Cultural studies

We know the statistics, but what does it feel like to be forced to turn to foodbanks for help? What does it take to get emergency food, and what's in the food parcel? This is a powerful insight into the harsh reality of foodbank use from the inside.

This is the first book to make the link between popular culture and social problems. Drawing on historical and topical examples, the authors apply an innovative theoretical framework to examine how facets of popular culture shape how we think about, and respond to, social issues.

Drawing on empirical research with the UK’s two largest Food Banks, this book explores the prolific rise of food charity over the last 15 years and its implications for overcoming food insecurity.

Gray and Hinch explore the phenomenon of food crime. Through discussions of food safety, food fraud, food insecurity, agricultural labour, livestock welfare, genetically modified foods, food sustainability, food waste, food policy, and food democracy, they problematize current food systems and criticize their underlying ideologies.

With a diverse range of case studies, and chapters co-written between academics and community partners, this book shows that co-produced research can be an empowering force by which communities stake a claim in the places they live.

Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. Illustrated by global case studies and empirical data, this book explores the history and current practises of food sharing, whilst exploring the impact and potential of such sharing for cities.

This book considers the importance of cultural intermediaries, analysing their role as mitigators of the worst effects of social exclusion and examining the necessity to engage communities with different forms of cultural consumption and production.

Founded in cultural, textual, and ethnographic analysis, this distinctive and engaging book proposes an imaginative criminology, focusing on how spaces of transgression, control or confinement are lived, portrayed and imagined.

Beer in the United States has always been bound up with race, racism, and the construction of white institutions and identities. This unique book carves a much-needed critical and interdisciplinary path to examine and understand the racial dynamics in the craft beer industry and the popular consumption of beer.

This book advances new perspectives for critical thought by exploring the links between consumer culture and the post-truth politics of Trumpism, and how Trump embodies the frightening potential of capitalism to intersect with and enable fascistic forms of power.

Ren examines the making of art spaces in Beijing and Berlin to engage with comparative urbanism as a framework for doing research. Across vastly different contexts where universal theories of modernity or development seem increasingly misplaced, the concept of aspiration provides an alternative lens to understand the nature of urban change.

Drawing on complex narratives across film, TV, novels and graphic novels, this authoritative critical analysis demonstrates the value of fictional narratives as a tool for understanding, explaining and reducing crime and social harm. McGregor establishes an original theory of the criminological value of fiction.