As a student and disciple of Karl Popper and longtime managing editor of Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Ian C. Jarvie extended the notion of Critical Rationalism to be useful in anthropology, aesthetics, film studies, and various social sciences. In this Festschrift, contributors from a range of interests and disciplines engage with the Popperian legacy and Jarvie's scholarly and editorial work in Critical Rationalism to contextualize it in the broader, contemporary intellectual landscape. These original essays not only honor Jarvie's legacy, but expand it to cross the philosophical divide between analytic and continental schools of thought. In so doing, the authors bring the state-of-the-art achievements of Critical Rationalism to the forefront of current academic debates.

By examining cultural consumption, tastes and imaginaries as a means of relating to the world, this book describes the effects of globalization on young people from an aesthetic and cultural perspective. It employs the concept of aesthetico-cultural cosmopolitanism to analyse the emergence of an aesthetic openness to alterity as a new generational "good taste". Aesthetico-Cultural Cosmopolitanism and French Youth critically examines the consumption of cultural products and imaginaries that provide genuine insight into social change, particularly in regards to young people, who play the largest role in cultural circulation. This book will be of interest to students and academics across a wide range of readers, including cultural theorists, and students engaged in debates on cultural consumption, the globalization of culture and transnational aesthetic codes.

In this book, the author draws on Karl Marx's writings on alienation and Erich Fromm's conception of necrophilia in order to understand these aspects of contemporary culture as expressions of the domination of the living by the dead under capitalism. Necroculture is the ideological reflection and material manifestation of this basic feature of capitalism: the rule of dead capital over living labor. The author argues that necroculture represents the subsumption of the world by vampire capital.

This volume describes and maps congregations of Christian confessions and denominations, as well as groups with Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, and various other spiritual faiths, in different European countries. Consisting of three parts, it presents concrete sociological studies addressing how established and not established, old and new congregations of various faiths create a new kind of religious diversity at the country level; how religious congregations are challenged and thrive in large cities; and how religious congregations change in the 21st century. The book enlightens by its descriptive analysis and the theoretical questions it raises concerning the religious transformations happening all over Europe. It addresses issues of religious diversity in the cities of Europe by presenting large studies conducted in cities such as Barcelona in Spain, and Aarhus in Denmark. By means of large-scale censuses taken in areas such as North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany and in countries like Switzerland and Italy, the book shows how the historically established churches restructure their congregations and activities. It clarifies for the new gatherers where and how a new diversity of religious congregations is in the process of being established. Finally, the book covers two important topical issues: pluralisation and secularisation. It provides new data on religious diversity, painting a new picture of secularisation: the impact and structural consequences of the long-term decrease of membership in the established churches.

Through the lens of the fashion industry, Iva Petkova explores not only how institutionalized organizations react and adapt to the rise of start-up outsiders, but also how these outside "disruptors" seek to cultivate legitimacy and win influence. In so doing, she reflects upon a longstanding question in the sociology of organizations and neo-institutional theory: How do institutionalized organizations in creative industries resolve the inherent conflict between art and commerce, particularly in a changing institutional environment? Engineering Legitimacy outlines the processes through which e-commerce and social commerce companies in fashion disturb and reconstruct the industry, crosscutting their technical field of expertise and looking to legitimize their innovative practice in the institutionally elaborated field of fashion. Through an analysis of the emerging culture of innovation collectively created by start-up outsider disruptors, this book contemplates how fashion-technology companies transform their moral narratives into acceptable commercial practice, legitimating a model of profound institutional change over the digital operations of fashion companies.

This book of conference proceedings contains papers presented at the Art and Design International Conference (AnDIC 2016). It examines the impact of Cyberology, also known as Internet Science, on the world of art and design. It looks at how the rapid growth of Cyberology and the creation of various applications and devices have influenced human relationships. The book discusses the impact of Cyberology on the behaviour, attitudes and perceptions of users, including the way they work and communicate. With a strong focus on how the Cyberology world influences and changes the methods and works of artists, this book features topics that are relevant to four key players - artists, intermediaries, policy makers, and the audience - in a cultural system, especially in the world of art and design. It examines the development, problems and issues of traditional cultural values, identity and new trends in contemporary art. Most importantly, the book attempts to discuss the past, present and future of art and design whilst looking at some underlying issues that need to be addressed collectively.

This book takes readers into stories of love, loss, grief and mourning and reveals the emotional attachments and digital kinships of the virtual 3D social world of Second Life. At fourteen years old, Second Life can no longer be perceived as the young, cutting-edge environment it once was, and yet it endures as a place of belonging, fun, role-play and social experimentation. In this volume, the authors argue that far from facing an impending death, Second Life has undergone a transition to maturity and holds a new type of significance. As people increasingly explore and co-create a sense of self and ways of belonging through avatars and computer screens, the question of where and how people live and die becomes increasingly more important to understand. This book shows how a virtual world can change lives and create forms of memory, nostalgia and mourning for both real and avatar based lives.

This book contributes to the current knowledge and research on conflict and cross-cultural dialogue, emphasizing how respect, tolerance and dialogue may be quite effective tools for bridging the diverse cultures and, consequently, for solving many of the conflicts of today's world, characterized by a dynamic interchange of populations with very diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds. For this purpose, we rely on reputed scholars from ten different countries, and from different cultures and fields of expertise, which allows for diverse contributions from a valuable interdisciplinary perspective. The first section of the book deals with the correlation between cultural differences and conflict, while also showing how such conflicts can be prevented and, should they arise, managed and solved. The second section addresses a different, more specific issue: how cultural expression means and tools for cultural communication may lead to conflict whereas they may help to avoid it as well. Finally, the third section analyzes how legal and justice systems deal with cross-cultural conflicts as well as with situations which may lead to cross-cultural conflicts, thus assessing to which extent such systems contribute to avoid and/or solve such kind of conflicts.

This book analyses the social and cultural status of high streets in the age of recession and austerity. High streets are shown to have long been regarded as the heart of many communities, but have declined to a state where boarded-up and vacant retail units are a familiar sight in many British cities. The book argues that the policies deemed necessary to revive the fortunes of high streets are often thinly-veiled attacks on the tastes and cultures of the working class. Policy-makers often promote boutiques, art galleries and upmarket cafes at the expense of some of the outlets frequented by less affluent populations, including betting shops, fast food takeaways, discount stores and bargain booze outlets. Highlighting the social and cultural roles that so-called 'dying' high streets continue to play in the lives of working class and disadvantaged populations, this book provides a powerful argument against retail gentrification, and a timely analysis of class conflict in austerity Britain. It will be of great interest to scholars of geography, social policy and cultural studies.

This book represents a comprehensive effort to understand discrimination, racialization, racism, Islamophobia, anti-racist activism, and the inclusion and exclusion of minorities in Nordic countries. Examining critical media events in this heavily mediatized society, the contributors explore how processes of racialization take place in an environment dominated by commercial interests, anti-migrant and anti-Muslim narratives and sentiments, and a surprising lack of informed research on national racism and racialization. Overall, in tracing how these individual events further racial inequalities through emotional and affective engagement, the book seeks to define the trajectory of modern racism in Scandinavia.

This book will broaden readers' understanding of the links between the music and fashion industries. It highlights the challenges currently facing the fashion industry in terms of hyper-competition, definition of ever-faster trends, changing consumer demands etc. In fact, the fashion industry is heavily influenced by the digital revolution in the music industry, which has changed the face of individual music consumption and social reference, and therefore, also has impacts on fashion consumption and social reference. This understanding is crucial in order to realign any fashion company's strategies to the demands of modern fashion consumers. In terms of content, the book first discusses the social perspective of fashion and music. This includes an analysis of music as a key influencer of fashion trends, both theoretically and on the basis of a case study on grunge music. Then the role of music in the fashion business is addressed, and covers in-store music and the role of music in fashion communication. Following up, the role of fashion in the music business is analyzed. This includes the trend of co-design of fashion collections, music artists' role of differentiation by style, and the market for music fashion merchandise articles (both theoretically and drawing on a case study). In closing, potential lessons learned from the music industry are developed for the fashion industry. This includes an analysis of the digital revolution and the advent of the crowdfunding idea (both theoretically and in a case study).

This book presents journeys of sixteen Indigenous Australian athletes from their first touch of a'footy' to the highest levels of Australian football and rugby league, conceptualized as a processof learning. The authors challenge simplistic explanations of Indigenous success in Australianfootball and rugby league, centered on the notion of the 'natural athlete'. The book tracesthe development of Indigenous sporting expertise as a lifelong process of learning situated inlocal culture and shaped by the challenges of transitioning into professional sport. Individually,the life stories told by the participants provide fascinating insights into experience, cultureand learning. Collectively, they provide deep understanding of the powerful influence thatAboriginal culture exerted on the participants' journeys to the top of their sports while locatingindividual experience and agency within larger economic, cultural and social considerations.Stories of Indigenous Success in Australian Sport will be of interest to students and scholarsacross a range of disciplines including Indigenous studies, physical education, education, sportmanagement and sociology

This edited collection explores building construction as an inspiring, yet often overlooked, place to develop new knowledge about the development of human societies. Eschewing dominant engineering and management perspectives on construction, the book is purposefully broad in its scope, both empirically and theoretically, as reflecting the rich underexplored potential of studies of building construction to inform a wide span of intellectual debates across the social science and humanities. The seven chapters encompass contributions to theories of: spatiotemporal organization with wildlife on building sites; institutional change with building ruins; home with Mexican self-help housing; place with a suburban housing development; socio-materiality with the adaptation of a university library; migrant labour with the Parisian postwar construction boom; and gender with a female site manager in Sweden. This book seeks to develop a new critical sub-area for construction studies that focuses on the actual processes and practices of 'constructing'. Bringing together diverse members of construction research communities working in a variety of contexts, it develops empirical engagements with building work to challenge its marginalization, relative to architectural studies, to provoke novel understandings of human history, geography and sociology.

This book questions the simplistic view that convenience food is unhealthy and environmentally unsustainable. By exploring how various types of convenience food have become embedded in consumers' lives, it considers what lessons can be learnt from the commercial success of convenience food for those who seek to promote healthier and more sustainable diets. The project draws on original findings from comparative research in the UK, Denmark, Germany and Sweden (funded through the ERA-Net Sustainable Food programme). Reframing Convenience Food avoids moral judgments about convenience food, and instead provides a refreshingly novel perspective guided by an understanding of everyday consumer practice. It will appeal to those with an interest in the sociology and politics behind health, consumerism, sustainability and society.

Shamanism is commonly understood through reference to spirits and souls. However, these terms were introduced by Christian missionaries as part of the colonial effort of conversion. So, rather than trying to comprehend shamanism through medieval European concepts, this book examines it through ideas that started developing in the West after encountering Amerindian shamans. Microbes and Other Shamanic Beings develops three major arguments: First, since their earliest accounts Amerindian shamanic notions have had more in common with current microbial ecology than with Christian religious beliefs. Second, the human senses allow the unaided perception of the microbial world; for example, entoptic vision allows one to see microscopic objects flowing through the retina and shamans employ techniques that enhance precisely these kinds of perception. Lastly, the theory that some diseases are produced by living agents acquired through contagion was proposed right after Contact in relation to syphilis, an important subject of pre-Contact Amerindian medicine and mythology, which was treasured and translated by European physicians. Despite these early translations, the West took four centuries to rediscover germs and bring microbiology into mainstream science. Giraldo Herrera reclaims this knowledge and lays the fundaments for an ethnomicrobiology. It will appeal to anyone curious about shamanism and willing to take it seriously and to those enquiring about the microbiome, our relations with microbes and the long history behind them.

This edited collection explores family relations in two types of 'migrant families' in Europe: mixed families and transnational families. Based on in-depth qualitative fieldwork and large surveys, the contributors analyse gender and intergenerational relations from a variety of standpoints and migratory flows. In their examination of family life in a migratory context, the authors develop theoretical approaches from the social sciences that go beyond migration studies, such as intersectionality, the solidarity paradigm, care circulation, reflexive modernization and gender convergence theory. Making Multicultural Families in Europe will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines including migration and transnationalism studies, family studies, intergenerational studies, gender studies, cultural studies, development studies, globalization studies, ethnic studies, gerontology studies, social network analysis and social work.

Subjectivity, the Unconscious and Consumerism is a unique and imaginative psycho-sociological exploration of how postmodern, contemporary consumerism invades and colonises human subjectivity. Investigating especially consumerism's unconscious aspects such as desires, imagination, and fantasy, it engages with an extensive analysis of dreams. The author frames these using a synthesis of Jungian psychology and the social imaginaries of Baudrillard and Bauman, in a dialogue with the theories of McDonaldization and Disneyization. The aim is to broaden our understanding of consumerism to include the perennial consumption of symbols and signs of identity - a process which is the basis for the fabrication of the commodified self. The book offers a profound, innovative critique of our consumption societies, challenging readers to rethink how we live, and how our identities are impacted by consumerism. As such it will be of interest to students and scholars of critical psychology, psychoanalysis, sociology, anthropology and cultural studies, but is also accessible to anyone interested in the complex psychology of contemporary subjectivity.

This handbook on social movements, revolution, and social transformation analyzes people's struggles to bring about social change in the age of globalization. It examines the origins, nature, dynamics, and challenges of such movements as they aim to change dominant social, economic, and political institutions and structures across the globe. Departing from a theoretical introduction that explores major classical and contemporary theories of social movements and transformation, the contributions collected here use a class-based approach to examine key cases of social movements, rebellions, and revolutions worldwide from the turn of the twentieth to the early twenty-first centuries. Against this wide-ranging background, the handbook concludes by charting the varied and competing future developments and trajectories of social movements, revolutions, and social transformations.

Providing an expansive view of the making and meaning of African American conservatism, this volume examines the phenomenon in four spheres: the political realm, the academic world, the black church, and grass-roots activism movements. In his analysis of their activities in these realms, Louis Prisock examines the challenges African American conservatives face as they operate within the context of (largely white) conservatism. At the same time that African American conservatives challenge the white conservative movement's principle of "color blindness," they are accused of being "racial mascots," or "tokens" from those outside of it. Prisock unwinds the intricacies of black conservatives' relationships to both the wider conservative movement and the everyday life experiences of black Americans, showing that they are as vulnerable to the "inescability of race" as any other individual in a racialized America.

This book presents 25 selected papers from the International Conference on "Developing Synergies between Islam & Science and Technology for Mankind's Benefit" held at the International Institute for Advanced Islamic Studies Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur, in October 2014. The papers cover a broad range of issues reflecting the main conference themes: Cosmology and the Universe, Philosophy of Science and the Emergence of Biological Systems, Principles and Applications of Tawhidic Science, Medical Applications of Tawhidic Science and Bioethics, and the History and Teaching of Science from an Islamic Perspective. Highlighting the relationships between the Islamic religious worldview and the physical sciences, the book challenges secularist paradigms on the study of Science and Technology. Integrating metaphysical perspectives of Science, topics include Islamic approaches to S&T such as an Islamic epistemology of the philosophy of science, a new quantum theory, environmental care, avoiding wasteful consumption using Islamic teachings, and emotional-blasting psychological therapy. Eminent contributing scholars include Osman Bakar, Mohammad Hashim Kamali, Mehdi Golshani, Mohd. Kamal Hassan, Adi Setia and Malik Badri. The book is essential reading for a broad group of academics and practitioners, from Islamic scholars and social scientists to (physical) scientists and engineers.

When strangers meet in social clubs, watch reality television, or interact on Facebook, they contribute to the social glue of mass society-not because they promote civic engagement or democracy, but because they enact the sacred promise of friendship. Where most theories of nationalism focus on issues of collective identity formation, Kaplan's novel framework turns attention to compatriots' experience of solidarity and how it builds on interpersonal ties and performances of public intimacy. Combining critical analyses of contemporary theories of nationalism, civil society, and politics of friendship with in-depth empirical case studies of social club sociability, Kaplan ultimately shows that strangers-turned-friends acquire symbolic, male-centered meaning and generate feelings of national solidarity.

This book is the first overall and detailed discussion of contemporary Asia's architectural theorisations and phenomena based on its heteroglossic and decolonisation character. Lin presents a theoretical journey of transdisciplinary reflection upon contemporary Asia's pragmatic phenomena which is methodologically achieved by means of elaborations of how tangible Asian architecture can be philosophically theorised and how interchangeable architectural theory is practically 'Asianised'. Discussions in the book are critically integrated with comparative studies focused on Japan, Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand and the UK. These empirical examinations are highlights of phenomenal localities, architecture, cities and cultures which reference the historicity of the Asia Pacific, Asia's contemporary architectural situations, and their subtle relationship with the 'West'. The schematisation of intended 'fuzziness' for Asia and its architecture is framed as the notion polychronotypic jetztzeit to represent a present time-place context of contemporary Asian architecture and urbanism. This book will be of great interest to scholars of Asian Studies, Architectural Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Urban Studies and Cultural Studies.

This book explores how recent football fiction has negotiated the decisive political developments in English football after the 1989/90 publication of the 'Taylor Report'. A direct response to the 1989 Hillsborough Disaster and growing concerns of hooliganism, the 'Taylor Report' suggested a number of measures for stricter regulation of fan crowds. In consequence, stadiums in the top divisions were turned into all-seated venues and were put under CCTV surveillance. The implementation of these measures reduced violent incidents drastically, but it also led to an unparalleled increase in ticket prices, which in turn significantly altered the demographics of the crowd. This development, which also enabled football's entry into other mainstream cultural forms, changed the game decisively. Piskurek traces patterns across prose and film to detect how these fictions have responded to the changed circumstances of post-Taylor football. Lending a cultural lens to these political changes, this book is pioneering in its analysis of football fiction as a whole, offering a fresh perspective to a range of scholars and students interested in cultural studies, sociology, leisure and politics.

From Strawberry Hill to The Dungeons, Alnwick Castle to Barnageddon, Gothic tourism is a fascinating, and sometimes controversial, area. This lively study considers Gothic tourism's aesthetics and origins, as well as its relationship with literature, film, folklore, heritage management, arts programming and the 'edutainment' business.

This Handbook provides the first comprehensive international overview of significant contemporary Indigenous architecture, practice, and discourse, showcasing established and emerging Indigenous authors and practitioners from Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, the Pacific Islands, Canada, USA and other countries. It captures the breadth and depth of contemporary work in the field, establishes the historical and present context of the work, and highlights important future directions for research and practice. The topics covered include Indigenous placemaking, identity, cultural regeneration and Indigenous knowledges. The book brings together eminent and emerging scholars and practitioners to discuss and compare major projects and design approaches, to reflect on the main issues and debates, while enhancing theoretical understandings of contemporary Indigenous architecture.The book is an indispensable resource for scholars, students, policy makers, and other professionals seeking to understand the ways in which Indigenous people have a built tradition or aspire to translate their cultures into the built environment. It is also an essential reference for academics and practitioners working in the field of the built environment, who need up-to-date knowledge of current practices and discourse on Indigenous peoples and their architecture.