Series Editor: Anthony Elliott, University of South Australia
Designed to complement the successful Key Sociologists, this series covers the main concepts, issues, debates, and controversies in sociology and the social sciences. The series provides concise and accessible overviews on central topics as well as new departures in social science, such as community, power, work, sexuality, inequality, mobilities, class and the family. Books in the series develop strongly original perspectives, as critical engagements rather than literature surveys, offering lively and original treatments of their subject matter. The books will be useful to students and teachers of sociology, political science, economics, psychology, philosophy, and geography.
The Series Editor is especially interested in commissioning titles in the following areas but is open to proposals covering other new areas of development in the social sciences and sociology:
To discuss a proposal, please contact the commissioning editor Rebecca Brennan ([email protected])
By Anthony Moran
November 30, 2023
Racism has a long history and its devastating impacts continue to spark heated, moral and political debate and give rise to social movements and widespread protest. This accessible primer provides a cogent introduction to the study and confrontation of racism in the twenty-first century, making use...
By Deborah Lupton
July 20, 2023
We are living in a world in which the existence of risk is constantly debated, misinformation and disinformation are rife and spread quickly and easily through online media, and where governments and institutions continue to avoid taking decisive action even when there is general agreement that a ...
By Bent Greve
June 29, 2023
This fully revised and updated edition of Happiness provides an accessible introduction to the concept of happiness and how it can be applied to public policy in order to help citizens achieve the good life. Countries around the globe want to ensure the best for their citizens. They want them to be...
By Nick Stevenson
May 31, 2023
This accessible introductory text offers an engaging and thought-provoking discussion of class in relation to several cultural, sociological and political schools of thought and draws upon the works of a broad range of key theorists as well as contemporary thinkers to restate the ongoing importance...
By Jeffrey Weeks
December 30, 2022
Sexuality is the fifth revised and updated edition of the classic text for understanding human sexuality. This new edition brings the arguments and evidence fully up to date and explores their implication for many topical controversies, around LGBTQ+ rights, the trans experience and gender fluidity...
By John Storey
October 18, 2022
This book provides a clear and wide-ranging overview of consumption as a sociological concept. Arguing that consumption is both an unavoidable part of life and an ongoing dialectical process, it gives a critical assessment of a range of theoretical approaches to the study of consumption and the ...
By Lars Jensen, Kristín Loftsdóttir
September 28, 2021
This volume crucially provides an analytical and comparative approach, investigating the meaning and uses of the concept of exceptionalism, while demonstrating the ways in which it manifests itself in different historical and geographical settings. Exceptionalism offers comparative case studies ...
By Lars Jensen
February 28, 2020
This book presents an overview of the direct and indirect ways in which Europe continues to be influenced by its entrenched postcolonial condition. Exploring the notion of postcolonial Europe as it characterises a Europe caught at a number of crossroads, it considers the distinctly European ...
By Robin Cohen, Nicholas Van Hear
December 09, 2019
This is an unusual book. Combining social science fiction, utopianism, pragmatism, sober analysis and innovative social theory, the authors address one of the biggest dilemmas of our age – how to solve the problems arising from mass displacement. As early versions of the solution proposed by Robin ...
By Brian McDonough, Jessie Bustillos Morales
December 02, 2019
Universal basic income is a controversial policy which is causing a stir amongst academics, politicians, journalists and policy-makers all over the world. The idea of receiving ‘money for nothing’, with no strings attached, has for a long time appeared a crazy or radical proposal. But today, this ...
By Charles Turner
October 22, 2019
‘Secularization’ sounds simple, a decline in the power of religion. Yet, the history of the term is controversial and multi-faceted; it has been useful to both religious believers and non-believers and has been deployed by scholars to make sense of a variety of aspects of cultural and social change...
By Shaun Best
June 17, 2019
This book explores the concept of the stranger as a ‘modern’ social form, identifying the differing conceptions of strangerhood presented in the literature since the publication of Georg Simmel’s influential essay ‘The Stranger’, questioning the assumptions around what it means to be regarded as ‘...