In the wake of the debates over high/low culture distinction spilling into the effective dismantling of the boundary that once separated them, the past decade has seen the explosion of ?bad taste? production on screen. Starting with paracinema or ?badfilm? ? a movement that has grown up around sleazy, excessive, or poorly executed B-movies and has come to encompass disreputable and unworthy films ? this trend has been evident in various formats: on television and in video-art, low-budget and straight to TV films, amateur and home movies. The proliferation of trash on screen can be seen as delivering the final blow to the vexed issue of taste.

More importantly, it prompts a reconsideration of some critical issues surrounding production, circulation, understanding and teaching of ?bad objects? in the media. This collection of essays, written by international film and television scholars, provides detailed critical analysis of the issues surrounding judgements of cultural value and taste, feeling and affect, cultural morals and politics, research methodologies and teaching strategies in the new landscape of ?after taste? media. Addressing global and local developments ? from global Hollywood to Australian indigenous film and television, through auteurs Sergei Eisenstein to Jerry Bruckheimer, on to examples such as Twilight to Sukiyaki Western Django ? the essays in this book offer a range of critical tools for understanding the recent shifts affecting cultural, aesthetic and political value of the moving image.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies.

Mini-set L: Sociology of Education re-issues 48 volumes originally published between 1928 and 1990. The books in this mini-set discuss: Teaching and social change, research processes in education, class, race, culture and education, marxist perspectives in the sociology of education, the family and education, the sociology of the classroom and school organization.

First comprehensive account of antisemitism on social media Covers a broad range of different social media Examines a variety of ideological manifestations of antisemitism and conspiracy theories

Klaus Bruhn Jensen is a well known academic and an authoritative and original author. There is a lack of good theory books for media and communications studies and the clear three part structure will appeal to students. Added features such as case studies, tables and diagrams to explain key concepts and a comprehensive glossary of terms will help steer students through complex material. The author is well-known for overviews and syntheses that join otherwise conflicting research traditions. The first part of the book presents an accessible history of ideas, placing communication in relation to key thinkers from Aristotle, via Immanuel Kant and Charles Sanders Peirce, to Jurgen Habermas and Richard Rorty. The second part of the book bridges technological, social, and aesthetic approaches to media and communication. The third and final part of the book includes sections on 'how to study new media' with concrete analytical examples. The book presents a sustained critique of Habermas' influential work on the ideal communication situation.

This book explores the complex, evolving relationships between men, masculinities, and social welfare in contemporary context. It is inspired by themes examined in 'Men, Gender Divisions and Welfare', an edited collection published in 1998 by Popay, Hearn, and Edwards. While international policy agendas reflect a growing commitment to critically addressing the relations between men, masculinities, and policy, in policy and popular discussions, societies continue to grapple with the question of 'what to do with men?' This question reflects an ongoing tension between the persistence of men's power and control over welfare and policy development, alongside their ostensible avoidance of welfare services. The collection constitutes an up-to-date account of the gendered and social implications of policy and practice change for men, and their inherent contradictions and complexities, tracing both stability and change over the past 25 years. This book will appeal to students and scholars in diverse fields, particularly in sociology, social policy, applied social sciences, gerontology, gender studies, youth studies, welfare studies, politics, and social geography. Given the volume's empirical attention throughout to both policies and practice developments, it will also be of interest to those training in applied and vocational degrees such as health and social care, social work, family support, and health visiting.

COVID-19: Social Inequalities and Human Possibilities examines the unequal impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on individuals, communities, and countries, a fact seldom acknowledged and often suppressed or invisible. Taking a global approach, this book demonstrates how the impact of the pandemic has differed as a result of social inequalities, such as economic development, social class, race and ethnicity, sex and gener, age, and access to health care and education. Economic inequality between and within nations has significantly contributed to the chances of individuals contracting and dying from the virus. Developing nations with weak health care systems, workers whose jobs cannot be performed remotely, the differences between those with and without access to soap and water to wash their hands, or the ability to practice physical distancing also account for the unequal impact of the virus. Racial and ethnic minorities experience higher death rates from the virus, which has also unequally affected indigenous peoples and urban and foreign migrants around the world. Inequality is also embedded in national and international responses to the pandemic, as giving and receiving aid is often impacted by inequalities of demographic and national power and influence, resulting in national and global competition rather than the collaboration needed to end the pandemic. Along with the other titles in Routledge's COVID-19 Pandemic series, this book represents a timely and critical advance in knowledge related to what many believe to be the greatest threat to global ways of being in more than a century. COVID-19: Social Inequalities and Human Possibilities is therefore indispensable for academics, researchers, and students as well as activists and policy makers interested in understanding the social impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and eradicating the inequalities it has exacerbated.

Parliamentary questions are a feature of almost all national legislatures. Despite this, we know very little about how questions are used by MPs and what impact questions have on controlling the government. This volume advances our theoretical and empirical knowledge of the use of questioning in a number of different parliamentary settings. The propensity of parliamentarians to ask questions indicates that the interrogatories are an important tool for measuring an individual legislator's job. Ultimately, how a parliamentarian chooses to use the questioning tool provides a unique insight into legislator behaviour and role orientation. Many of the chapters in this volume provide new empirical measures of legislator activity and use this data to provide new tests of leading theories of legislator behaviour. At an institutional level, questions provide an important source of information for the chamber and are a critical tool of government oversight - as many of the chapters in the volume indicate. Evidence of the impact of questions on executive and bureaucratic oversight challenges conventional views of parliaments as weak and ineffective parts of the political process. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Legislative Studies.

In the last three decades, the human body has gained increasing prominence in contemporary political debates, and it has become a central topic of modern social sciences and humanities. Modern technologies such as organ transplants, stem-cell research, nanotechnology, cosmetic surgery and cryonics have changed how we think about the body.

In this collection of thirty original essays by leading figures in the field, these issues are explored across a number of theoretical and disciplinary perspectives, including pragmatism, feminism, queer theory, post-modernism, post-humanism, cultural sociology, philosophy and anthropology. A wide range of case studies, which include cosmetics, diet, organ transplants, racial bodies, masculinity and sexuality, eating disorders, religion and the sacred body, and disability, are used to appraise these different perspectives.

In addition, this Handbook explores various epistemological approaches to the basic question: what is a body? It also offers a strongly themed range of chapters on empirical topics that are organized around religion, medicine, gender, technology and consumption. It also contributes to the debate over the globalization of the body: how have military technology, modern medicine, sport and consumption led to this contemporary obsession with matters corporeal?

The Handbook s clear, direct style will appeal to a wide undergraduate audience in the social sciences, particularly for those studying medical sociology, gender studies, sports studies, disability studies, social gerontology, or the sociology of religion. It will serve to consolidate the new field of body studies.

Regional development strategies are becoming more similar all around Europe, even though regional differences are more pronounced than ever and many European regions have become more autonomous actors. This thesis of a peculiar standardized diversification of sub-national space in the modern European Union is the point of departure of this book. Based upon the analytical premises of Stanford School Sociological Institutionalism, Sebastian M. Buttner studies regional mobilization in contemporary Europe from a new and innovative perspective. He highlights the importance of scientific expertise and global scientific models in contemporary regional development practice, and exemplifies their significance with the example of region-building in Poland in the course of EU integration. This new wave of regional mobilization is not just conceived as an effect of local, national or European politics, but as an expression of a larger conceptual shift in governing society and space. This well researched and clearly argued book not only provides fresh insights into region-building and regionalization in contemporary European space, but also contributes to the new sociology of Europeanization. It will be an illuminating read for scholars and students in Sociology, European and EU studies, International Relations, Cultural Studies, Geography, Regional Science, Polish Studies and related subject areas.

The recent surfacing of actor-network theory (ANT) in tourism studies correlates to a rising interest in understanding tourism as emergent thorough relational practice connecting cultures, natures and technologies in multifarious ways. Despite the widespread application of ANT across the social sciences, no book has dealt with the practical and theoretical implications of using ANT in Tourism research.
This is the first book to critically engage with the use of ANT in tourism studies. By doing so, it challenges approaches that have dominated the literature for the last twenty years and casts new light on issues of materiality, ordering and networks in tourism. The book describes the approach, its possibilities and limitations as an ontology and research methodology, and advances its use and research in the field of tourism.
The first three chapters of the book introduce ANT and its key conceptual premises, the book itself and the relation between ANT and tourism studies. Using illustrative cases and examples, the subsequent chapters deal with specific subject areas like materiality, risk, mobilities and ordering and show how ANT contributes to tourism studies. This part presents examples and cases which illustrate the use of the approach in a critical way. Inherently, the study of tourism is a multi-disciplinary field of research and that is reflected in the diverse academic backgrounds of the contributing authors to provide a broad post-disciplinary context of ANT in tourism studies.
This unique book, focusing on emerging approaches in tourism research, will be of value to students, researchers and academics in tourism as well as the wider Social Sciences.

This book brings together analyses from across the social sciences to develop an interdisciplinary approach to understanding spiritualities and neoliberalism. It traces the lived experience of social actors as they engage with new and alternative spiritualities in neoliberal contexts. An international group of authors in anthropology, sociology, religious studies, political science, critical management studies explore the contemporary flourishing of subjectivities centred on a variety of spiritual practices and imaginaries. The book analyses the social and organisational mechanisms that underlie the generation of 'enterprising' and 'competitive' subjectivities engaged in transforming inner selves and social environments in accordance with prevailing neoliberal economic rationalities. Contributions draw on a wide range of empirical settings around the world to discuss the role of subjectivities in organizations. The purpose of the book is to provide specific insights into how neoliberalism is resisted, contested or reproduced through a transformative ethic of spiritual self-realization. Researchers, academics and Masters level students in a range of social science disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, human geography, and organization studies will find this book relevant reading. Contributors include: I. Abraham, E. Bell, L. Cortois, S. Gog, A.-R. Kaupinnen, J.D. LoRusso, D. Miller, K. Navazhylava, A. Peticca-Harris, G. Shanahan, A. Simionca, S. Taylor, K. Valaskivi, T. Vine, A. Yankellevich

This book throws light on ideologies, practices and sociocultural developments currently shaping language use in Japan by departing from the more common investigation of language in private contexts and examining aspects of the language found in a range of significant public spaces, from the material (an international airport, the streets of Tokyo, the JSL classroom in Japan and courtrooms) to the electronic (television dramas, local government web pages and cyberspace).

Through its study of the language encountered in such settings, the volume provides a deeper understanding of multifaceted aspects of linguistic diversity, both in terms of the use of languages other than Japanese and of issues relating to the Japanese language itself. The variety of theoretical approaches brought to bear by contributing authors ensures a substantial intellectual contribution to the literature on language in contemporary Japan.

This book was published as a special issue of Japanese Studies.

Based on a study covering a one-year financial reporting cycle at a commercial subsidiary of a well-known scientific research organization, Inside Accounting examines how accountants and non-accounting managers construct their company's earnings. Addressing issues in both internal management accounting, such as budgeting, performance evaluation, and control, as well as external financial accounting, such as book keeping, monthly/year end accounts and auditing, David Leung focuses on how people classify transactions, make professional judgments and use computer software for accounting, and prepare for and facilitate the auditing process. He also looks at accountancy training and the impact of people's affiliations to the accounting profession or other professions on their accounting and on their perceptions of financial statements. Other contingent or contextual factors that influence the choice of accounting method, such as time pressure, reward structures, management authority and institutions are also considered. David Leung's research employs an innovative blend of theory and practice that redresses the imbalance between ethnographic studies of financial accounting, and management accounting and helps close the gap between the academic curriculum and the experiences of practitioners. His research leads the author to conclude that no act of accounting classification is ever indefeasibly correct; that the accounting community's institutions and authority are central to the accounting process and to the 'truth and fairness' of accounting numbers; that accounting training involves extensive use of learning by doing; and that both accountants and non-accounting managers have goals and interests that often result in no better than 'good enough' accounting. This book will appeal to accounting and finance professionals and academics in finance, as well as to sociologists and academic researchers interested in research methods and science studies.

This book studies the importance of adopting Green Academia as a systemic long-term counter-intervention strategy against any form of impending pandemics in the post-COVID era and beyond. It argues that anti-nature and capitalistic knowledge systems have contributed to the evolution and growth of COVID-19 across the globe and emphasizes the merits of reinstating nature-based and environment-friendly pedagogical and curricular infrastructures in mainstream educational institutions. The volume also explores possible ways of weaving ecology and the environment as a habitual practice of teaching and learning in an intersectional manner with Science and Technology Studies. With detailed case studies of the green schools in Bhutan and similar practices in India, Kenya, and New Zealand, the book argues for different forms of eco-friendly education systems and the possibilities of expanding these local practices to a global stage. Part of the Academics, Politics and Society in the Post-COVID World series, this book will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of sociology, cultural studies, decolonial studies, education, ecology, public policy social anthropology, sustainable development, sociology of education, and political sociology.

This book explores the changing approaches to urban common good in Central and Eastern Europe after 1989. The question of common good is fundamental to urban living; however, understanding of the term varies depending on local contexts and conditions, particularly complex in countries with experience of communism. In cities east of the former Iron Curtain, the once ideologically imposed principle of common good became gradually devalued throughout the 20th century due to the lack of citizen agency, only to reappear as a response to the ills of neoliberal capitalism around the 2010s. The book reveals how the idea of urban common good has been reconstructed and practiced in European cities after socialism. It documents the paradigm shift from city as a communal infrastructure to city as a commodity, which lately has been challenged by the approach to city as a commons. These transformations have been traced and analysed within several urban themes: housing, public transport, green infrastructure, public space, urban regeneration, and spatial justice. A special focus is on the changes in the public discourse in Poland and the perspectives of key urban stakeholders in three case-study cities of Gdansk, Krakow, and Lodz. The findings point to the need for drawing from best practices of the socialist legacy, with its celebration of the common. At the same time, they call for learning from the mistakes of the recent past, in which the opportunity for citizen empowerment has been unseized. The book is intended for researchers, academics, and postgraduates, as well as practitioners and anyone interested in rediscovering the inherent potential of urban commonality. It will appeal to those working in human geography, spatial planning, and other areas of urban studies.

The Routledge International Handbook of Fat Studies brings together a diverse body of work from around the globe and across a wide range of Fat Studies topics and perspectives. The first major collection of its kind, it explores the epistemology, ontology, and methodology of fatness, with attention to issues such as gender and sexuality, disability and embodiment, health, race, media, discrimination, and pedagogy. Presenting work from both scholarly writers and activists, this volume reflects a range of critical perspectives vital to the expansion of Fat Studies and thus constitutes an essential resource for researchers in the field.

This book compares Islamic and Western ideas of human rights in order to ascertain which human rights, if any, can be considered universal. This is a profound topic with a rich history that is highly relevant within global politics and society today. The arguments in this book are formed by bringing William Talbott's Which Rights Should Be Universal? (2005) and Abdulaziz Sachedina's Islam and the Challenge of Human Rights (2014) into conversation. By bridging the gap between cultural relativists and moral universalists, this book seeks to offer a new model for the understanding of human rights. It contends that human rights abuses are outcomes of complex systems by design and/or by default. Therefore, it proposes that a rigorous systems-thinking approach will contribute to addressing the challenge of human rights. Engaging with Islamic and Western, historical and contemporary, and relativist and universalist thought, this book is a fresh take on a perennially important issue. As such, it will be a first-rate resource for any scholars working in religious studies, Islamic studies, Middle East studies, ethics, sociology, and law and religion.

The study of Soviet youth has long lagged behind the comprehensive research conducted on Western European youth culture. In an era that saw the emergence of youth movements of all sorts across Europe, the Soviet Komsomol was the first state-sponsored youth organization, in the first communist country. Born out of an autonomous youth movement that emerged in 1917, the Komsomol eventually became the last link in a chain of Soviet socializing agencies which organized the young. Based on extensive archival research and building upon recent research on Soviet youth, this book broadens our understanding of the social and political dimension of Komsomol membership during the momentous period 1917 1932. It sheds light on the complicated interchange between ideology, policy and reality in the league's evolution, highlighting the important role ordinary members played. The transformation of the country shaped Komsomol members and their league's social identity, institutional structure and social psychology, and vice versa, the organization itself became a crucial force in the dramatic changes of that time. The book investigates the complex dialogue between the Communist Youth League and the regime, unravelling the intricate process that transformed the Komsomol into a mere institution for political socialization serving the regime's quest for social engineering and control.

Social research efforts are often more concerned with basic social processes or patterns than with the dynamic relationship between social processes and social institutions. In this classic collection, contributors posit generalizations drawn from contemporary sociology. Their analyses go beyond elementary principles--they interpret them, qualify them, or state them more precisely. Each of the contributors focuses on the modern American social structure, and they are either explicitly comparative or have made observations that clearly are meant to apply to many countries. This volume both embodies and draws attention to newer developments in sociology. Like most steps forward in an advancing science, this orientation does not reject the older knowledge accumulated during earlier generations, but incorporates and expands upon it. The differences are in emphasis rather than any denial of the main body of accepted theory. On the other hand, the collection may be said to represent a response to the many criticisms, by humanists and sociologists alike, of the mainstream of contemporary sociology as it existed at the time of original publication in the late 1960s. Inquiries into social changes, like sociological studies of historical phenomena, may be viewed as modes of a comparative sociology: They permit us to test more fully sociological generalizations. The emphasis in this volume on historical and comparative studies and on social change parallels the growing attention of sociology to these problems. During the 1960s, social science turned from a nearly exclusive preoccupation with middle-class populations to a concern with social relations in other societies, past as well as present. In addition to enriching our knowledge, this broader view has increased both the precision and generalizing power of sociological principles.

Web 2.0 is a highly accessible introductory text examining all the crucial discussions and issues which surround the changing nature of the World Wide Web. It not only contextualises the Web 2.0 within the history of the Web, but also goes on to explore its position within the broader dispositif of emerging media technologies.

The book uncovers the connections between diverse media technologies including mobile smart phones, hand-held multimedia players, "netbooks" and electronic book readers such as the Amazon Kindle, all of which are made possible only by the Web 2.0. In addition, Web 2.0 makes a valuable contribution towards understanding the new developments in mobile computing as it integrates various aspects of social networking, whilst also tackling head-on the recent controversial debates that have arisen in a backlash to the Web 2.0.

Providing valuable insight into this emerging area of the World Wide Web, Web 2.0 is a key supplementary text for undergraduate students of media studies, sociology, philosophy and other related disciplines, as well as being an informative read for anyone with an interest in this key contemporary issue.

This book brings together life stories from five generations of Balts, living through the diverse and recurring transformations of the twentieth century: occupations, war, independence, totalitarianism, and democratic rule and market economy. The twentieth century history of the Baltic countries has often been deeply tragic. Lying on the coastline of the Baltic Sea, these rather small but strategically well located territories have historically found themselves in the middle of many power struggles between larger states, empires and other power-holders: the Teutonic Knights, Swedish kings, Tsarist Russia, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union. Today, they are once again forced to stand up to the Russian Federation. Biographical interviewing is a field focused on individuals, and on how those individuals choose to re-create and present their lived lives, make meaning of it through the narratives they tell. To interpret the biographical narrations of Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians, shaped by complex and controversial historical background, the authors use Pierre Bourdieu's concept of social and cultural capitals, the principles of Erving Goffman's framing analysis and Alessandro Portelli's distinction of private and public spheres, Anton Steen's investigations of post-Socialist elites and Piotr Sztompka's theory of cultural trauma, etc. Given analyses of particular biographical narrations are supplemented by brief historical and sociological overviews, which allow the reader to better understand the contexts of lived lives, and the mental atmosphere in which the interviews were conducted.

This book uncovers a logical fallacy underlying Afro-Pessimism and provides a formal theory of Articulation, teasing out new reflections on race and Blackness. Afro-Pessimism maintains that Blacks, subject to a subordinate position in society, suffer a cultural death. In this monograph, Victor Peterson rejects this theory, demonstrating that Black subjectivity is inherently multiple, articulating identities appropriate to the contexts in which it finds itself and yet remaining continuous across its individual but not mutually exclusive instantiations. Peterson argues that we should consider the mechanisms that produce the conditions under which individuals obtain positions of either dominance or subordination. By providing a working logical foundation for Articulation theory within cultural studies, Peterson encourages us to rethink the politics of racial identity and subjectivity in contemporary social life. Encouraging critical thought about the arbitrarily determined but instrumentally objective of our global racial order, this book will be of great interest to scholars of Black Studies, sociology, cultural studies, and philosophy.

Authored by a stellar line-up of top China scholars from the US, Europe, Australia and China. Interdisciplinary in approach, so will appeal to courses on Chinese society, politics and history. Writing style is excellent and the chapters are truly connected due to the bok being co-authored.

As the longest economic boom in history has given way to leaner times, unemployment has re-emerged as a major issue. This theoretically and empirically sophisticated book examines how unemployment takes on widely different political meanings and explores the ways in which governments act to change their own accountability for unemployment. It contributes to the comparative political economy literature that analyzes political responses to economic problems. Baxandall reverses a conventional application of comparative research by using an Eastern European case to reveal political dynamics that are mirrored in the West - as demonstrated with American and Western European cases. Using interviews and previously unexplored archives to consider a dramatic transformation in the meaning of unemployment in Hungary, he demonstrates how the politics of economic change depend crucially on the political re-crafting of economic categories.

It takes little or no effort for us to gather information by means of our senses but it would be a mistake to take this as a sign that perception is simple. It was in the 20th century and after the establishment of psychology as a scientific discipline that the study of perception flourished. This important volume gathers together a selection of articles and essays which represent some of the most interesting discoveries and theories. It gives a flavour of the many different approaches and ideas taken by cognitive psychologists in this fascinating area. Topics covered include: attention, brain systems, object interpolation and completion, object recognition and classification, different types of objects, and information processing and models.