Social Sciences: The Big Issues second edition offers an introduction to the big debates within the social sciences and to what the social sciences can provide as a means of explaining the changing world. The social sciences focus upon people as individuals and as members of wider communities and networks, and look at all aspects of human relationships from the personal and intimate to the public and political. The book covers contemporary concerns with identities, citizenship, migration, diversity, new technologies, and the changing and often uncertain impact of globalization. The second edition has been extensively updated with new illustrations and examples, and additional discussion of the responses of the social sciences to the mobilities of contemporary life, such as migration, living in multiethnic and often rapidly changing communities, new forms of citizenship, the impact of the material world, the perception that we live in a more insecure and dangerous world and the role of the media in presenting ideas about the changes that might be taking place.
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 and part of living. Written by two authors, this book takes an intergenerational approach to highlight the connections and disconnections between birth and death; adopting a relational approach allows the book to explore birth and death through the key relationships that constitute them: personal and social, private and public, the affective and social norms, the actual and the virtual and the ordinary and profound. Of interest to academics and students in the fields of feminism, phenomenology and the life course, the book will also be of relevance to policy makers in the areas of birth activism and end of life care. Drawing from personal stories, everyday life and publicly contested examples, the book will also be of interest to a more general readership as it engages with questions we all at some point will grapple with.
This exciting book is an innovative and creative critique of the theories and practices of feminism, arguing that it still matters in the 21st century. Written by a mother and daughter authorial team, the book presents a dialogue across generations and reinstates a politics of difference and the importance of the category of 'woman'.
There is expanding global interest in the relationship between the psychological and the social. The bringing together of affect, emotion and feeling with social, political and cultural forces offers a creative, innovative and rich set of ways of understanding what Charles Wright Mills called the links between personal troubles and public issues. This book is an introduction to psychosocial studies. Drawing on different approaches to the field, the book introduces the main theoretical influences on psychosocial studies and their development and impact, through – for example – concepts such as the unconscious, self and identity, affect, emotion and the cultural and social unconscious. It explores the theoretical frameworks of psychosocial studies, and psychosocial research methods. The book offers examples of case studies which illustrate the diversity of psychosocial studies and what makes it distinctive. It asks: what is social about the inner worlds of the psychological? What is psychological and psychic about social worlds and social life? This clear, accessible introduction will be of interest to students and researchers across the social sciences and humanities, in particular in sociology, psychology, cultural geography, social policy and politics and cultural studies.
In Planet Sport, Woodward demonstrates why sport matters and how, arguing that we should take sport seriously, and explore what is social about it. Sport is affected by the global economy and social, political and cultural processes - but it also shapes the wider social terrain of which it is part. This is an engaging and concise introduction to some of the big issues in contemporary debates about sport in globalised societies, and will appeal to students, academics and general readers alike.
Written against the backdrop of the 2012 London Olympics, this book examines the idea of 'time' in sport, using time as a conceptual lens to explore movement, bodies, sports reporting, memory, disability, technology and the role of the past and the future in sport.
This is a book about bodies; material bodies and their practices and the regulatory bodies that shape embodied selves and their experiences. Sport is the focus for an examination of the links and intersections between lived bodies and the body politic and its disciplinary apparatuses.
Boxing is a traditional sport in many ways, characterized by continuities in the form of practices and regulations and heavy with legends and heroes reflecting its traditional/historical values. Associations with class, hegemonic masculinity and racialized inclusions/exclusions, however, sit alongside developments such as women's boxing and involvement in Mixed Martial Arts. This book will be the first to use boxing as a vehicle for exploring social, cultural and political change in a global context. It will consider to what degree and in what ways boxing reflects social transformations, and whether and how it contributes to those transformations. In exploring the relationship it will provide new ways of thinking critically about the everyday.
Visibility matters in contemporary societies; online, in the media and in the public eye. But who is seen and how? Are women still seen through a male gaze? This book explores the politics of looking and being looked at, and the relationship between actual and virtual worlds, for example in sport, art and cinema.
This book explores the social and cultural impact of the Olympic Games, examining gender and sport, the inequalities between nations and people and at what the Games offer and how they are changing, in relation to spectacles, spectatorship and culture, including the links between art and sport.
Boxing is infused with ideas about masculinity, power, race and social class, and as such is an ideal lens through which social scientists can examine key modern themes. In addition, its inherent contradictions of extreme violence and beauty and of discipline and excess have long been a source of inspiration for writers and film makers. Essential reading for anyone interested in the sociology of sport and cultural representations of gender, Boxing, Masculinity and Identity brings together ethnographic research with material from film, literature and journalism. Through this combination of theoretical insight and cultural awareness, Woodward explores the social constructs around boxing and our experience and understanding of central issues including: masculinity mind, body and the construction of identity spectacle and performance: tensions between the public and private person boxing on film: the role of cultural representations in building identities methodologies: issues of authenticity and ‘truth’ in social science.
Identity matters, but it matters in different ways at different times. Identity is a buzz word that we often hear about in all sorts of contexts, ranging from the concern with the self expressed through therapy, to identity crises that operate on the global arena, especially post 9/11.
What is really happening when people either individually or in groups identify with particular definitions of themselves or strike out to take up new identities? Do gender, class and ethnicity offer some stability, or are they limiting?
With the publication of his first book, HOUSEHOLDER, Gerard Woodward emerged as one of the most talented and unusual new poets of the 1990s. In his forthcoming collection AFTER THE DEAFENING, Woodward's powerful imagination, and the details of everyday life take on an extraordinary and exotic significance. 'A kind of punk anthropologist, his unsettling imagination violates all the thresholds between inner and outer. ' LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS 'Vivid and rarely whimsical' OBSERVER 'There are enough poems in this collection which are both felt AND written to justify Woodward's claim on our attention. Where he exhibits emotional generosity, he is very good indeed. ' Carol Ann Duffy
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