In contemporary shopping sites new modes of subjectivity, inter-personal relationships and models of social totality are being tried on, taken off and displayed in much the same way that one might shop for clothes. These are not the modernist spaces of goal-directed individuals and utopian projects. Rather it is a space of carnivalesque inversions of the present order of things. The multiple masks of the postmodern person who wears many hats in different groups and surroundings form a veritable dramatis personae. In such masks of the individual and the social world may be found a new...

Space and spatial practice has emerged as one of the key themes in the literature on modernity and postmodernity. Yet few attempts have been made to survey the theoretical terrain of space and modernity. Fewer still have endeavoured to apply this material in the form of concrete analysis. Places on the Margin attempts to correct the balance in three ways. First, it demonstrates the mutual relevance of sociology and geography. Second, it outlines a social theory of spatiality which focuses on the role of the spatial in making up culture. Third, it offers four detailed and penetrating case...

Lefebvre, Love and Struggle provides the only comprehensive guide to Lefebvre's work. It is an accessible introduction to one of the most significant European thinkers of the twentieth century.
Rob Shields draws on the full range of Lefebvres writings, including many previously untranslated and unpublished works and correspondence. Topics covered include Lefebvre's early relationship with Marxism, his critique of the rise of fascism, as well as his Critique of Everyday Life and the significant work on urban space for which he is best known today.

Lefebvre, Love and Struggle provides the only comprehensive guide to Lefebvre's work. It is an accessible introduction to one of the most significant European thinkers of the twentieth century.
Rob Shields draws on the full range of Lefebvres writings, including many previously untranslated and unpublished works and correspondence. Topics covered include Lefebvre's early relationship with Marxism, his critique of the rise of fascism, as well as his Critique of Everyday Life and the significant work on urban space for which he is best known today.

Showing how the construction of virtual worlds has a long history, Rob Shields looks at the origins and the many contemporary meanings of the virtual. He examines the many forms of faith and hysteria that have surrounded computer technologies and, moving beyond the technologies themselves, he shows how the virtual plays a role in our daily lives at every level. The virtual is also an essential concept needed to manage innovation and risk. It is real but not actual, ideal but not abstract. The virtual, he argues has become one of the key organizing principles of contemporary society in the...

'Cultures of Internet' examines the arrival of e-mail and online discussion groups, and considers the prospect of an 'online world' - a playground for virtual bodies in which identities are flexible, swappable and disconnected from real-world bodies.

This study seeks to recast the social dynamic of postmodernity. It argues, in contrast to much contemporary thought defining this dynamic as the contraction of the social into the individual, that it is in fact a retreat into tribalism.

Space inevitably plays an important role in our social lives. When talking to our neighbors, reading the newspaper, going the gym, answering an e-mail, we all draw on our presuppositions and understanding of spatiality and temporality. This book successfully illuminates these embedded experiences, questioning how to understand space as a multiple, dynamic, intangible, yet present, form of knowledge. Building from a history of philosopher's and geographer's theories of space, Rob Shields convincingly presents the importance of spatialization and cultural topology in social theory and the...

Essays exploring the prospects of the city-region.