Sociology and Social Theory

Founded in cultural, textual, and ethnographic analysis, this distinctive and engaging book proposes an imaginative criminology, focusing on how spaces of transgression, control or confinement are lived, portrayed and imagined.

Based on involved creative, qualitative work with families in India and the UK who live in different contexts, this book illuminates how environmental practices are negotiated within families, and how they relate to values, identities, and society.

Comedy and Critique explores British professional stand-up comedy in the wake of the Alternative Comedy movement of the late twentieth century, seeing it as an extension of the politics of the New Left: standing up for oneself as anti-racist, feminist and open to a queering of self and social institutions.

How can Archaeology help us understand our contemporary world? This ground-breaking book reflects on material, visual and digital culture from the Calais “Jungle” to reassess how we understand ‘crisis’, activism, and the infrastructure of national borders in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies.

This book develops new ways of thinking beyond the nation as a form of political community by transcending ethnonational categories of ‘us’ and ‘them’. Drawing on scholarship and cases spanning Pacific Asia and Europe, it provides a constructive agenda for critical nationalism studies.

Written by criminologists and policy analysts, Criminalisation and advanced marginality offers a constructive but critical application of Wacquant's ideas.

This is the first book to connect digital media technologies in digital sociology to traditional sociological and offers a much needed overview of it. It includes problems of the digital age in relation to inequality and identity, making it suitable for use for a global audience on a variety of courses.

The political and economic landscape of UK social security provision has changed significantly since the 2008 financial crisis. This fully revised, restructured and updated 3rd edition of a go-to text book covers all the key policy changes and their implications since the elections of 2010 and 2015.

This book analyses societal trends and controversies related to developments in data ownership, access, construction, dissemination and interpretation, looking at the ways that society interacts with and uses statistical data.

Citizens' everyday conduct is shaped by governmental action, yet there is much evidence that both front-line public service staff and service users can sometimes act in ways that modify or disrupt intended policy outcomes. This book presents a highly original examination of how policy objectives can be 'subverted' through the actions of citizens.

The history of social policy is emerging as an area of growing interest to both students and researchers. This topical book charts the period from the 1830s to the present day, providing a fresh analysis of the relationship between social theory and social policy in the UK.

This is the first accessible, succinct text to provide definitions and explanations of key terms and concepts relating to the expanding field of crime, harm and victimisation. Written by a wide range of experts, it includes theories, ideas and case studies relating to victims of conventional crime and victims outside the remit of criminal law.