Your Search Results

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        January 2017

        Immersion

        Marathon swimming, embodiment and identity

        by Alexander Smith, Karen Throsby

        Immersion is about the extreme sport of marathon swimming. Drawing on extensive (auto)ethnographic data, Immersion explores the embodied and social processes of becoming a marathon swimmer and investigates how social belonging is produced and policed. Using marathon swimming as a lens, this foundation provides the basis for an exploration of what constitutes the 'good' body in contemporary neoliberal society across a range of sites including charitable swimming, fatness, gender and health. The book argues that the self-representations of marathon swimming are at odds with its lived realities, and that this reflects the entrenched and limited discursive resources available for thinking about the sporting body in the wider social and cultural context. The book is aimed primarily at readers at undergraduate level and upwards with an interest in sociology, the sociology of the body, the sociology of sport, gender and the sociology of health and illness.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        June 2017

        Debating civilisations

        Interrogating civilisational analysis in a global age

        by Jeremy C. A. Smith

        Contemporary civilisational analysis has emerged in the post-Cold War period as a forming but already controversial field of scholarship. Debating civilisations seeks to evaluate the main currents of the field and its principal competitors. The author draws a unique comparison of many key scholars of civilisations, comparing civilisational analysis with competing perspectives and presenting a fresh theoretical approach. Debating civilisations will appeal to academics and postgraduate and final-year undergraduate students in the fields of history, comparative and historical sociology and social theory.

      • Trusted Partner
        Social & cultural anthropology
        June 2015

        Integration in Ireland

        The everyday lives of African migrants

        by Fiona Murphy, Mark Maguire

        The integration of new immigrants is one of the most important issues in Europe, yet not enough is known about the lives of migrants. This book draws on several years of ethnographic research with African migrants in Ireland, many of whom are former asylum seekers. Against the widespread assumptions that integration has been handled well in Ireland and that racism is not a major problem, this book shows that migrants are themselves shaping integration in their everyday lives in the face of enormous challenges. The book, now available in paperback, will appeal to scholars and students interested in migration and ethnicity and to a general reading public interested in the stories of integration in Ireland. The book is situated within current anthropological theory and makes an important contribution, both theoretically and empirically, to understandings of the everyday and a site of possibility and critique.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        August 2017

        Cultivating political and public identity

        Why plumage matters

        by Rodney Barker

        Public and political life can no longer be seen as simply the pursuit of material gain or even as the struggle for enough food and shelter by which to live. The interests people pursue are shaped by the identities which they both inherit and cultivate. In generating identities, everything is important, from clothing to cuisine, from architecture to language, and to understand why and how people associate in groups and communities, and why they compete and conflict with each other, every aspect of identity has to be taken seriously. Whatever secrets may remain in people's minds or souls, who they are socially is what they say, what they eat, and how they live. This book is ideal reading for students, lecturers, and the general reader interested in the importance of identity in public life, and in the inherent political momentum in identity cultivation to both equality and inequality simultaneously. This title will be available as an open access ebook under a CC-BY licence.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        August 2017

        Factories for learning

        Producing race and class inequality in the neoliberal academy

        by Christy Kulz, Alexander Smith

        Over half of England's secondary schools are now academies. While their impact on achievement has been debated, the social and cultural outcomes prompted by this neoliberal educational model has received less scrutiny. This book draws on original research based at Dreamfields Academy, a celebrated flagship secondary school in a large English city, to show how the accelerated marketization and centralization of education is reproducing raced, classed and gendered inequalities. The book also examines the complex stories underlying Dreamfields' glossy veneer of success and shows how students, teachers and parents navigate the everyday demands of Dreamfields' results-driven conveyor belt. Hopes and dreams are effectively harnessed and mobilized to enact insidious forms of social control, as education develops new sites and discourses of surveillance.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        August 2017

        Factories for learning

        Producing race and class inequality in the neoliberal academy

        by Christy Kulz, Alexander Smith

        Over half of England's secondary schools are now academies. While their impact on achievement has been debated, the social and cultural outcomes prompted by this neoliberal educational model has received less scrutiny. This book draws on original research based at Dreamfields Academy, a celebrated flagship secondary school in a large English city, to show how the accelerated marketization and centralization of education is reproducing raced, classed and gendered inequalities. The book also examines the complex stories underlying Dreamfields' glossy veneer of success and shows how students, teachers and parents navigate the everyday demands of Dreamfields' results-driven conveyor belt. Hopes and dreams are effectively harnessed and mobilized to enact insidious forms of social control, as education develops new sites and discourses of surveillance.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        May 2017

        The absurdity of bureaucracy

        How implementation works

        by Nina Holm Vohnsen, Rod Rhodes

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        May 2017

        The absurdity of bureaucracy

        How implementation works

        by Nina Holm Vohnsen, Rod Rhodes

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        June 2017

        Debating civilisations

        Interrogating civilisational analysis in a global age

        by Jeremy C. A. Smith

        Contemporary civilisational analysis has emerged in the post-Cold War period as a forming but already controversial field of scholarship. Debating civilisations seeks to evaluate the main currents of the field and its principal competitors. The author draws a unique comparison of many key scholars of civilisations, comparing civilisational analysis with competing perspectives and presenting a fresh theoretical approach. Debating civilisations will appeal to academics and postgraduate and final-year undergraduate students in the fields of history, comparative and historical sociology and social theory.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        June 2017

        Debating civilisations

        Interrogating civilisational analysis in a global age

        by Jeremy C. A. Smith

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        July 2017

        Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

        The path to economic crisis in Scotland

        by Jonathan Hearn, Alexander Smith

        This book is based on ethnographic research from 2001-2, during Bank of Scotland's first year of merger with Halifax to form HBOS. The research is revisited from the present perspective in the wake of the global banking and financial crisis that undermined HBOS in 2008. This historical perspective on the ethnographic data is used to explore: people's responses to the pressures of heightened competition and organisational change; mutual and sometimes antagonistic perceptions of Scottish and English identities across the two merged banks; conflicting evaluations of national and organisational cultures; and the challenges of integrating ethnographic and historical perspectives in a single study. As an historical ethnography it 'salvages' a disappearing culture of Scottish and UK banking, disintegrated by neoliberal processes.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        July 2017

        Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

        The path to economic crisis in Scotland

        by Jonathan Hearn, Alexander Smith

        This book is based on ethnographic research from 2001-2, during Bank of Scotland's first year of merger with Halifax to form HBOS. The research is revisited from the present perspective in the wake of the global banking and financial crisis that undermined HBOS in 2008. This historical perspective on the ethnographic data is used to explore: people's responses to the pressures of heightened competition and organisational change; mutual and sometimes antagonistic perceptions of Scottish and English identities across the two merged banks; conflicting evaluations of national and organisational cultures; and the challenges of integrating ethnographic and historical perspectives in a single study. As an historical ethnography it 'salvages' a disappearing culture of Scottish and UK banking, disintegrated by neoliberal processes.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        December 2017

        Realising the city

        Urban ethnography in Manchester

        by Camilla Lewis, Jessica Symons

        This book offers an inside view of Manchester, England demonstrating the complexity of urban dynamics from a range of ethnographic vantage points, including the city's football clubs, the airport, housing estates, the Gay Village and the city's annual civic parade. These perspectives help trace the multiple dynamics of a vibrant and rapidly changing post-industrial city, showing how people's decisions and actions co-produce the city and give it shape. Using the metaphor of the kaleidoscope, with each turn of the wheel, another aspect of the city is materialised. In doing so, the contributors complicate the dominant narrative of Manchester's renaissance as driven by the city administration's entrepreneurial ethos. By taking up civic space and resources with council-led cultural representations focused largely on generating financial income for the city, three decades of command-and-control politics has inhibited grassroots and spontaneous forms of emergent publics.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        December 2017

        Realising the city

        Urban ethnography in Manchester

        by Camilla Lewis, Jessica Symons

        This book offers an inside view of Manchester, England demonstrating the complexity of urban dynamics from a range of ethnographic vantage points, including the city's football clubs, the airport, housing estates, the Gay Village and the city's annual civic parade. These perspectives help trace the multiple dynamics of a vibrant and rapidly changing post-industrial city, showing how people's decisions and actions co-produce the city and give it shape. Using the metaphor of the kaleidoscope, with each turn of the wheel, another aspect of the city is materialised. In doing so, the contributors complicate the dominant narrative of Manchester's renaissance as driven by the city administration's entrepreneurial ethos. By taking up civic space and resources with council-led cultural representations focused largely on generating financial income for the city, three decades of command-and-control politics has inhibited grassroots and spontaneous forms of emergent publics.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        February 2017

        Antisemitism and the left

        On the return of the Jewish question

        by Robert Fine, Philip Spencer

        Universalism shows two faces to the world: an emancipatory face that looks to the inclusion of the other, and a repressive face that sees in the other a failure to pass some fundamental test of humanity. Universalism can be used to demand that we treat all persons as human beings regardless of their differences, but it can also be used to represent whole categories of people as inhuman, not yet human or even enemies of humanity. The Jewish experience offers an equivocal test case. Universalism has stimulated the struggle for Jewish emancipation, but it has also helped to develop the idea that there is something peculiarly harmful to humanity about Jews - that there is a 'Jewish question' that needs to be 'solved'. This original and stimulating book traces struggles within the Enlightenment, Marxism, critical theory and the contemporary left, seeking to rescue universalism from its repressive, antisemitic undertones.

      • Trusted Partner
        Social & cultural anthropology
        November 2014

        Framing cosmologies

        The anthropology of worlds

        by Edited by Allen Abramson and Martin Holbraad

        How might the anthropological study of cosmologies - the ways in which the horizons of human worlds are imagined and engaged - illuminate understandings of the contemporary world? This book addresses this question by bringing together anthropologists whose research is informed by a concern with cosmological dimensions of social life in different ethnographic settings. Its overall aim is to reaffirm the value of the cosmological frame as a continuing source of analytical insight. Attending to the novel cosmological formations that emerge in such fields as modern markets, political landscapes, digital media and popular cinema, the book's key task is to explore how modern circumstances are constituted within the variable imagination of worlds and their horizons. It will be of interest to all students and researchers in anthropology, as well as scholars in fields as diverse as film studies, cultural studies, comparative religion, science and technology studies, and broader social theory.

      • Trusted Partner
        Social & cultural anthropology
        November 2014

        Framing cosmologies

        The anthropology of worlds

        by Edited by Allen Abramson and Martin Holbraad

        How might the anthropological study of cosmologies - the ways in which the horizons of human worlds are imagined and engaged - illuminate understandings of the contemporary world? This book addresses this question by bringing together anthropologists whose research is informed by a concern with cosmological dimensions of social life in different ethnographic settings. Its overall aim is to reaffirm the value of the cosmological frame as a continuing source of analytical insight. Attending to the novel cosmological formations that emerge in such fields as modern markets, political landscapes, digital media and popular cinema, the book's key task is to explore how modern circumstances are constituted within the variable imagination of worlds and their horizons. It will be of interest to all students and researchers in anthropology, as well as scholars in fields as diverse as film studies, cultural studies, comparative religion, science and technology studies, and broader social theory.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        September 2013

        Enduring violence

        Everyday life and conflict in eastern Sri Lanka

        by Alexander Smith, Rebecca Walker

        Located in the war-torn eastern province of Sri Lanka, this book provides a rich ethnography of how Tamil-speaking communities in Batticaloa live through and make sense of a violence that shapes everyday life itself. The core of the book comes from the author's two-year close interaction with a group of (mainly women) human rights activists in the area. The book describes how the activists work in clandestine, informal ways to support families whose loved ones have been threatened, disappeared or killed and how they build networks of trust within the context of everyday violence. As Sri Lanka faces up to the enormity of the task of 'post-war reconciliation', this book aims to create a wider conversation about grief, resistance and healing in the context of violence and its long afterlife. ;

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