This book argues the crucial role of culture and cultural policies in defining the notion of urban citizenship in Barcelona since 1979. Through analysis of official documents, municipal publicity campaigns, sport - including the Olympic Games and Barcelona F.C - and film, Balibrea makes sense of the city as a global cultural destination and reveals how such transformation impacts local inhabitants. Scrutinizing municipal discourses on culture from the late 1970s, this interdisciplinary work unveils how ideas of the function and nature of citizenship articulate changing definitions of the city, from model to brand. Over the course of topics such as: tourism, social democracy and urban regeneration, Balibrea constructs an original argument for how the Barcelona image mobilizes neoliberal fantasies of subject transformation. A wide-ranging study, this book will be of great interest to scholars of urban geography, sociology and cultural studies.

At a time when traditional dating practices are being replaced with new ways to meet potential partners, this book provides fresh insights into how are men responding to new ways of dating. Drawing upon original research, this book examines a wide range of contemporary dating practices that includes speed dating, holiday romances, use of dating apps, online sex seeking and dogging. It reveals the ways in which men draw upon traditional models of masculinity to negotiate these changes; but also, the extent to which men are responding by elaborating new masculinities. Through an investigation of the dynamics of heterosexuality and masculinity, this book highlights the importance attached to authenticity, and the increasing marketization and commodification of dating. It argues that in a post-truth world, men must also come to terms with a post-trust dating landscape. Combining rich empirical material with keen theoretical analysis, this innovative work will have interdisciplinary appeal for students and scholars of sociology, media studies, cultural studies, and gender studies.

This book names and confounds the mono-mainstream assumption that invisibly frames much research, the ideologies that normalize monolingualism, monoculturalism, monoliteracy, mononationalism, and/or monomodal ways of knowing. In its place, the authors propose multi- and trans- lenses of these phenomena steeped in a raciolinguistic perspective on Bourdieu's reflexive sociology to move toward a more accurate, multidimensional view of racialized peoples' literacy and language practices. To achieve this, they first engage in a comprehensive review of literacies, languaging, and a critical sociocultural framework. Then, the distinct testimonios of four women underscore this framework in practice, followed by action steps for research, policy, and pedagogy. This book will be of particular interest to literacy and language education researchers.

Culture's Engine offers an insightful and penetrating analysis of the enduring relationship between technology and society. William Gosling explores in absorbing historical detail how humans have experienced change through a sequence of technological revolutions, each giving rise to new social organisation, which in turn influences the shape and timing of the next such revolution. Gosling argues that it is through this dialogue that successful technology sets the direction and pace of all cultural evolution. The state of technology at any time is the major influence on the world, and not just the material world. This book then is not a history of technology, still less of science. It fundamentally questions how technology and social forces interact, leading to these successive revolutions and their outcomes.

Leading scholars in the sociology of migration, Michaela Benson and Karen O'Reilly, re-theorise lifestyle migration through a sustained focus on postcolonialism at its intersections with neoliberalism. This book provides an in-depth analysis of the interplay of colonial traces and neoliberal presents, the relationship between residential tourism and economic development, and the governance and regulation of lifestyle migration. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork undertaken by the authors among lifestyle migrants in Malaysia and Panama, they reveal the structural and material conditions that support migration and how these are embodied by migrant subjects, while also highlighting their agency within this process. This rigorous work marks an important contribution to emerging debates surrounding privileged migration and mobility. It will appeal to sociologists, social theorists, human and cultural geographers, economists, social psychologists, demographers, social anthropologists, tourism and migration studies specialists.

While the field of football studies has produced an abundance of literature on professional, top-league football, there is little research output to do with the non-top level football. This book explores the relationship between the top and lower leagues, laying open the drastic schisms that exist between the different levels. The study links the developments at the top level of English and German football in the past 30 years to transformational processes in lower league football. Illustrating how the hegemonic status of top football weighs hard on the spheres below, it depicts how it also serves as a blueprint for lower league football clubs' strategies in coping with a threefold dilemma of institutional legitimacy that shows itself in economic, cultural and social dimensions. Taking the different club structures in both national contexts as a starting point, it portrays both the efficacy of institutional frameworks and how these can be challenged from below. This research will be of interest to students and scholars across football studies, sports studies, the sociology of sport, and organisation studies.

This book connects a detailed analysis of Irn-Bru's brand identity over time to theories of national identity, consumer studies, and banal nationalism. It situates the commercial history of Barr's Irn-Bru in a transnational context and shows how Irn-Bru has become a symbol of Scotland through processes of rewriting, reframing and institutionalized forgetting, linking the consumption of what began as a trans-national generic product to a specific national community. As such, Leishman presents a longitudinal, cross-disciplinary approach to analysing branding and advertising as multi-modal forms of discourse, in order to underline the role of commercial, non-state actors and popular consumerism in the phenomenon of banal nationalism. It will be of interest to students and scholars researching nationalism, consumption, and Scottish studies.

This study raises that difficult and complicated question on a broad front, taking into account the expressions and attitudes of a wide variety of Greek, Roman, Jewish, and early Christian sources, including Herodotus, Polybius, Cicero, Philo, and Paul. It approaches the topic of ethnicity through the lenses of the ancients themselves rather than through the imposition of modern categories, labels, and frameworks. A central issue guides the course of the work: did ancient writers reflect upon collective identity as determined by common origins and lineage or by shared traditions and culture?

The rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender persons (LGBT) are strongly contested by certain faith communities, and this confrontation has become increasingly pronounced following the adjudication of a number of legal cases. As the strident arguments of both sides enter a heated political arena, it brings forward the deeply contested question of whether there is any possibility of both communities' contested positions being reconciled under the same law. This volume assembles impactful voices from the faith, LGBT advocacy, legal, and academic communities - from the Human Rights Campaign and ACLU to the National Association of Evangelicals and Catholic and LDS churches. The contributors offer a 360-degree view of culture-war conflicts around faith and sexuality - from Obergefell to Masterpiece Cakeshop - and explore whether communities with such profound differences in belief are able to reach mutually acceptable solutions in order to both live with integrity.

This valuable book is the first to bring together theory and policy with analysis and expertise on practices in key areas of the public realm to explore what religious literacy is, why it is needed and what might be done about it. It makes the case for a public realm which is well equipped to engage with the plurality and pervasiveness of religion and belief, whatever the individual's own stance. It is aimed at academics, policy-makers and practitioners interested in the policy and practice implications of the continuing presence of religion and belief in the public sphere.

Focusing on non-human actors, Grazyna Gajewska expands the discussion of eroticism in contemporary culture by bringing in material culture, object studies, and "the anthropology of things." She sets out from the assumption that things (such as, for instance, attire, underwear, shoes, or jewelry) play an important role in arousing erotic imagination-they are genuine participants in the process, not mere signifiers of eroticism. Their use does not denote only undeniable facts of everyday life associated with functionality, the pragmatic or aesthetic aspect, but also contribute to the shaping of human emotions, fantasies and phantasms. In her study, Gajewska brings eroticism in contemporary culture to light through applying gender studies to new contexts-animals, robots, virtual worlds-even as she explores a new methodology, the anthropology of things.

Americans love religious freedom. Few agree, however, about what they mean by either "religion" or "freedom." Rather than resolve these debates, Finbarr Curtis argues that there is no such thing as religious freedom. Lacking any consistent content, religious freedom is a shifting and malleable rhetoric employed for a variety of purposes. While Americans often think of freedom as the right to be left alone, the free exercise of religion works to produce, challenge, distribute, and regulate different forms of social power. The book traces shifts in the notion of religious freedom in America from The Second Great Awakening, to the fiction of Louisa May Alcott and the films of D.W. Griffith, through William Jennings Bryan and the Scopes Trial, and up to debates over the Tea Party to illuminate how Protestants have imagined individual and national forms of identity. A chapter on Al Smith considers how the first Catholic presidential nominee of a major party challenged Protestant views about the separation of church and state. Moving later in the twentieth century, the book analyzes Malcolm X's more sweeping rejection of Christian freedom in favor of radical forms of revolutionary change. The final chapters examine how contemporary controversies over intelligent design and the claims of corporations to exercise religion are at the forefront of efforts to shift regulatory power away from the state and toward private institutions like families, churches, and corporations. The volume argues that religious freedom is produced within competing visions of governance in a self-governing nation.

This edited collection expands scholarly and popular conversations about dark tourism in the American West. The phenomenon of dark tourism-traveling to sites of death, suffering, and disaster for entertainment or educational purposes-has been described and, on occasion, criticized for transforming misfortune and catastrophe into commodity. The impulse, however, continues, particularly in the American West: a liminal and contested space that resonates with stories of tragedy, violent conflict, and disaster. Contributions here specifically examine the mediation and shaping of these spaces into touristic destinations. The essays examine Western sites of massacre and battle (such as Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site and the "Waco Siege"), sites of imprisonment (such as Japanese-American internment camps and Alcatraz Island), areas devastated by ecological disaster (such as Martin's Cove and the Salton Sea), and unmediated sites (those sites left to the touristic imagination, with no interpretation of what occurred there, such as the Bennet-Arcane camp).

Sociology addresses challenging social issues and seeks new ways to understand them. However, much sociological terminology suffers from multiple, vague, or uncertain meanings. This is true of many of the central terms that sociologists use, such as 'power', 'ideology', 'culture', 'social class', and even 'society'. The result is that the conclusions reached by sociological investigations are frequently subject to discrepant interpretations, and their validity is difficult to assess. The chapters in this book address several of the key terms employed by sociologists, examining the concepts associated with them in depth - from both an historical and an analytical perspective. The aim is not to develop an entirely new framework but rather to document the various meanings associated with these terms, and to suggest ways in which they could be refined or developed for the purposes of sociological analysis. Since the concepts addressed are of wide relevance, Troubling Sociological Concepts will be of interest and use to researchers and students across the social sciences.

This volume brings together for the first time case studies on secularists of the 19th and early 20th centuries in national and transnational perspectives including examples from all over Europe. Its focus is on freethinkers taken as secular avant-gardes and early promoters of secularity. The authors of this book deal with multiple historical, religious, social, and cultural backgrounds and, in these contexts, analyze freethinkers' organizations, projects, networks, and contributions to forming a secular worldview, in particular, the promotion of concrete undertakings such as civil baptism or initiatives to leave church. Next to this secularist agenda, the contributions also take into account ambivalences and difficulties freethinkers were faced with, namely, the tensions between a national self-image and the transnational direction the movement has taken; the regional base of many projects and their transregional horizon; freethinkers' cultural programs and their immanent political mission; and the dialogue with respectively the conceptual distinction from other secularist groups. Readers interested in the history of secularity will learn that it was a heterogeneous enterprise already in its beginnings. This set the course for later European and global developments.

Drawing from a study of courtship media and ethnographic work at purity retreats and home-school conventions across the Midwest, this is the first inquiry into modern Christian courtship, an alternative to dating that asks young people to avoid both romance and sex until they are ready to be married. Bridging sociological and historical studies of American Christianity with youth and girlhood studies literatures, Elizabeth Shively finds that the courtship system is designed to shore up the patriarchal nuclear family structure at the center of conservative Christianity and ensure predictability in the face of emerging adulthood: single young women work to embody ideals of "luminous femininity" and model themselves after archetypes such as the "Proverbs 31 woman," the "stay-at-home-daughter," and the "mission-minded girl," and courting couples strive to "guard their hearts" against premature emotional intimacy. Nonetheless, participants report that courtship, like other relationships, inevitably carries an element of risk, and it ultimately fails to offer a substantial challenge to the to the sexist realities of youth dating culture.

This book examines our contemporary preoccupation with risk and how criminal law and punishment have been transformed as a result of these anxieties. It adopts an historical approach to examine the development of risk control measures used across the US, UK, New Zealand, Australia and Canada - particularly since the 1980's - with the rise of the "security sanction". It also takes a criminological and sociological approach to analysing shifts in criminal law and punishment and its implications for contemporary society and criminal justice systems. Law, Insecurity and Risk Control analyses the range and scope of the 'security sanction' and its immobilizing measures, ranging from control over minor incivilities to the most serious crimes. Despite these innovations, though, it argues that our anxieties about risk have become so extensive that the "security sanction" is no longer sufficient to provide social stability and cohesion. As a consequence, people have been attracted to the 'magic' of populism in a revolt against mainstream politics and organisations of government, as with the EU referendum in the UK and the US presidential election of Donald Trump in 2016. While there have been political manoeuvrings to rein back risk and place new controls on it, these have only brought further disillusionment, insecurity and anxiety. This book argues that the "security sanction" is likely to become more deeply embedded in the criminal justice systems of these societies, as new risks to both the well-being of individuals and the nation state are identified.

This book addresses the educational, occupational, and income progress of Jews in the American labor market. Using theoretical and statistical findings, it compares the experience of American Jews with that of other Americans, from the middle of the 19th century through the 20th and into the early 21st century. Jews in the United States have been remarkably successful; from peddlers and low-skilled factory workers, clearly near the bottom of the economic ladder, they have, as a community, risen to the top of the economic ladder. The papers included in this volume, all authored or co-authored by Barry Chiswick, address such issues as the English language proficiency, occupational attainment and earnings of Jews, educational and labor market discrimination against Jews, life cycle and labor force participation patterns of Jewish women, and historical and methodological issues, among many others. The final chapter analyzes alternative explanations for the consistently high level of educational and economic achievement of American Jewry over the past century and a half. The chapters in this book also develop and demonstrate the usefulness of alternative techniques for identifying Jews in US Census and survey data where neither religion nor Jewish ethnicity is explicitly identified. This methodology is also applicable to the study of other minority groups in the US and in other countries.

How to study the contemporary dynamics between the religious, the nonreligious and the secular in a globalizing world? Obviously, their relationship is not an empirical datum, liable to the procedures of verification or of logical deduction. We are in need of alternative conceptual and methodological tools. This volume argues that the concept of 'social imaginary' as it is used by Charles Taylor, is of utmost importance as a methodological tool to understand these dynamics. The first section is dedicated to the conceptual clarification of Taylor's notion of social imaginaries both through a historical study of their genealogy and through conceptual analysis. In the second section, we clarify the relation of 'social imaginaries' to the concept of (religious) worldviewing, understood as a process of truth seeking. Furthermore, we discuss the practical usefulness of the concept of social imaginaries for cultural scientists, by focusing on the concept of human rights as a secular social imaginary. In the third and final section, we relate Taylor's view on the role of social imaginaries and the new paths it opens up for religious studies to other analyses of the secular-religious divide, as they nowadays mainly come to the fore in the debates on what is coined as the 'post-secular.'

Few studies focus on the modes of knowledge transmission (or concealment), or the trends of continuity or change from the Ancient to the Late Antique worlds. In Antiquity, knowledge was cherished as a scarce good, cultivated through the close teacher-student relationship and often preserved in the closed circle of the initated. From Assyrian and Babylonian cuneiform texts to a Shi'ite Islamic tradition, this volume explores how and why knowledge was shared or concealed by diverse communities in a range of Ancient and Late Antique cultural contexts. From caves by the Dead Sea to Alexandria, both normative and heterodox approaches to knowledge in Jewish, Christian and Muslim communities are explored. Biblical and qur'anic passages, as well as gnostic, rabbinic and esoteric Islamic approaches are discussed. In this volume, a range of scholars from Assyrian studies to Jewish, Christian and Islamic studies examine diverse approaches to, and modes of, knowledge transmission and concealment, shedding new light on both the interconnectedness, as well as the unique aspects, of the monotheistic faiths, and their relationship to the ancient civilisations of the Fertile Crescent.

A history of Catholics in Cardiff

This book will make a first contribution to identify the gaps in current practices and provide alternative mechanisms to conceptualize professionalism that is reflective of changing requirements, culture, and demographics of the contemporary military force.The military profession promotes the development, sustainment, and embodiment of ethos, which guides conduct across operational contexts, from times of national and international crises and security challenges (e.g., war, natural disasters, and peace support operations). It is imperative for military leaders to understand how ethos and doctrine shape professional frameworks, which guide the conduct of military members.

The seemingly vitalizing impact of religiosity on civil society is a research topic that has been extensively looked into, not only in the USA, but increasingly also in a European context. What is missing is an evaluation of the role of institutionalized religious communities, and of circumstances that facilitate or impede their status as civil society organisations. This anthology in 2 volumes aims at closing this gap by providing case studies regarding political, legal and historical aspects in various European countries. Vol. 2 provides some theoretical aspects, a report on the final conference, and case studies from Germany, France, United Kingdom, Italy, Poland and the Ukraine, as well as a special chapter on Brazil and a Note on Religious Political Ideology.

An intimate and moving portrait of daily life in New York's oldest institution of traditional rabbinic learning New York City's Lower East Side has witnessed a severe decline in its Jewish population in recent decades, yet every morning in the big room of the city's oldest yeshiva, students still gather to study the Talmud beneath the great arched windows facing out onto East Broadway. Yeshiva Days is Jonathan Boyarin's uniquely personal account of the year he spent as both student and observer at Mesivtha Tifereth Jerusalem, and a poignant chronicle of a side of Jewish life that outsiders rarely see. Boyarin explores the yeshiva's relationship with the neighborhood, the city, and Jewish and American culture more broadly, and brings vividly to life its routines, rituals, and rhythms. He describes the compelling and often colorful personalities he encounters each day, and introduces readers to the Rosh Yeshiva, or Rebbi, the moral and intellectual head of the yeshiva. Boyarin reflects on the tantalizing meanings of "study for its own sake" in the intellectually vibrant world of traditional rabbinic learning, and records his fellow students' responses to his negotiation of the daily complexities of yeshiva life while he also conducts anthropological fieldwork. A richly mature work by a writer of uncommon insight, wit, and honesty, Yeshiva Days is the story of a place on the Lower East Side with its own distinctive heritage and character, a meditation on the enduring power of Jewish tradition and learning, and a record of a different way of engaging with time and otherness.

This volume examines the question "Do abstract objects exist?", presenting new work from contributing authors across different branches of philosophy. The introduction overviews philosophical debate which considers: what objects qualify as abstract, what do we mean by the word "exist" and indeed, what evidence should count in favor or against the thesis that abstract objects exist. Through subsequent chapters readers will discover the ubiquity of abstract objects as each philosophical field is considered. Given the ubiquitous use of expressions that purportedly refer to abstract objects, we think that it is relevant to attend to the controversy between those who want to advocate the existence of abstract objects and those who stand against them. Contributions to this volume depict positions and debates that directly or indirectly involve taking one position or other about abstract objects of different kinds and categories. The volume provides a variety of samples of how positions for or against abstract objects can be used in different areas of philosophy in relation to different matters.