This book acts as a bridge between the critical study of 'religion' and empirical studies of 'religion in the real world'. Chris Cotter presents a concise and up-to-date critical survey of research on non-religion in the UK and beyond, before presenting the results of extensive research in Edinburgh's Southside which blurs the boundary between 'religion' and 'non-religion'. In doing so, Cotter demonstrates that these are dynamic subject positions, and phenomena can occupy both at the same time, or neither, depending on who is doing the positioning, and what issues are at stake. This book details an approach that avoids constructing 'religion' as in some way unique, whilst also fully incorporating 'non-religious' subject positions into religious studies. It provides a rich engagement with a wide variety of theoretical material, rooted in empirical data, which will be essential reading for those interested in critical, sociological and anthropological study of the contemporary non-/religious landscape.

From race, sex, class, and culture, the multidisciplinary field of Internet studies needs theoretical and methodological approaches that allow us to question the organization of social relations that are embedded in digital technologies, and that foster a clearer understanding of how power relations are organized through technologies. Representing a scholarly dialogue among established and emerging critical media and information studies scholars, this volume provides a means of foregrounding new questions, methods, and theories which can be applied to digital media, platforms, and infrastructures. These inquiries include, among others, how representation to hardware, software, computer code, and infrastructures might be implicated in global economic, political, and social systems of control. Contributors argue that more research needs to explicitly trace the types of uneven power relations that exist in technological spaces. By looking at both the broader political and economic context and the many digital technology acculturation processes as they are differentiated intersectionally, a clearer picture emerges of how under-acknowledging culturally situated and gendered information technologies are impacting the possibility of participation with (or purposeful abstinence from) the Internet. This book is ideal for undergraduate and graduate courses in Internet studies, library and information studies, communication, sociology, and psychology. It is also ideal for researchers with varying expertise and will help to advance theoretical and methodological approaches to Internet research.

When photographs documenting the torture and humiliation of prisoners at Abu Ghraib came to the attention of a horrified public, national and international voices were raised in shock, asking how this happened. At War with Metaphor offers an answer, arguing that the abuses of Abu Ghraib were part of a systemic continuum of dehumanization. This continuum has its roots in our public discussions of the war on terror and the metaphors through which they are repeatedly framed. Arguing earnestly and incisively that these metaphors, if left unexamined, bind us into a cycle of violence that will only be intensified by a responsive violence of metaphor, Steuter and Wills examine compelling examples of the images of animal, insect, and disease that inform, shape, and limit our understanding of the war on terror. Tying these images to historical and contemporary uses of propaganda through a readable, accessible analysis of media filters, At War with Metaphor vividly explores how news media, including political cartoons and talk radio, are enmeshed in these damaging, dehumanizing metaphors. Analyzing media through the lenses of race and Orientalism, it invites us to hold our media and ourselves accountable for the choices we make in talking war and making enemies.

This book focuses on the clinical, social and psychological aspects of HIV among gay men and examines the complex factors that can contribute to HIV risk in this key population. With the target to end all HIV transmissions in the UK by 2030 in mind, Jaspal and Bayley combine elements of HIV medicine and social psychology to identify the remaining barriers to effective HIV prevention among gay men. The authors take the reader on a journey through the history of HIV, its science and epidemiology and its future, demonstrating the vital role of history, society and psychology in understanding the trajectory of the virus. Underpinned by theories from social psychology and clinical snapshots from practice, this book considers how psychological constructs, such as identity, risk and sexuality, can impinge on physical health outcomes. This refreshing and thought-provoking text is an invaluable resource for scholars, clinicians and students working in the field of HIV.

People often see nonhuman agents as human-like. Through the processes of anthropomorphism and humanization, people attribute human characteristics, including personalities, free will, and agency to pets, cars, gods, nature, and the like. Similarly, there are some people who often see human agents as less than human, or more object-like. In this manner, objectification describes the treatment of a human being as a thing, disregarding the person's personality and/or sentience. For example, women, medical patients, racial minorities, and people with disabilities, are often seen as animal-like or less than human through dehumanization and objectification. These two opposing forces may be a considered a continuum with anthropomorphism and humanization on one end and dehumanization and objectification on the other end. Although researchers have identified some of the antecedents and consequences of these processes, a systematic investigation of the motivations that underlie this continuum is lacking. Considerations of this continuum may have considerable implications for such areas as everyday human functioning, interactions with people, animals, and objects, violence, discrimination, relationship development, mental health, or psychopathology. The edited volume will integrate multiple theoretical and empirical approaches on this issue.

Sociology Matters offers a truly concise introduction to sociology with thorough, balanced coverage of the major theoretical perspectives. It emphasizes real-world application and enables students to see the relevance of sociological concepts to their everyday lives. The 8th edition of Sociology Matters has been carefully revised to present important world developments and new scholarship with clear and succinct language.

We live in a time of great uncertainty about the future. Those heady days of the late twentieth century, when the end of the Cold War seemed to be ushering in a new and more optimistic age, now seem like a distant memory. During the last couple of decades, we've been battered by one crisis after another and the idea that humanity is on a progressive path to a better future seems like an illusion. It is only now that we can see clearly the real scope and structure of the profound shifts that Western societies have undergone over the last 30 years. Classical industrial society has been transformed into a late-modern society that is molded by polarization and paradoxes. The pervasive singularization of the social, the orientation toward the unique and exceptional, generates systematic asymmetries and disparities, and hence progress and unease go hand in hand. Reckwitz examines this dual structure of singularization and polarization as it plays itself out in the different sectors of our societies and, in so doing, he outlines the central structural features of the present: the new class society, the characteristics of a postindustrial economy, the conflict about culture and identity, the exhaustion of the self resulting from the imperative to seek authentic fulfillment, and the political crisis of liberalism. Building on his path-breaking work The Society of Singularities, this new book will be of great interest to students and scholars in sociology, politics, and the social sciences generally, and to anyone concerned with the great social and political issues of our time.

The new social media build on and further complicate all of the issues and processes of symbolic interaction. This volume builds on and expands the existing symbolic interactionist perspective to include the study of social interaction made possible by the use of new social media. This special issue demonstrates the interface between willful social interaction and structured technological features - how social media are defined by social interactions, as well as how social interactions are dictated by the use of social media.

2012 Recipient of the Gerald R. Miller Book Award from the Interpersonal Communication Division of the National Communication Association (NCA) 2009 Recipient of the David R. Maines Narrative Research Award from the Ethnography Division of the National Communication Association (NCA) "The book is a valuable addition to the literature on friendship. Faculty who teach relationship development will find useful material for themselves and their students. Relationship researchers will find dozens of possible studies in these pages. Finally, any thoughtful person interested in relationship quality could profit from reading this interesting treatment of one of life's most valuable attributes-our friends." - Phil Backlund, University of Denver Exploring how friends use dialogue and storytelling to construct identities, deal with differences, make choices, and build inclusive communities, The Compass of Friendship examines communication dialectically across private, personal friendships as well as public, political friendships. Author William K. Rawlins uses compelling examples and cases from literature, films, dialogue and storytelling between actual friends, student discussions of cross-sex friendships, and interviews with interracial friends. Throughout the book, he invites readers to consider such questions as: What are the possibilities for enduring, close friendships between men and women? How far can friendship's practices extend into public life to facilitate social justice? What are the predicaments and promises of friendships that bridge racial boundaries? How useful and realistic are the ideals and activities of friendship for serving the well-lived lives of individuals, groups, and larger collectives? Key Features Incorporates undergraduate students' debates about cross-sex friendships. Discussions draw on popular culture and lived experiences to re-examine gendered identities, sexual orientations, and narratives of romance and the well-lived life Investigates the possibilities of cross-race friendships between blacks and whites in light of personal, sociocultural, and historical issues. Using short stories, autobiographies, and interviews with a male and a female pair of friends, he book probes the capacities of friendship to address our similarities and differences in enriching ways Develops an original theoretical synthesis of work concerning dialogue and narrative. A chapter featuring an afternoon conversation between two longtime friends illustrates storytelling and dialogue as vitally interwoven communicative activities that shape friends' identities Explores friendship's ethical and political potentials. Classic and contemporary views clarify friendship's ethical guidance in our lives, as Rawlins demonstrates how learning about others in a spirit of equal respect can involve us in political participation Celebrates hopeful private and public communication by friends. The book provides students a useful model they can use in evaluating the ethical qualities of their relationships/friendships and helps them to think differently about their possibilities for participating meaningfully in politics The Compass of Friendship is appropriate for use in courses in Advanced Interpersonal Communication, Friendship Communication, Communication in Interpersonal Relationships, Relational Communication, Social and Personal Relationships, Dialogue and Communication, Social Identities and Communication Ethics.

This is a social history of refugees escaping Hungary after the Bolshevik-type revolution of 1919, the ensuing counterrevolution, and the rise of anti-Semitism. Largely Jewish and German before World War I, the Hungarian middle class was torn by the disastrous war, the partitioning of Hungary in the Treaty of Trianon, and the numerus clausus act XXV in 1920 that seriously curtailed the number of Jews admitted to higher education. Hungary's outstanding future professionals, whether Jewish, Liberal or Socialist, felt compelled to leave the country and head to German-speaking universities in Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Germany. When Hitler came to power, these exiles were to flee again, many on the fringes of the huge German emigration. Emotionally prepared by their earlier threatening experiences in Hungary, they were quick to recognize the need to uproot themselves again. Many fled to the United States where their double exile catalyzed the USA into an active enemy of Nazi Germany and stimulated the transplantation of European modernism into American art and music. To their surprise, the refugees also encountered anti-Semitism in the USA. The book is based on extensive archival work in the USA and Germany.

The digital revolution has not only transformed multiple aspects of social life - it also shakes sociological theory, transforming the most basic assumptions that have underlain it. In this timely book, Ori Schwarz explores the main challenges digitalization poses to different strands of sociological theory and offers paths to adapt them to new social realities. What would symbolic interactionism look like in a world where interaction no longer takes place within bounded situations and is constantly documented as durable digital objects? How should we understand new digitally mediated forms of human association that bind our actions and lives together but have little in common with old-time 'collectives'; and why are they not simply 'social networks'? How does social capital transform when it is materialized in a digital form, and how does it remould power structures? What happens to our conceptualization of power when faced with the emergence of new forms of algorithmic power? And what happens when labour departs from work? By posing and answering such fascinating questions, and offering critical tools for both students and scholars of social theory and digital society to engage with them, this thought-provoking book draws the outline of future sociological theory for our digital society.

One of the ongoing problems researchers in geography and GIS have is studying data that is inherently spatial over a long period of time. One of the main hurdles they have to overcome is the study of groups of people classified by their socio-economic status (one of the main means for governments, companies and research organisations to group together segments of the population). The amount of data collected by governments, business and research organisations has increased markedly in recent years. Geographic Information Systems have been more widely used than ever before for the storage and analysis of this information. Most GIS can handle this information spatially rather than temporally, and have difficulty with the management of socio-economic time series, which relate to spatial units. Accordingly, this book covers the issues ranging from the formal model to differentiate aspects of spatio-temporal data, through philosophical and fundamental reconsideration of time and space to the development of practical solutions to the problem. This book draws together an interdisciplinary group of scientists in the field of geography, computing, surveying and philosophy. It presents the definitive sourcebook on temporal GIS as applied to socio-economic units.

"Epinets " presents a new way to think about social networks, which focuses on the knowledge that underlies our social interactions. Guiding readers through the web of beliefs that networked individuals have about each other and probing into what others think, this book illuminates the deeper character and influence of relationships among social network participants.
Drawing on artificial intelligence, the philosophy of language, and epistemic game theory, Moldoveanu and Baum formulate a lexicon and array of conceptual tools that enable readers to explain, predict, and shape the fabric and behavior of social networks. With an innovative and strategically-minded look at the assumptions that enable and clog our networks, this book lays the groundwork for a leap forward in our understanding of human relations.

The first book to examine the nature, practices, and potential of empathy for understanding and addressing human problems on a global scale Violence and acts of hatred worldwide-from the bombing of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 to wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Darfur, and Palestine-call attention to the critical importance of empathy in human affairs. Empathy in the Global World examines the role of compassion in decision making, how it is communicated via the media, and how it affects global problems such as poverty and environmental disasters. Ideal for undergraduate and graduate students, politicians, and reformers, this important work helps readers understand the workings of empathy-the bedrock of intercultural communication-as it demonstrates the importance of understanding the role of compassion in addressing international challenges. Key Features Offers historical and cultural analysis into an array of topics, from the genesis of empathy to 21st- century discourse and practices of the concept Takes readers beyond existing ways of looking at empathy into such areas as geopolitics, global class issues, the world of NGOs, and national disasters Explores what it is like to grapple with terrorism, Israeli-Arab relations, and other audacious events that shape human thought Clarifies and connects issues through stories and examples of empathetic and non-empathetic practices across a range of cultures Intended Audience Empathy in the Global World: An Intercultural Perspective is ideal for a wide range of courses, including Conflict/Negotiation/Mediation, Intercultural Communication, and Interpersonal Communication.

Originally published in 1984 Reproductive Ritual examines fertility and re-production in pre-industrial England. The book discusses both through anthropological research and reviews of contemporary literature that conscious family limitation was practised before the nineteenth century. The volume describes a surprising number of rules, regulations, taboos, injunctions, charms and herbal remedies used to affect pregnancy, and shows the extent to which individual women and men were concerned with controlling the size of their families. The fertility levels in England - as in Western Europe as a whole - were a very long way from the biological maximum in these centuries, and the book discusses the various reasons why this was so. The book reviews traditional ideas concerning the relationship between procreation and pleasure, drawn from a range of contemporary sources and discusses ways in which earlier generations sought both to promote and limit fertility. The book also examines abortion and shows how much evidence there is for its actual practice during the period and of traditional views towards it. This book provides a detailed understanding of historical attitudes towards conception family planning in pre-industrial England.

Healthcare Ethics, Law and Professionalism: Essays on the Works of Alastair V. Campbell features 15 original essays on bioethics, and healthcare ethics specifically. The volume is in honour of Professor Alastair V. Campbell, who was the founding editor of the internationally renowned Journal of Medical Ethics, and the founding director of three internationally leading centres in bioethics, in Otago, New Zealand, Bristol, UK, and Singapore. Campbell was trained in theology and philosophy and throughout his career worked with colleagues from various disciplines, including law and various branches of healthcare. The diversity of topics and depth of contributors' insights reflect the breadth and impact of Campbell's philosophical work and policy contributions to healthcare ethics. Throughout his long academic career, Campbell's emphasis on healthcare ethics being practice-oriented, yet driven by critical reflection, has shaped the field in vital ways. The chapters are authored by leading scholars in healthcare ethics and law. Directly engaging with Campbell's work and influence, the essays discuss essential questions in healthcare ethics relating to its methodology and teaching, its intersection with law and policy, medical professionalism, religion, and its translation in different cultural settings. Chapters also grapple with specific enduring topics, such as the doctor-patient relationship, justice in health and biomedical research, and treatment of the human body and the dead.

Common Mental Disorders in Primary Care provides a thorough overview of the diagnosis, treatment and management of the most common mental disorders encountered in primary care. In this book, published to mark the retirement of Professor Sir David Goldberg, distinguished contributors bring together clinical and research work drawn from psychiatry, medicine, psychology, social work and sociology, covering such topics as: * the biological basis of common mental disorders * disability and depression in primary care * the limits of mental health care in general medical clinics * improving the management of mental disorders in the elderly * training the whole primary care team. Common Mental Disorders in Primary Care provides an authoritative review of the subject for professionals working in the area of primary care.

Over the past few years, ever since the advent of HIV and AIDS, there has been increasing discussion of the concept of sexual health. This upsurge is especially noticeable not only in the field of health education and promotion but also in academic sources. The recent discourse on sexual health is paralleled by an upsurge in the debate on sexual rights. This book examines the social construction of sexual health in India through an analysis of HIV and AIDS messages. The broad objective of the chapters is to trace the growth and evolution of the concept of sexual health from a health communication perspective and to understand the role of the state in determining its form and structure. The methodology used includes comparative analysis of HIV and AIDS policies, document analysis on HIV and AIDS, poster and short films analysis, in depth and open-ended Interviews and case studies. The book shows that Sexual Health is constructed in various modes in India. The models that are elaborated are the Medical model that constructs HIV scientifically and in terms of a compromised immune system; the Epidemic model that identifies risk behaviours and transmission routes and the Moralistic model. Social constructions of AIDS as plague or punishment against society are advanced by moralists who equate HIV with taboo social and sexual behaviour and the political constructions highlights public health in the face of obstacles to treatment and the delivery of services to people living with HIV. Bringing together current research and discussions on the three areas of policy, practices and theoretical perspectives related to the use and social construction of sexual health through HIV and AIDS communication approaches with specific reference to India, this book will be of interest to academics in the field of health communication, HIV and AIDS, and South Asian Studies.

Stem cell research has sparked controversy and heated debate since the first human stem cell line was derived in 1998. Too frequently these debates devolve to simple judgmentsOCogood or bad, life-saving medicine or bioethical nightmare, symbol of human ingenuity or our fall from graceOCoignoring the people affected. With this book, Ruha Benjamin moves the terms of debate to focus on the shifting relationship between science and society, on the people who benefitOCoor don'tOCofrom regenerative medicine and what this says about our democratic commitments to an equitable society.
"People's Science" uncovers the tension between scientific innovation and social equality, taking the reader inside California's 2004 stem cell initiative, the first of many state referenda on scientific research, to consider the lives it has affected. Benjamin reveals the promise and peril of public participation in science, illuminating issues of race, disability, gender, and socio-economic class that serve to define certain groups as more or less deserving in their political aims and biomedical hopes. Under the shadow of the free market and in a nation still at odds with universal healthcare, the socially marginalized are often eagerly embraced as test-subjects, yet often are unable to afford new medicines and treatment regimes as patients.
Ultimately, Ruha Benjamin argues that without more deliberate consideration about how scientific initiatives can and should reflect a wider array of social concerns, stem cell researchOCo from African Americans' struggle with sickle cell treatment to the recruitment of women as tissue donorsOCostill risks excluding many. Even as regenerative medicine is described as a participatory science for the people, Benjamin asks us to consider if the people ultimately reflects our democratic ideals.
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What is it like to lose your front porch to the ocean? To watch saltwater destroy your favorite fishing holes? To see playgrounds and churches subside and succumb to brackish and rising water? The residents of coastal Louisiana know. For them hurricanes are but exclamation points in an incessant loss of coastal land now estimated to occur at a rate of at least twenty-four square miles per year.

In "Losing Ground," coastal Louisianans communicate the significance of place and environment. During interviews taken just before the 2005 hurricanes, they send out a plea to alleviate the damage. They speak with an urgency that exemplifies a fear of losing not just property and familiar surroundings, but their identity as well.

People along Louisiana's southeastern coast hold a deep attachment to place, and this shows in the urgency of the narratives David M. Burley collects here. The meanings that residents attribute to coastal land loss reflect a tenuous and uprooted sense of self. The process of coastal land loss and all of its social components, from the familial to the political, impacts these residents' concepts of history and the future. Burley updates many of his subjects' narratives to reveal what has happened in the wake of the back-to-back disasters of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

This volume looks at the key links between social determinants, health disparities and health and health care. There is a particular focus on macro-level systems and micro-level issues, including the examination of issues for patients, carers and providers of care. Coverage includes papers on geographical and place factors and disparities, SES and race/ethnicity factors, chronic care and serious health problems such as HIV/AIDs and kidney transplantation, comparative aspects and perceptions of health disparities. Starting with an introduction that reviews the crucial sociological literature on social determinants and health disparities, papers in this volume go on to cover key themes including ageing, barriers to care, ethnicity, social inequalities, the views of parents on their children's care, and doctor/patient relationships.

This scholarly collection presents some of the most important classical and contemporary texts of relevance to political sociology. Volume I offers an overview of the sociological approach to the concepts of power and the state; it examines state theory in the 1970s from both a Marxist and Capitalist point of view, the recent shift of political power from the state to other areas of society, this issue of citizenship, and the welfare state.Volume II focuses on the most important political formations and processes in modern societies: democracy, revolution and totalitarianism. It also looks more broadly at political processes in non-industrial societies and at recent historical and sociological analyses of global political systems. Volume III offers analyses of the principal political ideologies and movements of the twentieth century. Other topics covered include military power and regimes and the social bases of politics such as classes and elites, ethnicity, gender and religion.

At century's close, American social scientists, policy analysts, philanthropists and politicians became obsessed with a fearsome and mysterious new group said to be ravaging the ghetto: the urban "underclass." Soon the scarecrow category and its demonic imagery were exported to the United Kingdom and continental Europe and agitated the international study of exclusion in the postindustrial metropolis. In this punchy book, Loic Wacquant retraces the invention and metamorphoses of this racialized folk devil, from the structural conception of Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal to the behavioral notion of Washington think-tank experts to the neo-ecological formulation of sociologist William Julius Wilson. He uncovers the springs of the sudden irruption, accelerated circulation, and abrupt evaporation of the "underclass" from public debate, and reflects on the implications for the social epistemology of urban marginality. What accounts for the "lemming effect" that drew a generation of scholars of race and poverty over a scientific cliff? What are the conditions for the formation and bursting of "conceptual speculative bubbles"? What is the role of think tanks, journalism, and politics in imposing "turnkey problematics" upon social researchers? What are the special quandaries posed by the naming of dispossessed and dishonored populations in scientific discourse and how can we reformulate the explosive question of "race" to avoid these troubles? Answering these questions constitutes an exacting exercise in epistemic reflexivity in the tradition of Bachelard, Canguilhem and Bourdieu, and it issues in a clarion call for social scientists to defend their intellectual autonomy against the encroachments of outside powers, be they state officials, the media, think tanks, or philanthropic organizations. Compact, meticulous and forcefully argued, this study in the politics of social science knowledge will be of great interest to students and scholars in sociology, anthropology, urban studies, ethnic studies, geography, intellectual history, the philosophy of science and public policy.

Economic globalisation has produced austere social jeopardy in extended parts of post-communist Europe with former Yugoslavia and its successor states as the most conspicuous example. This state is exploited, sanctioned and nourished by authoritarian ethnocratic regimes and misconceived Western policies may contribute to its persistence. Bringing new perspectives to bear on these crucial issues, Scramble for the Balkans is essential for scholars and professionals concerned with social reconstruction in the world's increasing number of complex emergencies.