Books

Death, Dying and Bereavement: New Sociological Perspectives

Sharon Mallon and Laura Towers (eds)

While death, dying and bereavement are universal life events, the social conditions under which death takes place are fundamental in shaping how it is experienced by the individual. Bringing together contributors from around the world, this collection of chapters provides sociological insights into death, dying and bereavement.

Published November 2024

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Platform Politics: Corporate Power, Grassroots Movements and the Sharing Economy

Luke Yates

The ‘sharing economy’, powered by companies like Airbnb, Uber and Deliveroo, promised to revolutionize the way we work and live. But what changes have come about, and why? This book shows how platform capitalism is not only shaped by business decisions, but is a result of struggles involving social movements, consumer politics and state interventions. It focuses in particular on the controversial tactics used by platform giants to avoid regulation. 

Published November 2024

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Global Marxism: Decolonisation and revolutionary politics

Simin Fadaee

A cutting-edge exploration of how Marx's ideas have been adopted and adapted by revolutionary thinkers in the Global South. For much of the twentieth century, the ideas of Karl Marx provided the backbone for social justice around the world. But today the legacy of Marxism is contested, with some seeing it as Eurocentric and irrelevant to the wider global struggle. In Global Marxism, Simin Fadaee argues that Marxism remains a living tradition and the cornerstone of revolutionary theory and practice in the Global South. 

Published September 2024

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Everyday Eating: Food, taste and trends in Britain since the 1950s

Alan Warde

How have eating habits changed in recent decades? What does it mean to eat well? This fascinating book examines continuity and change in food consumption and eating patterns since the 1950s. The culinary landscape of Britain is explored through discussion of commodification, globalisation and diversification enabling an understanding of both developing trends and enduring habits.

Published June 2024

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Reimagining Age-Friendly Communities Urban Ageing and Spatial Justice

Tine Buffel, Patty Doran and Sophie Yarker (eds)

How can we design, develop and adapt urban environments to better meet the needs and aspirations of an increasingly diverse ageing population? This edited collection offers a new approach to understanding the opportunities and challenges of creating ‘age-friendly’ communities in the context of urban change. 

Published June 2024

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The Asian Gang Revisited: Changing Muslim masculinities

Claire Alexander

This book picks up the story of Alexander's earlier book 'The Asian Gang' over the subsequent two decades, examining the changing identities of the original participants as they transition into adulthood in the context of increased public and political concerns over Muslim masculinities, spanning the War on Terror, 'grooming gangs' and increased Islamophobia. 

Published January 2024

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The ethics of researching the far right: Critical approaches and reflections

Antonia Vaughan, Joan Braune, Meghan Tinsley and Aurelien Mondon (eds)

As far, radical, and extreme-right politics become increasingly mainstream globally, research is essential to understand the most effective ways to combat these dangerous ideologies. Yet engaging with far right texts and movements raises a number of urgent ethical issues.

Published April 2024.

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Feminist Fandom: Media Fandom, Digital Feminisms, and Tumblr

Briony Hannell

This book examines how fannish and feminist modes of cultural consumption, production, and critique are converging and opening up informal spaces for young people to engage with feminism.

Published December 2023.

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The Biopolitics of Dementia: A Neurocritical Perspective

James Rupert Fletcher

This book explores how dementia studies relates to dementia’s growing public profile and corresponding research economy. It argues that a neuropsychiatric biopolitics of dementia positions dementia as a syndrome of cognitive decline, caused by discrete brain diseases, distinct from ageing, widely misunderstood by the public, that will one day be overcome through technoscience. 

Published November 2023

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Resisting Radicalisation? Understanding Young People's Journeys through Radicalising Milieus

Hilary Pilkington (ed)

This book of extensive empirical research conducted across Europe explains how, and why, young people become engaged in radical(ising) milieus but also resist radicalisation into violent extremism.

Published November 2023

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Masking in the Pandemic: Materiality, Interaction, and Moral Practice

Owen Abbott, Vanessa May, Sophie Woodward, Rob Meckin and Leah Gilman.

This book explores masking during the pandemic from an everyday life perspective, approaching the topic of masking in terms of material, interactional, and moral practice. 

Published November 2023

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Families

Vanessa May

Exploring what is and has been understood by ‘family’ in different sociocultural contexts and how family life intersects with social spheres such as the state, the labour market and the economy.

Published November 2023

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A Critical History of Dementia Studies

James Rupert Fletcher and Andrea Capstick (eds)

The first critical history of dementia studies. Focusing on the emergence of dementia studies in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, it draws on critical theory to interrogate the very notion of dementia studies as an entity, shedding light on the affinities and contradictions that characterise the field. By a collection of internationally renowned experts in a variety of fields, including people with dementia, and perspectives from education, the arts, human rights and much more. 

Published September 2023

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The Materiality of Nothing: Exploring Our Everyday Relationships with Objects Absent and Present

Helen Holmes

This book explores the invisible, intangible and transient materials and objects of everyday life and the relationships we have with them. 

Published July 2023

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Brutalism as Found: Housing, Form, and Crisis at Robin Hood Gardens

Nicholas Thoburn

Robin Hood Gardens was designed as an ethical and aesthetic encounter with the flux and crises of the social world. Now demolished, this Brutalist estate has been much disputed. But the clichéd debates marginalise the estate's residents and obscure its architectural originality. Thoburn centres the estate's lived experience of a multiracial working class, not to displace the architecture's sensory qualities of matter and form, but to radicalise them for our present.

Published December 2022

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Donors: Curious Connections in Donor Conception

Petra Nordqvist and Leah Gilman

What is expected of 21st Century egg and sperm donors, and how does being a donor impact on men and women’s own personal lives and relationships? How do donors navigate connections and relationships created by donation? What do these connections mean to them, and to the people around them –their partners, parents, siblings and children?

Published October 2022.

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The Eroticizing of HIV: Viral Fantasies

Jaime García Iglesias

An exploration of sexual fantasies and their influence on everyday lives through a sociological study of gay men who fetishise HIV infection. 

Published September 2022.

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Marxism, Religion, and Emancipatory Politics

Graeme Kirkpatrick, Peter McMylor, Simin Fadaee (editors)

Challenging the idea that Marxism is simply a rejection of religion, both in theory and practice, this book resuscitates the study of religion as a rubric for analysing political and religious movements. 

Published August 2022.

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Creating spaces for an ageing society: The role of critical social infrastructure

Sophie Yarker

Creating spaces for an ageing society considers the existing social science literature on shared neighbourhood spaces through the perspective of an ageing population. It asks the question; how can we use social infrastructure to build local neighbourhoods that are supportive of the social relationships we need in later life?

Published November 2021.

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Anti-racist scholar activism

Remi Joseph-Salisbury and Laura Connelly

How can anti-racist scholar-activists navigate barriers and backlash in order to leverage the opportunities and resources of the university in service to communities of resistance? This book is a call to arms for academics who are, or want to be, committed to social justice.

Published November 2021.

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Commemorating Muslims in the First World War Centenary: Making Melancholia

Meghan Tinsley

The book engages with the explosion of public commemorations in Britain and France in the wake of the First World War centenary, alongside the hyper-visibility of British and French Muslims in political and popular discourse. Bringing these two phenomena together, it draws on national commemorations in Britain and France, alongside eleven local field sites that foregrounded Muslims, to make sense of how national memory changes when it seeks to include a previously excluded group.

Published November 2021.

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Contemporary Megaprojects

Edited by Seth Schindler, Simin Fadaee and Dan Brockington.

Contemporary megaprojects have evolved from the discreet, modernist projects undertaken in the past by centralized authorities to encompass everything from large-scale construction to space exploration. With case studies ranging from mega-plantations in Southeast Asia to ocean mapping to sports events, this volume demonstrates the increasing ambition and pervasiveness of megaprojects, and their significant impact on both society and the environment.

Published August 2021.

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Pandemics: The Basics

Elisa Pieri

An engaging, jargon-free introduction to global pandemics, with an overview of the many origins and triggers of pandemic events. It covers the impacts generated by novel infectious disease outbreaks across various dimensions, from social and ethical to medical and political, from media to economic and legal implications. It discusses preparedness strategies, lessons learned, and how mitigation measures, from quarantine and social distancing, to data sharing and surveillance systems, may create unintended impacts.

Published March 2021.

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Technical Politics: Andrew Feenberg's Critical Theory of Technology

Graeme Kirkpatrick

Andrew Feenberg is an unusual figure: a critical theorist with an essentially optimistic view of technology. His concept of 'technical politics' puts technology design at the heart of disputes over the future shape of society. This book provides the first sustained critique of Feenberg's work, describing how it has developed from the tradition of Marx and Marcuse and analysing the key ideas of formal bias, ambivalence, progressive rationalisation and primary and secondary instrumentalisation.

Published May 2020.

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Mundane Methods: Innovative Ways to Research the Everyday

Helen Holmes and Sarah Marie Hall

Bringing together a range of interdisciplinary approaches this book provides a practical, hands-on approach for scholars interested in studying the mundane and exploring its potential. Divided into three key themes this volume explores methods for studying: materials and memories, emotions and senses, and mobilities and motion; with encounters, relationships, practices, spaces, temporalities and imaginaries cross-cutting throughout.

Published May 2020.

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The Social Significance of Dining Out: A Study of Continuity and Change

Alan Warde, Jessica Paddock and Jennifer Whillans

Offering a unique comparison of the social differences between London, Bristol and Preston from 1995 to 2015, charting the dynamic relationship between eating in and eating out. Addressing the changing domestic divisions of labour around food preparation, the variety of culinary experience for different sections of the population, and class differences in taste and the pleasures and satisfactions associated with dining out.

Published May 2020.

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Ethnicity, Race and Inequality in the UK: State of the Nation

Bridget Bryne, Claire Alexander, Omar Khan, James Nazroo, William Shankley

This book provides commentary by some of the UK’s foremost scholars of race and ethnicity on data relating to sectors of society, including employment, health, education. It explores progress and identifies areas where inequalities remain and asks how our thinking around race and ethnicity has changed in an era of Islamophobia, Brexit and an increasingly diverse population.

Published April 2020.

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A Sense of Inequality

Wendy Bottero

This book considers what provokes everyday ‘views’ or framings of inequality. It examines how different approaches can help us understand this process, drawing on a range of literature, including social attitudes and perceptions research, class identities and neoliberalism, theories of the psychosocial, affect and the abject, social constructionism, social movements research, and pragmatism. 

Published in 2020.

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Connecting Sounds: The Social Life of Music

Nick Crossley

Crossley argues that music is a form of social interaction, interwoven in the fabric of society and in constant interplay with its other threads. Musical interactions are often also economic interactions, for example, and sometimes political interactions. They can be forms of identity work, for both individuals and collectives, contributing to the reproduction or bridging of social divisions.

Published January 2020.

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Birth and Death: Experience, Ethics and Politics

Kath Woodward and Sophie Woodward

Usually conceived in opposition to each other - birth as a hopeful beginning, death as an ending - this book brings them into dialogue with each other to argue that both are central to our experiences of being in the world.

Published December 2019.

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Material Methods: Researching and Thinking with Things

Sophie Woodward

Exploring a range of tools and approaches, Material Methods: Researching and Thinking with Things is a practical and inspiring guide to researching the material world.

Published October 2019.

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Convivial Cultures in Multicultural Cities: Polish Migrant Women in Manchester and Barcelona

Alina Rzepnikowska

This book examines the complex encounters between Polish migrant women and local populations in Manchester and Barcelona. Illustrating how cultural differences may become important resources for interaction that facilitates positive relationships, it draws on the narratives of Polish migrant women to shed new light on everyday social relations between migrant women and local populations, including settled ethnic minorities and other migrants.

Published September 2019.

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Anti-Book: On the Art and Politics of Radical Publishing

Nick Thoburn

This book explores the encounter between political thought and experimental publishing. Proposing a “communism of textual matter”, it takes a post-digital approach to a wide array of textual media forms, inviting us to challenge the commodity form of books—to stop imagining books as transcendent intellectual, moral, and aesthetic goods unsullied by commerce.

Open access version published July 2019.

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All In The Mix

Bridget Byrne and Carla De Tona

This publication considers how parents choose secondary schools for their children and makes an important intervention into debates on school choice and education. The book examines how parents talk about race, religion and class in the process of choosing.

Published May 2019.

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Sociology of Personal Life

Vanessa May, Petra Nordqvist

What can Sociology tell us about our personal lives, families and intimate relationships? This book explains how key theoretical perspectives and relevant contemporary research in the discipline can shed new light on even the most familiar areas of our everyday worlds.

Published February 2019.

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Lie Detection and the Law: Torture, Technology and Truth

Andrew Balmer 

This book develops a sociological account of lie detection practices and uses this to think about lying more generally. Bringing together insights from sociology, social history, socio-legal studies and science and technology studies (STS), it explores how torture and technology have been used to try to discern the truth.

Published December 2018.

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Snobbery

David Morgan

This book takes a fresh and engaging look at this key issue, drawing on literature, popular culture and autobiography as well as sociology and history. David Morgan explores the complex history and different varieties of snobbery as well as its all-pervasive character to reveal why, despite claims about the openness of our society, it is still a matter of public concern.

Published in December 2018.

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Technology, Media and Social Movements

Cristina Flesher Fominaya and Kevin Gillan

This book offers an interdisciplinary set of contributions from leading scholars, and explores the complex relationship between media, technology and social movements. It provides a valuable resource for scholars and students working in this rapidly developing field.

Published December 2018.

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The Fire Now: Anti-racist scholarship in times of explicit racial violence

Azeezat Johnson, Remi Joseph-Salisbury and Beth Kamunge (Eds)

Bringing together some of the UK’s leading scholars on race, this collection reframes anti-racist scholarship and activism for a new era by contributing a much-needed British angle to the US-led body of work on whiteness, anti-racist education, black queer studies and intersectionality. 

Published November 2018.

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Gender and the Radical and Extreme Right

Cynthia Miller-Idriss and Hilary Pilkington (Eds.)

This book takes up an important and often-overlooked across scholarship on the radical right, gender and education. This edited volume steps into this space, bringing together seven chapters and an afterword to help readers rethink the educational implications of research on gender and the radical right.

Published 2018.

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Forced Migration: Current Issues and Debates

Alice Bloch and Giorgia Dona (Eds.)

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Qualitative Researching

Jennifer Mason

The third edition of this best-selling text guides students and researchers through the process of doing qualitative research, clearly explaining how different theoretical approaches inform what you do in practice. The text bridges the gap between ‘cookbook’ and more abstract approaches to qualitative research, by posing ‘difficult questions' that researchers should be asking themselves . 

Published 2018.

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Home and Community: Lessons from a Modernist Housing Scheme

Sandra Costa Santos, Nadia Bertolino, Stephen Hicks, Camilla Lewis and Vanessa May 

Examining the relationships between architecture, home and community in the Claremont Court housing scheme in Edinburgh, Home and Community provides a novel perspective on the enabling potential of architecture that encompasses physical, spatial, relational and temporal phenomena.

Published 2018.

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Age-friendly cities and communities: A global perspective

Edited by Tine Buffel, Sophie Handler and Chris Phillipson

In this book, part of the Ageing in a Global Context series, leading international researchers critically assess the problems and the potential of designing age-friendly environments. The book considers the different ways in which cities are responding to population ageing, the different strategies for developing age-friendly communities, and the extent to which older people themselves can be involved in the co-production of age-friendly policies and practices. 

Published in 2018.

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Shared Housing, Shared Lives: Everyday Experiences Across the Lifecourse

Sue Heath, Katherine Davies, Gemma Edwards, Rachael Scicluna

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Analysing Social Networks (2nd edition)

Stephen P Borgatti, Martin G Everett, Jeffrey C Johnson (Eds.)

Designed to walk beginners through core aspects of collecting, visualising, analysing, and interpreting social network data, this book will get you up-to-speed on the theory and skills you need to conduct social network analysis. 

Second edition published 2018. 

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The craft of writing in sociology: Developing the argument in undergraduate essays and dissertations

Andrew Balmer and Anne Murcott

This is an indispensable companion for students studying sociology and related disciplines, such as politics and human geography, as well as courses which draw upon sociological writing, such as nursing, social psychology or health studies. It demystifies the process of constructing coherent and powerful arguments, starting from an essay's opening paragraphs, building evidence and sequencing key points in the middle, through to pulling together a punchy conclusion.  

Published 2017

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