Cultural studies
What Are Museums For?
Museums today are a cultural battleground. Jon Sleigh maintains that museums must be for all people and inclusion must be at the heart of everything they do. He uses museum objects from different museums to explore trust-building, representation, digital access, conflicting narratives, removal from display and restitution.
Queering Kinship
Non-heterosexual Couples, Parents, and Families in Guangdong, China
Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Guangdong, China, this book explores the various tactics queer people employ to have children and to form queer or ‘rainbow’ families. It unpacks people’s experiences of cultivating, or losing, kinship relations through their negotiation with biological relatives, cultural conventions and state legislations.
Everyday Eating
Food, Taste and Trends in Britain since the 1950s
This fascinating book examines continuity and change in food consumption and eating patterns since the 1950s. The culinary landscape of Britain is explored through discussion of commodification, globalisation and diversification enabling an understanding of both developing trends and enduring habits.
Activists in the Data Stream
The Practices of Daily Grassroots Politics in Southern Europe
Available Open Access digitally under CC-BY-ND licence
This book pulls back the curtain on the link between technology and activism, showing shows how activists navigate the impact of digital media on today’s grassroots politics.
Studying Generations
Multidisciplinary Perspectives
This collection explores generational studies, showcasing its interdisciplinary potential in sociology, literature, history, psychology, media studies and politics. It offers fresh perspectives and opens new avenues for generational thinking.
Interpreting Subcultures
Approaching, Contextualizing, and Embodying Sense-Making Practices in Alternative Cultures
This book makes an unprecedented contribution to the field by explaining the interpretive processes through which subcultural phenomena are studied. Examining dimensions of interpretivism, it reveals how and why people decide to use specific conceptual frames or methodologies and how they shape their interpretations of everyday realities.
Mundania
How and Where Technologies Are Made Ordinary
Emerging technologies eventually disappear into the atmosphere of everyday life – they become ordinary and enmeshed in ignored infrastructures and patterns of behaviour. This is how Mundania takes form.
Based on original research, this book uses the concept of mundania to better understand our relationship with technology.
Death’s Social and Material Meaning beyond the Human
This book provides an alternative focus for death studies by looking beyond traditional perspectives of a nature/culture binary. Bringing together a range of international scholars, it sheds light on topics which have previously remained at the margins of contemporary death studies and death care cultures.
Decolonizing Development
Food, Heritage and Trade in Post-Authoritarian Environments
Combining an analysis of political economy and ecocultural heritage, this book examines post-Soviet Latvia and post-apartheid South Africa in an unusual comparative study of post-authoritarian efforts to decolonize production and trade.
Games in the Platform Economy
Steam's Tangled Markets
This book examines the evolution of digital platform economies through the lens of online gaming with a unique economic sociology perspective.
Paying particular attention to Valve’s ‘Steam’ platform, the book examines the architecture of this online videogame marketplace and the way it enables new markets and economic transactions.
Beyond the Neoliberal Creative City
Critique and Alternatives in the Urban Cultural Economy
A buoyant, creative economy can be seen as the saviour of many cities, but behind such ‘urban makeovers’ lie serious problems such as widening inequalities and gentrification. Blending lively city case studies with broader theoretical debates, this book explores the opportunities for a more just and sustainable urban future.