Sociology of Culture

Exploring the creative and destructive ways individuals and groups make use of new digital and social media in democratic societies across the world, this book presents a much-needed critical theory of the public sphere as we enter the new digital age.

In this thought-provoking collection, Muslim and non-Muslim academics take a multi-disciplinary approach to humour in Islam. They draw on examples of comedy practices and styles to scope sociological, cultural, theological and political themes, consider humour’s role in fundamentalism, and correct misconceptions about laughter in the religion.

This book offers an empirically-based view on Europeans’ interconnections in everyday life. It looks at the ways in which EU residents have been getting closer across national frontiers. The book considers how people reconcile their increasing cross-border interconnections and a politically separating Europe of nation states and national interests.

This edited collection provides interdisciplinary, global, and multi-religious perspectives on the relationship between women’s identities, religion, and social change in the contemporary world.

Considering food consumption in a wider social context, this book offers an alternative understanding of class relations, which extends academic, political and public debates about privilege.

This book, offering in-depth analysis from a native scholar, is a critical examination of the world-renowned community Auroville located in Tamil Nadu, South India as a site of spiritually prefigurative utopian practice.

This book explores neoliberalism in contemporary Latin America as a set of interrelated cultural forms, offering a transnational and comparative perspective on the ways in which neoliberalism has transformed public discourses of self and social relationships, popular cultures and modes of everyday experience.

In this engaging and original book, John Clarke is in conversation with twelve leading individual scholars about the dynamics of critical thinking in the social sciences, and he reflects on the necessity of thinking collaboratively and dialogically.

In this book, James Brassett builds on his prize-winning research to demonstrate how British comedy can provide intimate and vital understandings of the everyday politics of globalization in Britain.

Bringing together leading scholars, this international collection examines different dimensions of ageing and ageism in a range of media and how older adults use and interact with the media.

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.

This book shapes a new language of social theory that allows people to embody their differences with a sense of dignity and self-worth, enabling them to come to terms with the complexities of their lived identities in a post-modern globalised world.