores the queer politics of LGBTQ+ inclusion in London. Drawing on rich ethnographic work with activists, professionals and businesses, it reveals how gender and sexuality come to be reconfigured in the production and consumption of LGBTQ+ inclusion and its promises.
How Britain Loves the NHS
Practices of Care and Contestation
It is often claimed that the UK is unusually attached to its National Health Service, and the last decade has seen increasingly visible displays of gratitude and love. This book offers a timely critique of both the potential, and the dysfunctions, of Britain’s complex love affair with its healthcare system.
Interpreting Contentious Memory
Countermemories and Social Conflicts over the Past
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.