Kategoria BISAC: Social Science >> Sociology - General

Off-grid isn't a state of mind. It isn't about someone being out of touch, about a place that is hard to get to, or about a weekend spent offline. Off-grid is the property of a building (generally a home but sometimes even a whole town) that is disconnected from the electricity and the natural gas grid. To live off-grid, therefore, means having to radically re-invent domestic life as we know it, and this is what this book is about: individuals and families who have chosen to live in that dramatically innovative, but also quite old, way of life.

This ethnography explores the...

This important cultural analysis tells two stories about food. The first depicts good food as democratic. Foodies frequent 'hole in the wall' ethnic eateries, appreciate the pie found in working-class truck stops, and reject the snobbery of fancy French restaurants with formal table service. The second story describes how food operates as a source of status and distinction for economic and cultural elites, indirectly maintaining and reproducing social inequality. While the first storyline insists that anybody can be a foodie, the second asks foodies to look in the mirror and think about...

Issues of sustainability and increased competition over coastal resources are changing practices of resource management. Societal concerns about environmental degradation and loss of coastal resources have steadily increased, while other issues like food security, biodiversity, and climate change, have emerged. A full set of social, ecological and economic objectives to address these issues are recognized, but there is no agreement on how to implement them. This interdisciplinary and "big picture book" - through a series of vivid case studies from environments throughout the world -...

Pursuing Intersectionality, Unsettling Dominant Imaginaries offers a sustained, interdisciplinary exploration of intersectional ideas, histories, and practices that no other text does. Deftly synthesizing much of the existing literatures on intersectionality, one of the most significant theoretical and political precepts of our time, May invites us to confront a disconcerting problem: though intersectionality is widely known, acclaimed, and applied, it is often construed in ways that depoliticize, undercut, or even violate its most basic premises. May cogently demonstrates how...

Celebrity Culture and the American Dream, Second Edition considers how major economic and historical factors shaped the nature of celebrity culture as we know it today, retaining the first edition's examples from the first celebrity fan magazines of 1911 to the present and expanding to include updated examples and additional discussion on the role of the internet and social media in today's celebrity culture. Equally important, the book explains how and why the story of Hollywood celebrities matters, sociologically speaking, to an understanding of American society, to the changing...

In the life sciences and beyond, new developments in science and technology and the creation of new social orders go hand in hand. In short, science and society are simultaneously and reciprocally coproduced and changed. Scientific research not only produces new knowledge and technological systems but also constitutes new forms of expertise and contributes to the emergence of new modes of living and new forms of exchange. These dynamic processes are tightly connected to significant redistributions of wealth and power, and they sometimes threaten and sometimes enhance democracy....

In this comprehensive and engaging study Georges Bataille s central ideas: the sacred, community and eroticism are explored in detail. Bataille s project to understand social bonds and energies at their most fundamental level and to re-energise society by challenging individualism, is argued to be of continuing relevance to sociological thought. Bataille s infamous College of Sociology is placed in the intellectual context of Durkheimian and Maussian sociology. Social effervescence, gift exchange and the ambivalent and volatile nature of the sacred emerge as the central threads of Bataille...

The death of secularization theses keeps being announced but people keep using the word. Historically the transfer of church property to secular use, for sociologists secularization signals a decline in the influence of religious institutions or ideas; yet 'secularization' has also been an attractive idea for theologians and philosophers, signalling the transformation of religious ideas into secular form, and for political theorists asserting the existence of 'political religions' in the 20^th century.　

There is no single 'secularization thesis', nor are...

In Popular Culture and Everyday Life Phillip Vannini and Dennis Waskul have brought together a variety of short essays that illustrate the many ways that popular culture intersects with mundane experiences of everyday life. Most essays are written in a reflexive ethnographic style, primarily through observation and personal narrative, to convey insights at an intimate level that will resonate with most readers. Some of the topics are so mundane they are legitimately universal (sleeping, getting dressed, going to the bathroom, etc.), others are common enough that most readers will...

This book provides a fresh examination of the cosmopolitan project of post-war Europe from a variety of perspectives. It explores the ways in which European cosmopolitanism can be theorized differently if we take into account histories which have rarely been at the forefront of such understandings. It also uses neglected historical resources to draw out new and unexpected entanglements and connections between understandings of European cosmopolitanism both in Europe and elsewhere. The final part of the book places European cosmopolitanism in tension with contemporary postcolonial...

Obesity has dominated popular media as one of the most pressing issues of the new millennium. In the US, high rates of obesity, and by extension, fat people are often blamed for rising health-care costs and a weakening of national security. What does it mean to be considered fat during a time when obesity is framed as a threat? When body fat is the enemy, how does the line between "acceptable" and "too fat" get defined moment-to-moment as people make value judgments about each other's bodies in the course of everyday life?

Nicole Taylor explores how teens navigated the...

This book sketches the contours of a vision that moves beyond the dominant paradigm or worldview that underlies and governs modernity (and postmodernity). It does so by drawing on the remarkable leap in human consciousness that occurred during the Axial Age and on a cross-pollination of what are arguably the three most comprehensive integrative metatheories available today: Complex thought, integral theory and critical realism i.e. a complex integral realism. By deploying the three integrative metatheories this book recounts how the seeds of a number of biases within the Western tradition...

Do young West Africans want to go abroad at any cost because they receive too little or erroneous information? Why do they and their families risk large sums of money with migration brokers? How do the risks of illegality and deportation change migration aspirations in West Africa?

This book places trafficking and smuggling within a wider framework of high-risk migration and proposes a novel interpretation of how people manage unwanted and uncertain migration outcomes. Drawing on in-depth ethnographic research with aspiring and failed migrants, their families, migration brokers and...

The tenth edition of Sociology of Mental Disorder presents the major issues and research findings on the influence of race, social class, gender, and age on the incidence and prevalence of mental disorder. The text also examines the institutions that help those with mental disorders, mental health law, and public policy.

Many important updates are new to this edition:

-More first-person accounts of individuals who suffer from mental illness are included.

-The new DSM-5 is now thoroughly covered along with the controversy surrounding...

Autoethnography is an ideal method to study the feminist I . Through personal stories, the author reflects on how feminists negotiate agency and the effect this has on one's political sensibilities. Speaking about oneself transforms into stories of political responsibility - a key issue for feminists who function as cultural mediators.

The dominant understanding of reuse for sustainability is a technical one, which assumes reuse's benefits are limited to the new material, energy and emissions avoided by repurposing, but reuse is much more than that. Reuse and repurposing have always been part of human engagement with objects and spaces. Thus reuse and remaking are important topics in sustainable design, architecture, cultural studies, anthropology, and the sociology, economics and politics of consumption.

Given our current environmental crises and the unsustainable expansion of global consumerism in an age of...