SOCIAL SCIENCE / Sociology / General
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.
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 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.
Qualitative Fieldwork with Children
Context and Participation in Child Well-Being Research across Nations
Drawing on the multinational qualitative study ‘Children’s Understandings of Well-being’ (CUWB), this book offers practical insights into conducting fieldwork across diverse contexts. Featuring experts from 13 countries, the book provides valuable perspectives for researchers across a wide range of academic settings.
Renewing Europe's Housing
Expert contributors provide contemporary comparative accounts of housing renewal policy and practice in nine European countries. Shared concerns over energy conservation, social protection and inclusion, and the roles and responsibilities of public and private sectors, form the basis of a proposed policy agenda for housing renewal across Europe.
Interpreting Subcultures
Approaching, Contextualizing, and Embodying Sense-Making Practices in Alternative Cultures
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.
University Audit Cultures and Feminist Praxis
An Institutional Ethnography
Drawing on an unprecedented institutional ethnography of UK universities, this book uses feminist and gender lenses to critique the power, culture and structure of Higher Education institutions. Challenging the myths of how academia is governed by audit processes, it provides an opportunity to re-read and re-write these institutions from within.
Imagining Regulation Differently
Co-creating for Engagement
This book innovatively explores how we can better apply a ‘bottom-up’ approach to the design of regulatory systems that recognise the capabilities, knowledge, passions and creativity of citizens in communities at the margins.
The Death of Affirmative Action?
Racialized Framing and the Fight Against Racial Preference in College Admissions
Can affirmative action in US college admissions survive mounting threats? This judicious review, part of the Sociology of Diversity series, considers the question using up-to-date sociological, policy and legal perspectives to explain both sides of the fierce debate over affirmative action in the context of prominent Supreme Court cases.
Children Framing Childhoods
Working-Class Kids’ Visions of Care
Based on a unique longitudinal study and offering a critical visual methodology of “collaborative seeing”, this book shows how a diverse community of young people in Worcester, MA used cameras at different ages (10, 12, 16, 18) to capture the centrality of care in their lives, homes and classrooms.
Generational Encounters with Higher Education
The Academic–Student Relationship and the University Experience
Employing a generational analysis, this book offers an original approach to the study of Higher Education and documents the changing nature of the relationship between academics and students. Examining wider issues of culture and socialisation, this is a timely contribution to current debates about the University around higher education.