What is we?

An analysis of the concept "we" and the central role it plays in the interdisciplinary humanities and social sciences. Rather than as a collective to belong to or be excluded from, or as a specific group to be identified with, the book argues that "we" functions as a method.

Land grabbing and home country development

Between 2000 and 2016, China and the UK acquired large areas of land through investment projects in sub-Saharan Africa. Ariane Goetz explains the global phenomenon of land grabbing from the perspective of these two investor countries, offering insights into the political economies that enable the...

Working for debt

Working for Debt explores how the fight against wage loans divided the American credit market along class, race, and gender lines. Simon Bittmann argues that the moral and political crusades of Progressive Era reformers helped create the exclusionary credit markets that favored white male breadwi...

Trade and nation

In the seventeenth century, English economic theorists lost interest in the moral status of exchange and became increasingly concerned with the roots of national prosperity. Emily Erikson brings together historical, comparative, and computational methods to explain the institutional forces that b...

Women and work in rural india

The book is a compilation of papers examining women’s role in rural production systems in India. The book is divided into six sections that explore conceptual, theoretical, and methodological issues; primary and secondary data; and historical perspectives.

Experiencing hiv

Hidden hate

Mathew Creighton develops a new model for understanding xenophobia by shining a light on the layers of intolerance concealed beneath the surface.

Teaching research in design

Sandra Dittenberger, Hans Stefan Moritsch and Agnes Raschauer discuss how the concept of learning by research can be integrated into product design studio teaching. They show different international approaches for integrating research into teaching and contrast the areas of design research with s...

Patriotic education in contemporary russia

This book outlines the complexities, contestation, and contradictions in the formal organization and contents of patriotic education in post-Soviet Russia. While the topics of patriotism and patriotic education are highly political and politicized, this study approaches them from a more sociologi...

Afroasian musical imaginaries

This book is a collection of papers presented at a colloquium, ‘AfroAsian Musical Imaginaries’ that was organized by the IIC-IRD in collaboration with a project titled ‘RecentringAfroAsia: Musical and Human Migrations, 700-1500 AD’ that started from Cape Town in South Africa.

Academic culture: an analytical framework for understanding academic work

That we live in a world ruled and confused by cultural diversity has become common sense. The social sciences gave birth to a new theoretical paradigm, the creation of cultural theories. Since then, social science theorizing applies to any social phenomenon across the world exploring cultural div...

Defining work tools: studying effects of digitalising work tools

This reader combines empirically grounded insights into how changes in work tools affect our work and how we react to it. It offers a hands-on approach to discovering the impacts digitalization might have on qualification and the labor market. Work tools can be used to link analytical perspective...

Concepts and categories

A team of sociologists presents a groundbreaking model of concepts and categorization that can guide sociological and cultural analysis of a wide variety of social situations. Using this model, important yet commonplace phenomena such as routine buying decisions can be quantified in terms of the ...

The conversational firm

A fast-growing social media marketing company, TechCo encourages all of its employees to speak up. By promoting open dialogue across the corporate hierarchy, the firm has fostered a uniquely engaged workforce and an enviable capacity for change. Yet the path hasn't always been easy. TechCo has co...

Skateboarding between subculture and the olympics

The inclusion of skateboarding as an official discipline in the 2020 Olympic Games marks the pinnacle of a decades-long process of commercialization and sportification. This anthology creates an analytical framework for understanding the fundamental conflict between skateboarding’s core ethos and...

The corsairs of saint-malo

Henning Hillmann examines the merchant community of Saint-Malo, Brittany, a key port in the French Atlantic economy, to shed light on the local networks that linked commerce and conflict in early modern Europe. He combines rich descriptions of privateering campaigns with quantitative network anal...

Transnationalizing radio research

Transnationalizing Radio Research presents a theoretical and methodological guide for exploring radio's multiple »global ages«, from its earliest years through its recent digital transformations. It offers radio scholars theoretical tools and concrete case studies for moving beyond national resea...

Lost in ideology

Lost in Ideology maps the ideological terrain of the past 200 years and asks whether the current disorientation engulfing the world’s liberal democracies is in no small part ideological in origin.

Data money

In this groundbreaking ethnographic analysis of crypto economies and their global markets and communities, Koray Caliskan offers an inside view of how cryptocurrencies are made and traded.

Urban curating

Urban Curating explores the interconnectedness of economy, ecology, and labor in urban history as well as practices of remembrance. Drawing on the author’s work as an urban curator, the focus is on caring repair, refusal, and resistance—fighting the spatialization of injustice by building feminis...

Banished to the homeland

The 1996 U.S. Immigration Reform and Responsibility Act has led to the forcible deportation of tens of thousands of Dominicans from the United States. Following thousands of these individuals over a seven-year period, David C. Brotherton and Luis Barrios use a unique combination of sociological a...

American resistance

Who are the millions of people marching against the Trump administration? American Resistance traces activists from the streets back to the communities and congressional districts around the country where they live, work, and vote. Using innovative data, Dana R. Fisher analyzes how resistance gro...

When the state winks

When the State Winks traces the performance of state-endorsed Orthodox conversion in Israel. Michal Kravel-Tovi complicates the popular perception that it is a "wink-wink" relationship in which both sides agree to treat pretenses of faith as real, developing new ways to think about the connection...

Durable economies

This book argues for a deeper engagement with durability, which is essential for understanding of how economies work; and for envisaging alternative economies built on principles of environmental stewardship and social justice.

Reimagining digital cosmopolitanism

Reimagining the concept of cosmopolitanism for the twenty-first century, based on contemporary theory.

Organizing networks

What are organizations? Where do they come from? How are they transformed and adapted to new situations? In the digital age and in the global network society, traditional theories of the organization can no longer answer these questions. Based on actor-network theory, this book explains organizat...

[un]grounding

This edited volume puts contemporary debates arising from the “spatial turn” in cultural and social sciences in a dialogue with postfoundational theories of space and place to devise postfoundationalism as a radical approach to urban studies.

The death of idealism

Why do Peace Corps volunteers often return having lost their idealism? In The Death of Idealism, Meghan Elizabeth Kallman details the combination of social forces and organizational pressures that depoliticizes Peace Corps volunteers, channels their idealism toward professionalization, and leads ...

The power of place in play

»There's nothing really fun about the park in winter!« – Christina Ergler is the first one to explore why ›play‹ resonates differently across urban localities and seasons. She draws on Bourdieu's theory of practice and Gibson's affordance theory to show that determinants of seasonal outdoor play ...

Heading home

Heading Home reveals the stark gap between the promise of gender equality and women’s experience of continued injustice. It draws on in-depth interviews with highly educated London women who left paid employment to take care of their children, juxtaposed with media and policy depictions of women,...

Working for respect

Adam Reich and Peter Bearman examine how Walmart workers make sense of their jobs in order to consider the nature of contemporary low-wage work, as well as the obstacles and opportunities such workplaces present for social and economic justice. Working for Respect makes important contributions to...

Blogging in beirut

Unlike previous media-analytic research, Sarah Jurkiewicz's anthropological study understands blogging as a social field and a domain of practice. This approach underlines the significance of blogging in practitioners' daily lives and for their self-understanding. In this context, the notion of p...

Clash of identities

By revisiting the past hundred years of shared Palestinian and Jewish-Israeli history, Baruch Kimmerling reveals surprising relations of influence between a stateless indigenous society and the settler-immigrants who would later form the state of Israel. Shattering our assumptions about these two...

Ambitious and anxious

Yingyi Ma offers a multifaceted analysis of the wave of Chinese students across American higher-education based on research in both Chinese high schools and U.S. institutions. Ma argues that their experiences embody the duality of ambition and anxiety that arises from transformative social change...

An ungovernable foe

Natalie B. Aviles examines seventy years of federally funded scientific breakthroughs in the laboratories of the U.S. National Cancer Institute to shed new light on how bureaucratic organizations nurture innovation.

Carried away

Asserting that a history of shopping was, until recently, a history of women, Rachel Bowlby trains her eye on the evolution of the modern shopper. She uses a compelling blend of history, literary analysis, and cultural criticism to explore the rise of department stores and supermarkets of the Uni...

Inequality and mobility

This book investigates the erosion of capabilities and aspirations in post-revolutionary Tunisia

Fantasies of the new class

America's post–World War II prosperity created a boom in higher education, expanding the number of university-educated readers and making a new literary politics possible. Writers began to direct their work toward the growing professional class, and the American public in turn became more open to...

An address in paris

Aïssatou Mbodj-Pouye examines the changing roles that foyers have played in the lives of generations of West African migrants, weaving together rich ethnographic description with a critical historical account.

Beyond quantity

This book asks what epistemological challenges arise when we think about the use of AI beyond its dependency on big data.