Your Search Results

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        January 2017

        Exoticisation undressed

        Ethnographic nostalgia and authenticity in Emberá clothes

        by Dimitrios Theodossopoulos, Alexander Smith

        Exoticisation undressed is an innovative ethnography that makes visible the many layers through which our understandings of indigenous cultures are filtered and their inherent power to distort and refract understanding. The book focuses in detail on the clothing practices of the Emberá in Panama, an Amerindian ethnic group, who have gained national and international visibility through their engagement with indigenous tourism. The very act of gaining visibility while wearing indigenous attire has encouraged among some Emberá communities a closer identification with an indigenous identity and a more confident representational awareness. The clothes that the Emberá wear are not simply used to convey messages, but also become constitutive of their intended messages. By wearing indigenous-and-modern clothes, the Emberá-who are often seen by outsiders as shadows of a vanishing world-reclaim their place as citizens of a contemporary nation. Through reflexive engagement, Exoticisation undressed exposes the workings of ethnographic nostalgia and the Western quest for a singular, primordial authenticity, unravelling instead new layers of complexity that reverse and subvert exoticisation.

      • 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
        October 2012

        Ageing selves and everyday life in the north of England

        Years in the making

        by Alexander Smith, Cathrine Degnen

        Seeking to explore what it means to grow older in contemporary Britain from the perspective of older people themselves, this richly detailed ethnographic study engages in debates over selfhood and people's relationships with time. Based on research conducted in a former coal mining village in South Yorkshire, England, Cathrine Degnen explores how the category of 'old age' comes to be assigned and experienced in everyday life through multiple registers of interaction, including that of social memory, in a postindustrial context of great social transformation. Challenging both the notion of a homogenous relationship with time across generations and the idea of a universalised middle-aged self, Degnen argues that the complex interplay of social, cultural and physical attributes of ageing means that older people can come to have a different position in relation to time and to the self than younger people, unseating normative conventions about narrative and temporality.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        July 2012

        An ethnography of English football fans

        Cans, cops and carnivals

        by Geoff Pearson, Alexander Smith

        This book is an ethnographic account of English football fans, based upon sixteen years' of participant observation. The author identifies a distinct sub-culture of supporter - the 'carnival fan' - who dominated the travelling support of the three teams observed - Manchester United, Blackpool and the England National Team. This accessible account follows these groups home and abroad, describing their interpretations, motivations and behaviour and challenging a number of the myths about 'hooliganism' and crowd control. The text will be of value to anyone studying, researching or interested in ethnographic modes of enquiry or the behaviour of football fans. In particular it will be of value to anyone involved in the academic disciplines of policing, criminal justice, sociology, criminology, sports studies and research methods. It also makes recommendations for the management of football crowds that will be of use to practitioners involved in policing, crowd control and event management.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        September 2017

        The power of citizens and professionals in welfare encounters

        The influence of bureaucracy, market and psychology

        by Nanna Mik-Meyer, Mark Haugaard

        This book is about power in welfare encounters. Present-day citizens are no longer the passive clients of the bureaucracy and welfare workers are no longer automatically the powerful party of the encounter. Instead, citizens are expected to engage in active, responsible and coproducing relationships with welfare workers. However, other factors impact these interactions; factors which often pull in different directions. Welfare encounters are thus influenced by bureaucratic principles and market values as well. Consequently, this book engages with both Weberian (bureaucracy) and Foucauldian (market values/NPM) studies when investigating the powerful welfare encounter. The book is targeted Academics, post-graduates, and undergraduates within sociology, anthropology and political science.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        September 2017

        The power of citizens and professionals in welfare encounters

        The influence of bureaucracy, market and psychology

        by Nanna Mik-Meyer, Mark Haugaard

        This book is about power in welfare encounters. Present-day citizens are no longer the passive clients of the bureaucracy and welfare workers are no longer automatically the powerful party of the encounter. Instead, citizens are expected to engage in active, responsible and coproducing relationships with welfare workers. However, other factors impact these interactions; factors which often pull in different directions. Welfare encounters are thus influenced by bureaucratic principles and market values as well. Consequently, this book engages with both Weberian (bureaucracy) and Foucauldian (market values/NPM) studies when investigating the powerful welfare encounter. The book is targeted Academics, post-graduates, and undergraduates within sociology, anthropology and political science.

      • 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
        March 2017

        Britannia's children

        Reading colonialism through children's books and magazines

        by Kathryn Castle

        Britannia's children looks at the roots of society's perception of racial difference through the establishment and diffusion of the image of imperial peoples in the period before and after the First World War. Focusing on materials produced for children, by textbook historians and the popular press, it provides an important study of both the socialisation of the young and the source of race perceptions in twentieth-century British society. Britanina's children introduces the reader to the imperial images of the Indian, African and Chinese - created for the youth of Britain through their history textbooks and popular periodicals. By close study of the characterisation of the 'other', shaped in this era, one can see how the young learned of racial difference which would influence many generations to follow. This revealing book shows how society secures the rising generation in the beliefs of the parent society, and how the myths of race and nationality became an integral part of Britain's own process of self-identification. Written for historians, educators and a wider audience with an interest in the issues of race and society, this book makes important reading for those who wish to understand both the popularisation of the imperial idea and the legacy of its workings in contemporary society.

      • Trusted Partner
      • 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
        Literature: history & criticism
        September 1999

        Beginning Postmodernism

        by Tim Woods

        The first volume of Manchester University Press' 'Beginnings' series, which is based on Peter Barry's critically aclaimed bestseller, Beginning theoryThis brilliant digest offers a clear, step-by-step introduction to postmodernism on every discourse a. . . .

      • Trusted Partner
        Anthropology
        January 2014

        Ageing selves and everyday life in the north of England

        Years in the making

        by Cathrine Degnen

        Seeking to explore what it means to grow older in contemporary Britain from the perspective of older people themselves, this richly detailed ethnographic study engages in debates over selfhood and people's relationships with time. Based on research conducted in a former coal mining village in South Yorkshire, England, Cathrine Degnen explores how the category of 'old age' comes to be assigned and experienced in everyday life through multiple registers of interaction, including that of social memory, in a postindustrial context of great social transformation. Challenging both the notion of a homogenous relationship with time across generations and the idea of a universalised middle-aged self, Degnen argues that the complex interplay of social, cultural and physical attributes of ageing means that older people can come to have a different position in relation to time and to the self than younger people, unseating normative conventions about narrative and temporality.

      • 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
        December 2016

        Human remains in society

        Curation and exhibition in the aftermath of genocide and mass-violence

        by David Anderson, Paul J Lane, Zuzzana Dziuban, Vilho Shigedha, Caroline Sturdy Colls, David Deutsch, Devlin M. Scofield, John Harris, Gaetano Dato, Ayala Maurer-Prager, Jean-Marc Dreyfus, Élisabeth Anstett, Jean-Marc Dreyfus, Élisabeth Anstett

        Human remains and society presents a groundbreaking account of the treatment and commemoration of dead bodies resulting from incidents of genocide and mass violence. Whether reburied, concealed, stored, abandoned or publically displayed, human remains raise a vast number of questions regarding social, legal and ethical uses by communities, public institutions and civil society organisations. Through a diverse range of international case studies, across multiple continents, this highly innovative book explores the effect of dead bodies or body parts, either desired or unintended, on various political, cultural or religious practices. How, for instance, do issues of confiscation, concealment or the destruction of human remains in mass crime impact on transitional processes, commemoration or judicial procedures? Multidisciplinary in scope, Human remains and society will appeal to readers interested in the crucial phase of post-conflict reconciliation. This includes students and researchers of history, anthropology, sociology, archaeology, law, politics and modern warfare.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        December 2016

        Human remains in society

        Curation and exhibition in the aftermath of genocide and mass-violence

        by David Anderson, Paul J Lane, Zuzzana Dziuban, Vilho Shigedha, Caroline Sturdy Colls, David Deutsch, Devlin M. Scofield, John Harris, Gaetano Dato, Ayala Maurer-Prager, Jean-Marc Dreyfus, Élisabeth Anstett, Jean-Marc Dreyfus, Élisabeth Anstett

        Human remains and society presents a groundbreaking account of the treatment and commemoration of dead bodies resulting from incidents of genocide and mass violence. Whether reburied, concealed, stored, abandoned or publically displayed, human remains raise a vast number of questions regarding social, legal and ethical uses by communities, public institutions and civil society organisations. Through a diverse range of international case studies, across multiple continents, this highly innovative book explores the effect of dead bodies or body parts, either desired or unintended, on various political, cultural or religious practices. How, for instance, do issues of confiscation, concealment or the destruction of human remains in mass crime impact on transitional processes, commemoration or judicial procedures? Multidisciplinary in scope, Human remains and society will appeal to readers interested in the crucial phase of post-conflict reconciliation. This includes students and researchers of history, anthropology, sociology, archaeology, law, politics and modern warfare.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        May 2017

        The absurdity of bureaucracy

        How implementation works

        by Nina Holm Vohnsen, Rod Rhodes

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