Social theory

This book examines the use of ‘intersectionality’ in UK policy and practice, with a specific focus on NGOs. The book outlines the five meanings of intersectionality in equality work and provides practical insights for applying intersectional theory. A valuable resource for policymakers, practitioners, and scholars.

This imaginative collection invites readers to explore how a broader view of aesthetics can reshape areas like, medicine, arts and education, challenging how we think about knowledge. It is an agenda-setting contribution to understanding the significance of aesthetics in science and technology studies.

This book offers a theory of trafficking and modern slavery with implications for policy. Going beyond polarised debates on the sex trade, this book shows the importance of coercion and the societal complexities that perpetuate modern slavery.

Hindpal Singh Bhui argues that we need to look at who is sent to prison and why to disentangle reality from ideology and myth. Including the voices of prisoners, prison staff and victims, he asks whether prison is an institution for managing marginalized people, or if there is a better way to achieve the socially useful goals of prisons.

Demonstrating the relevance of theory to political and policy debates and practice, this dynamic and fully updated second edition helps students to grasp the real-life implications of social policy theory. It includes a new chapter featuring debates around disability, sexuality and the environment.

This fully-updated, accessible textbook considers the theory and practice of critical social work in addressing inequality and social injustice. It is essential reading for students, educators and practitioners of child and family social work.

This book offers insights into the argument that capitalist society damages human health and well-being. Drawing on and bringing Marx’s theory of alienation forward to the present day, it uniquely links it to well-being.

This pioneering work explores how in our digital age of connectivity, temporal acceleration and real-time simultaneity impact personal and institutional experience. Bringing memory and future studies into a unique dialogue, the book offers an intervention to the current ‘temporal crisis’ of social life and sociological debates.

Exploring the impact of climate change and the pandemic on people’s decisions to form families and their experience of having children, this book makes a valuable contribution to debates on contemporary planetary crises.

Drawing on theoretical and empirical studies, this book offers a unique and timely reformulation of socialism adapted to current challenges. It makes explicit the ‘silent utopia’ of intersectionality theory and lays the conceptual groundwork for an emancipatory politics.

Written by leading social scientists, this ambitious volume asks what individuals’ “handling” of bodies reveal about inequality, social order and cultural change in societies.

This book illustrates how scholars use different interpretive lenses to study profound conflicts rooted in the past. Addressing issues of racism, genocide, war, nationalism, colonialism and more, it highlights how our interpretations of contentious memories are indispensable to our understandings of contemporary conflicts and identities.