The public space of democracies is constructed in a context that is marked by the digital transformation of the economy and society. This construction is carried out primarily through deliberation. Deliberation informs and guides both individual and collective action. To shed light on the concept of deliberation, it is important to consider the rationality of choice; but what type of rationality is this? References to economic reason are at once widespread, crucial and controversial. This book therefore deals with arguments used by individuals based on the notions of preferential choice and rational behavior, and also criticizes them. These arguments are examined in the context of the major themes of public debate that help to construct the contemporary public space: "populism", social insurance, social responsibility and environmental issues. Economic Reason and Political Reason underlines the importance of the pragmatist shift of the 2000s and revisits, through the lens of this new approach, the great utilitarian and Rawlsian normative constructs that dominated normative political economics at the end of the 20th century. Alternative approaches, based on the concept of deliberative democracy, are proposed and discussed.

This anthropological work thoroughly illustrates the novel synthesis of Christian religion and New Age spirituality in Greece. It challenges the single-faith approach that traditionally ties southern European countries to Christianity and focuses on how processes of globalization influence and transform vernacular religiosity. Based on long-term anthropological fieldwork in Greece, this book demonstrates how the popular belief in the 'evil eye' produces a creative affinity between religion and spirituality in everyday practice. The author analyses a variety of significant research themes, including lived and vernacular religion, alternative spirituality and healing, ritual performance and religious material culture. The book offers an innovative social scientific interpretation of contemporary religiosity, while engaging with a multiplicity of theoretical, analytic and empirical directions. It contributes to current key debates in social sciences with regard to globalization and secularization, religious pluralism, contemporary spirituality and the New Age movement, gender, power and the body, health, illness and alternative therapeutic systems, senses, perception and the supernatural, the spiritual marketplace, creativity and the individualization of religion in a multicultural world.

In the neoliberal world, rising individualism has frequently been linked to rising inequality. Drawing on social theory, philosophy, history, institutional research and a wealth of contemporary empirical data, this innovative book analyzes the tangled relationship between individualism and inequality and explores the possibilities of rediscovering individualism's revolutionary potential. Ralph Fevre demonstrates that a belief in individual self-determination powered the development of human rights and inspired social movements from anti-slavery to socialism, feminism and anti-racism. At the same time, every attempt to embed individualism in systems of education and employment has eventually led to increased social inequality. The book discusses influential thinkers, from Adam Smith to Herbert Spencer and John Dewey, as well as the persistence of discrimination despite equality laws, management and the transformation of individualism, individualism in work and mental illness, work insecurity and intensification. This multi-disciplinary book will be essential reading for students and scholars of sociology, economics, philosophy, political science, management science and public policy studies, among other subjects. It will also be of use to policymakers and those who want to know how the culture and politics of the neoliberal world are unfolding.

Technology is rapidly advancing, and each innovation provides opportunities for such technology to mesh with the human enactment of physical intimacy or to be used in the quest for information about sexuality. However, the availability of this technology has complicated sexual decision making for young adults as they continually navigate their sexual identity, orientation, behavior, and community. Young Adult Sexuality in the Digital Age is a pivotal reference source that improves the understanding of the combination of technology and sexual decision making for young adults, examining the role of technology in sexual identity formation, sexual communication, relationship formation and dissolution, and sexual learning and online sexual communities and activism. While highlighting topics such as privacy management, cyber intimacy, and digital communications, this book is ideally designed for therapists, social workers, sociologists, psychologists, counselors, healthcare professionals, scholars, researchers, and students.

This issue moves beyond the binary of life and death to explore how the gray areas in between-precarious life, slow death-call into question assumptions about the social in social theory. In these "collateral afterworlds," where the line between life and death is blurred, the presumed attachments of sociality to life and solitude to death are no longer reliable. The contributors focus on the daily experiences of enduring a difficult present unhinged from any redeeming future, addressing topics such as drug treatment centers in Mexico City, solitary death in Japan, Inuit colonial violence, human regard for animal life in India, and intimacies forged between grievously wounded soldiers. Engaging history, film, ethics, and poetics, the contributors explore the modes of intimacy, obligation, and ethical investment that arise in these spaces. Contributors. Anne Alison, Naisargi N. Dave, Angela Garcia, Fady Joudah, Julie Livingston, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Solmaz Sharif, Lisa Stevenson, Zoe H. Wool

CAPTIVATING LOVE STORIES CELEBRATED AND RETOLD THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER AND GLOBAL HIT As seen on BBC2 Between the Covers 'Perfection in short story form. So rarely is love expressed this richly, this vividly, or this artfully.' CANDICE CARTY-WILLIAMS 'Beautifully written and full of joy. Bolu Babalola is a star.' MEG CABOT 'Here is love as freedom, love as deep joy. Romance will never be dead, as long as Bolu is writing it.' JESSIE BURTON __________ Bolu Babalola takes the most beautiful love stories from history and mythology and rewrites them with incredible new detail and vivacity in her debut collection. Focusing on the magical folktales of West Africa, Babalola also reimagines iconic Greek myths, ancient legends from the Middle East, and stories from countries that no longer exist in our world. A high-born Nigerian goddess feels beaten down and unappreciated by her gregarious lover and longs to be truly seen. A young businesswoman attempts to make a great leap in her company, and an even greater one in her love life. A powerful Ghanaian spokeswoman is forced to decide whether to uphold her family's politics, or to be true to her heart. Whether captured in the passion of love at first sight, or realising that self-love takes precedent over the latter, the characters in these vibrant stories try to navigate this most complex human emotion and understand why it holds them hostage. Moving exhilaratingly across perspectives, continents and genres, from the historic to the vividly current, Love in Colour is a celebration of romance in all of its forms. __________ PRAISE FOR LOVE IN COLOUR: 'Captivating.' Vice 'Smart and joyful, witty and heartbreaking.' Stylist 'Epic.' Bustle 'Vibrant.' Refinery29 'Brilliant and beautiful.' Net-a-Porter

In the field of socio-legal studies or law and society scholarship, it is rare to find empirically rich and conceptually sophisticated understandings of actual legal practice. This book, in contrast, connects the conceptual and the empirical, the abstract and the concrete, and in doing so shows the law to be an irreducibly social, material and temporal practice. Drawing on cutting-edge work in the social study of knowledge, it grapples with conceptual and methodological questions central to the field: how and where judgment empirically takes place; how and where facts are made; and how researchers might study these local and concrete ways of judging and knowing. Drawing on an ethnographic study of how narratives and documents, particularly case files, operate within legal practices, this book's unique and innovative approach consists of rearticulating the traditional boundaries separating judgment from knowledge, urging us to rethink the way truths are made within law.