Society and culture: general Books

This book explores religion in various spatial constellations in South Asian cities, including religious centres such as Varanasi, Madurai and Nanded, and cities not readily associated with religion, such as Mumbai and Delhi.Contributors from different...

This book is about media transparency and good-faith attempts of honesty by both the sources and the gate-keepers of news and other information that the mass media present as being unbiased. Specifically, this book provides a theoretical framework for...

Creating Literacy Communities as Pathways to Student Success offers a model for using literacy as a pathway for secondary students to explore fields from which they are often systematically excluded. In particular, this volume demonstrates how access for...

Launched in 1971, Adolescent Psychiatry, in the words of founding coeditors Sherman C. Feinstein, Peter L. Giovacchini, and Arthur A. Miller, promised "to explore adolescence as a process . . . to enter challenging and exciting areas that may have...

This book investigates recent changes in Japan's financial system and looks at the implications for Japan's particularistic model of political economy. Drawing on the latest theoretical research, it seeks to determine how Japan's experience resembles...

When Muslim women from diverse national and cultural contexts meet one another through transnational dialogue and networking, what happens to their sense of identity and social agency? Addressing this question, Meena Sharify-Funk encountered women...

This multimethod study of crime and the elderly in a small-town setting approaches the related issues from varied perspectives and ultimately presents a different picture of fear of crime among the elderly than that which dominates the current literature...

Transnational Environmental Policy analyses a surprising success story in the field of international environmental policy making: the threat to the ozone layer posed by industrial chemicals, and how it has been averted. The book also raises the more...

The existing literature on rural China characterizes socioeconomic diversity as a uniquely regional phenomenon: north versus south, coastal versus inland, urban versus rural. Unlike most work done at the village level, this book shows the large...

Modern technological systems entail risks and uncertainties of hitherto unknown dimensions. This book discusses the construction of risk and safety within a variety of empirical contexts where technologies and their risk are debated and handled by...

This study aims to fill the gap in the existing literature on China's Democratic development, by presenting a comprehensive and detailed examination of the key factors that have created and sustained state domination over society in China.

International migration is an issue of enduring interest and debate, as strong as ever in the 21st century. This in-depth, global examination proposes a balance sheet of international migration and highlights its consequences regarding migrant...

While the huge impact of the mass media on everyday social life is acknowledged, it has generally been assigned a peripheral role in the historical process. This intriguing book demonstrates that, far from being a footnote, media discourse has been a...

There are relatively few books that provide comparative analysis of European cities in relation to immigrants and political participation. This fresh and insightful volume, from the same team that published Multicultural Policies and Modes of Citizenship...

Presenting the findings of a major research project funded by the EU (INTAS), this key volume investigates the regional, ethnic and socio-cultural aspects of poverty and social exclusion in Russia in recent years. In-depth household interviews and survey...

The collapse of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe brought widespread fear of a 'tidal wave' of immigrants from the East into Western Europe. Quite apart from the social and political importance, East-West migration also poses a challenge to...

Black Skin, Black Masks: Hybridity, Dialogism, Performativity offers a timely exploration of Black identity and its negotiation. The book draws on empirical work recording everyday conversations between Black women: friends, peers and family members...

The transformations seen in women's active citizenship in Central and Eastern Europe mirror the social political and economic transformations in the region since the fall of communism at the end of the 1980s. This book challenges the universal notion of...

Despite considerable interest in social capital amongst urban policy makers and academics alike, there is currently little direct focus on its urban dimensions. In this volume leading urban researchers from the Netherlands, the UK, the USA, Australia,...

This ethnographic exploration of contemporary spaces of homelessness takes an expanded view of homeless space, threading together experiences of organizational spaces, routes taken through the city and the occupation of public space. Through...

This book is the first general social analysis that seriously considers the daily experience of information disruption and software failure within contemporary Western society. Through an investigation of informationalism, defined as a contemporary form...

How do young people make effective transitions into work? This question has occupied the minds of parents and young people, and also researchers and policy makers, as they face up to challenges presented by globalization and technological change. The...

It has been half a century since the Geneva Refugee Convention came into place, but there is still no comparable international regime which provides for the increasing phenomenon of mobile economic migrants. At a time of global mobility, when migration...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 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 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...

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...

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...

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 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...

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...

This book explores contemporary transformations of identities in a digitizing society across a range of domains of modern life. As digital technology and ICTs have come to pervade virtually all aspects of modern societies, the routine registration of...

This book analyzes in detail the main social, economic and special transformation of the city of São Paulo. In the last 30 years, São Paulo has become a more heterogeneous and less unequal city. Contrary to some expectations, the recent economic...

What is it like to make television comedy? How do writers get their ideas made, and how do commissioners and producers decide what to make? How do members of the comedy industry work with large broadcasters and production companies, and what does it mean...

Light Touches: Cultural Practices of Illumination, 1800-1900 explores how urban lives in the nineteenth century were increasingly touched by innovations in the technologies and aesthetics of illumination. Dramatic changes in qualities of light - and...

Contrary to what is suggested in media and popular discourses, Europe is neither a monolithic entity nor simply a collection of nation states. It is, rather, a union of millions of individuals who differ from one another in a variety of ways while also...

This book focuses on food culture and politics in three Baltic States: Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. In popular and scholarly writings, the Baltic states are often seen as a meat-and-potatoes kind of place, inferior to sophisticated cuisines of...