Society & Social Sciences Books

Recent years have witnessed growing concerns about the disengagement of young people from conventional politics both in Britain and internationally. Their non-participation is often viewed as reflecting both a deeper political alienation and 'apathy'...

The influx of female migrants to Europe has posed challenges to established European feminist movements. In this book the author assesses the significance of female immigration to Italy and its impact on Italian feminism by analyzing the way in which...

Every week thousands of people in Europe and the USA consult psychic practitioners. Communication is crucial to the performance of psychic powers in a range of settings. Psychic practitioners use language to demonstrate their powers, whether they are...

Providing empirical evidence on the lives of young British-born Pakistanis, The New British also reveals fascinating insights into the Pakistani community more generally. Using Bradford as a case study, Ikhlaq Din focuses on the relationship between...

Recent years have seen a growing emphasis upon the need for universities to contribute to the economic, social and environmental well-being of the regions in which they are situated, and for closer links between the university and the region. This book...

What can diversity management offer those concerned with ethnic inequality, racial discrimination, and issues of social and economic inclusion and exclusion? In this book John Wrench traces the emergence of diversity management in the US in the late...

Once a marginal political issue, crime control now occupies a central place on the social, political and economic agenda of contemporary liberal democracies. Nowhere more so than in post-apartheid South Africa, where the transition from apartheid rule to...

There is a saying that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, implying that beauty is subjective. But can it be said that 'better looking' people have more social power? This book provides a fascinating insight into the social stratification of people...

Many people in the West or global North now live in a culture of 24/7 instant messaging, iPods and MP3s, streamed content, blogs, ubiquitous digital images and Facebook. But they are also surrounded by even more paper, books, telephone calls and material...

Journalism, Ethics and Society provides a comprehensive overview and critical analysis of debates within media ethics in relation to the purpose of news and journalism for society. It assesses how the meaning of news and journalism is central to a...

Complying with Colonialism presents a complex analysis of the habitual weak regard attributed to the colonial ties of Nordic Countries. It introduces the concept of 'colonial complicity' to explain the diversity through which northern European countries...

Across sociology and cultural studies in particular, the concept of authenticity has begun to occupy a central role, yet in spite of its popularity as an ideal and philosophical value authenticity notably suffers from a certain vagueness, with work in...

This book focuses on the developments in research, national-historical narratives, and geographies of East Central Europe. It explores the emergence of specific discursive practices, architectures of ethnic identity, and the eventual juxtaposition during...

Globalization, European integration, and migration are challenging national identities and changing education across Europe. The nation-state no longer serves as the sole locus of civic participation and identity formation, ceasing to have the influence...

Advertising and Cultural Politics in Global Times traces daringly transgressive convergences between cultural politics and global advertising media. It engages with a range of interpolations between cultural politics and advertising technologies...

Re-crafting Rationalization contributes to debates relating to the public understanding of science, regarding the conceptualization of the relationship between 'science' and 'the public'. It challenges the prevailing science-centred or 'top-down'...

Gender and Rural Migration: Realities, Conflict and Change explores the intersection of gender, migration, and rurality in 21st-century Western and non-Western contexts. In a world where heightened globalization is making borders increasingly...

Through an in-depth case study of the black professional middle class in Oakland, this book provides an analysis of the experiences of black professionals in the workplace, community, and local politics. Brown shows how overlapping...

Call centers have come, in the last three decades, to define the interaction between corporations, governments, and other institutions and their respective customers, citizens, and members. The offshoring and outsourcing of call center employment, part...

Although emerging scholarship in the social sciences suggests that religion can be a potential catalyst of cosmopolitanism and global citizenship, few attempts have been made to bring to the fore new theoretical positions and empirical analyses of how...

This edited volume offers a comparative and interdisciplinary analysis of interrogation and questioning in war and conflict in the twentieth century. Despite the current public interest and its military importance, interrogation and questioning in...

This volume develops a new multimodal semiotic approach to the study of communication, examining how multimodal discourse is construed transmedially and interculturally and how new technologies and cultural stances inform communicative contexts across...

This book examines how the violence of conflict is transformed in the post-conflict period.Post-conflict studies seek to illuminate, theorise, and narrate the processes by which societies transition from periods of overt and violent conflict to periods...

Digitalization and computerization are now pervasive in science. This has deep consequences for our understanding of scientific knowledge and of the scientific process, and challenges longstanding assumptions and traditional frameworks of thinking of...

Multiple killings by serial or spree killers and the mass violence seen in war crimes and other atrocities have typically been understood as discrete category types, which can foster the view that there are fundamentally different kinds of human beings,...

This new volume showcases the latest research into Muslim political participation both in terms of electoral politics and civil society initiatives.Muslims play a prominent role in British political life yet what do we actually know about the involvement...

This edited collection explores issues that arise when researching "hard-to-reach" groups and those who remain socially excluded and marginalized in society, such as access, the use of gatekeepers, ethical dilemmas, "voice," and how such...

This book explores the transition from the era of internationalization into the era of globalization of Japan by focusing on language and identity as its central themes. By taking an interdisciplinary approach covering education, cultural studies,...

This book focuses on the diverse interrelationships between aging and transnationality. It argues that the lives of older people are increasingly entangled in transnational contexts on the social as well as the cultural, economic and political levels...

In the last decade or so, China and India have emerged on the global stage as two powerful free market economies. The tremendous economic growth in China and India has meant that they have been able to lift millions of people out of the poverty trap...

Having been state-owned for decades, the railway reform in China confused many people, particularly in terms of its ownership and property rights arrangements. Western literature always prescribes that the best model for railway reform is privatization...

Research in the humanities and social sciences thrives on critical reflections that unfold with each research project, not only in terms of knowledge created, but in whether chosen methodologies served their purpose.  Ethics forms the bulwark of any...

This book critically explores from a comparative international perspective the role medicine plays in constructing and managing natural and social risks, including those belonging to modern medical technology and expertise. Drawing together chapters...

At a time when inequalities are growing globally, when the pace of socio-economic transitions is rapid, and when traditional ties of community are under threat of dissolving, 'soul' offers a new way of thinking imaginatively about how people might...

The EU seeks to define a role for itself in power politics while remaining firm in its rejection of power politics. In order to make power compatible with the European project, EU debate has appended a number of progressive adjectives to the word...

This book applies the concept of mediatization to the contemporary dynamic between war, media and society, with a focus on the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). Since the beginning of the 21st century the IDF has undergone an intensive process of...

In the years since the death of Mao Zedong, interest in Chinese writers and Chinese literature has risen significantly in the West. In 2000, Gao Xingjian became the first Chinese writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature followed by Mo Yan in...

Fifty years ago, familiar images of the lottery would have been strange, as no state lottery existed then. Few researchers have uncovered the obscure role lotteries play in the changing composition of American taxation. Even less is known about what role...

The deployment of remotely piloted air platforms (RPAs) - or drones - has become a defining feature of contemporary counter-insurgency operations. Scholarly analysis and public debate has primarily focused on two issues: the legality of targeted killing...

The question of recourse to self-medication arises at the intersection of two partly antagonistic discourses: that of the public authorities, who advocate the practice primarily for economic reasons, and that of health professionals, who condemn it for...

Romantic relationships, especially good ones, are desired of almost all humans. However, what makes such relationships good and nourishing? For the most part, it is the support and intimacy that exists within the couple, and their ability to experience...

Vulnerability has traditionally been conceived as a dichotomised status, where an individual by reason of a personal characteristic is classified as vulnerable or not. However, vulnerability is not static, and most, if not all, people are vulnerable at...

A particular culture is associated with a particular community, and thus has a social dimension. But how does culture operate and how is it to be defined? Is it to be taken as the behavioral repertoire of members of that community, as the products of...

This book explores the new debates on Basque sovereignty and statehood that have emerged in the post-violence Basque political scenario. It deciphers how sovereignty is understood or imagined by a revitalized civil society after the unilateral cessation...

Disabled women represent one of the most marginalised minority groups in the world, hence they are largely silent while their sexuality is ignored, suppressed, forbidden and buried underneath the carpet. Until recently, most of the Global Northern...

India has a rich tradition of meditative practices designed to study the phenomenon of consciousness. From the distant past to the present, India has evolved a unique psychological culture with grand unifying themes and universal modes of meditative...

In this book, Anca Pusca seeks to extend the aesthetic and cultural turn in international relations to an analysis of post-communist transitions in Central and Eastern Europe. Building on the philosophy of Walter Benjamin and Jacques Ranciere, the work...

Southern Africa, where most of these book chapters originate, has been identified as one of regions of the world most at risk of the consequences of environmental degradation and climate change. At the same time, it is still seeking ways to overcome the...