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Auroville in Tamil Nadu, South India, is an internationally recognised endeavour in prefiguring an alternative society: the largest, most diverse, dynamic and enduring of intentional communities worldwide.
This book is a critical and insightful analysis of the utopian practice of this unique spiritual township, by a native scholar. The author explores how Auroville’s founding spiritual and societal ideals are engaged in its communal political and economic organisation, as well as various cultural practices and what enables and sustains this prefiguratively utopian practice.
This in-depth, autoethnographic case-study is an important resource for understanding prefigurative and utopian experiments – their challenges, potentialities, and significance for the advancement of human society.
The year 2023 marks 50 years of mass incarceration in the United States. This timely volume highlights and addresses pressing social problems associated with the U.S.’s heavy reliance on mass imprisonment. In an atmosphere of charged political debate, including “tough on crime” rhetoric, the editors bring together scholars and experts in the criminal justice field to provide the most up-to-date science on mass incarceration and its ramifications on justice-impacted people and our communities.
This book offers practical solutions for advocates, policy and lawmakers, and the wider public for addressing mass incarceration and its effects to create a more just, fair and safer society.
Written by leading social scientists working in and across a variety of analytic traditions, this ambitious, insightful volume explores interpretation as a focal metaphor for understanding the body’s influence, meaning, and matter in society.
Interpreting body and embodiment in social movements, health and medicine, race, sex and gender, globalization, colonialism, education, and other contexts, the book’s chapters call into question taken-for-granted ideas of where the self, the social world, and the body begin and end.
Encouraging reflection and opening new perspectives on theories of the body that cut through the classic mind/body divide, this is an important contribution to the literature on the body.
Semiotics provides key analytical tools to understand the creation and reproduction of meaning in social life. Although some fields have productively incorporated semiotic models, sociology still needs to engage with semiosis mediation.
Written by a diverse group of authors in interpretive sociology, this ambitious volume asks what the relationship between meaning systems and action is, how we can describe culture and which roles we assign to language, social processes and cognition in a sociological context. Contributors offer empirical research that not only outlines the conceptual issues at stake, but also demonstrates ‘how to do things’ with semiotics through case studies.
Synthesizing a diverse and fragmented landscape, this is a key reference work for scholars interested in the connection between semiotics and sociology.
This book addresses the social, political and economic turbulence in which the UK is embroiled. Drawing on Cultural Studies, it explores proliferating crises and conflicts, from the multiplying varieties of social dissent through the stagnation of rentier capitalism to the looming climate catastrophe.
Examining arguments about Brexit, class and ‘race’, and the changing character of the state, the book is underpinned by a transnational and relational conception of the UK. It traces the entangled dynamics of time and space that have shaped the current conjuncture.
Questioning whether increasingly anti-democratic and authoritarian strategies can provide a resolution to these troubles, it explores how the accumulating crises and conflicts have produced a deepening ‘crisis of authority’ that forms the terrain of the Battle for Britain.
This book addresses the prejudices that emerged out of the collision of two pandemics: COVID-19 and racism.
Offering a snapshot of experiences through counter story-telling and micro narratives, this collection assesses the racialised responses to the pandemic and investigates acts of discrimination that have occurred within social, political and historical contexts.
Capturing the divisive discourses which have dominated this contemporary moment, this is a unique and creative resource that shows how structural racism continues to operate insidiously, offering invaluable insights for policy, practicend critical race and ethnic studies.
This book rethinks meritocracy as a form of coloniality, namely, a social imaginary that reproduces narratives of ethnic and racial difference between European centres and peripheries, and between Europe and its others.
Drawing on interviews with working and middle class, white and Black Italians who moved to Britain after the 2008 economic crisis, the book explores the narratives of Northern meritocracy and Southern backwardness that inform migrants’ motivations for moving abroad, and how these narratives are experienced within classed, racialised and gendered migrations.
Connecting decolonial theory with the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, this book provides innovative insights into the relationships between meritocracy, coloniality and European whiteness, and into the social stratification of EU migrations.
Bringing together the voices of local scholars in the Philippines, this book offers critical insights into one of the world’s most disaster-prone regions.
The Asia-Pacific region is one of the most vulnerable regions in the world, with the effects of climate change contributing to rising sea levels and increasingly frequent typhoons and floods. Case studies in this book examine such disasters, including the aftermath of 2013 super typhoon Haiyan. Discussions are centred around four themes: women and empowerment, economics and recovery, community and resilience, and religion and spirituality.
Through its analysis, the book demonstrates the scopes, inequities and inefficiencies of policies and responses, as well as forms of empowerment and resilience, in meeting challenges in disaster-afflicted communities in the Philippines. Its conclusions provide a more nuanced and grounded perspective of policies, practices and approaches in the sociology of disasters today.
The liberal arts approach to higher education is a growing trend globally. We are told that the mental dexterity and independent, questioning spirit cultivated by such interdisciplinary degrees are the best preparation for the as-yet unknown executive jobs of tomorrow.
This book explores the significant recent growth of these degrees in England, in order to address an enduring problem for higher education: the relationship between meritocracy and elitism.
Against the view that the former is a myth providing rhetorical cover for the latter, it argues that these are two entangled, but discrete, value systems. Sociology must now pay attention to how students and academics attempt to disentangle them.
Understanding prisons and the policies surrounding them is of fundamental importance to students and practitioners of criminology and related fields. This concise and accessible guide offers a compendium of key information, theories, concepts, research and policy, presenting a rounded and critical overview of the prison system in England and Wales.
Covering the historical and contemporary context of prisons, the text guides the reader through prison life as experienced by different groups such as women, the work of prison officers and a tour of international prisons.
Each chapter features key learning items:
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an overview and summary;
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learning outcomes;
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end of chapter questions;
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definitions of key terms and concepts;
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examples and illustrative case studies;
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summary boxes of key research studies and further reading.
Focusing on the experiences of stakeholder groups and the themes of power, legitimacy and rehabilitation, the book concludes with an overview of the future challenges for prisons.
