Bøger i Cambridge Cultural Social Studies serien

Places identity politics in its historical framework, analyzing the evolution of the concepts and traditions of racial and gender identity. Linda Nicholson examines how changing ideas about social identity both helped and hindered successive social movements and explains the shift to a new discourse of identity politics in the 1960s.

Focusing on rightwing populist politics in contemporary Europe, particularly the French National Front, Mabel Berezin argues that the populist movement would not have emerged in the absence of intensified Europeanization. A compelling read which makes a novel argument about the relation between democracy and political and social security.

This book combines original theoretical analysis with real life case studies to examine the nature of the standoff. The author explores the archetypal patterns of human action and cognition that move us into and out of these highly charged situations and seeks to theorize the contingency of all such moments.

Examining how de Beauvoir is constructed as an intelligible self by academics, biographers and the media, this book proposes an original conception of identity and subjectivity in the context of recent post-structuralist and queer debates and argues that attempts to 'deconstruct' identity founder on Western concepts such as individuality.

This book proposes a theory of collective and national identity based on culture and language rather than power and politics. A study also of Germany before 1871, it shows how the codes of nineteenth-century German identity in turn became those of the divided Germany between 1945 and 1989.

Investigating American television viewing habits as a distinct cultural form this book is based on an empirical study of the day-to-day use of television by working people and develops a unique theoretical approach to explore the way in which people give meaning to their viewing practices.

This 1996 book presents a theory of the formation of national literatures, based on analysis of two hundred American and Canadian novels. Sarah Corse accounts for cross-national differences and illuminates the historically-constructed and symbolic nature of the relationship between literature and the nation-state.

This book compares the post-Second World War histories of the American and British gay and lesbian movements. The two case study chapters function as brief historical sketches which provide an introduction to British and American gay and lesbian history. An appendix provides a useful evaluative summary to social movement theories.

In this groundbreaking book, Alberto Melucci delves into questions about the self, in a globalised, information society, as both a psychological and socio-cultural entity. He examines the self as the site of highly personal experiences, such as laughing and loving, and through more impersonal experiences, such as of time.

This book is an ambitious intertwining of multidisciplinary themes about citizenship, social exclusion, statelessness, civil society, knowledge, the public sphere, networks and narrativity. Margaret Somers offers a fundamental rethinking of democracy, freedom, rights and social justice in today's world. This is political, economic and cultural sociology and social theory at its best.

The growing success of Arab soccer teams and players in Israel highlights fundamental tensions and contradictions in Israeli collective identity and in Arab-Jewish relations. This book analyses the political significance of sport in ethno-national conflicts and argues that equality in the soccer sphere legitimises contemporary inequality between Jews and Arabs.

Fuyuki Kurasawa develops a new perspective on human rights and the creation of an alternative globalization. Focusing on how groups and persons struggling against transnational injustices act, he identifies five modes of practice (bearing witness, forgiveness, foresight, aid and solidarity) that represent the ethical and political substance of global justice.

Ali Mirsepassi explores Eurocentric assumptions about modernity and Islamic Fundamentalism. He argues the Iranian Revolution was not a clash between modernity and tradition but an attempt to accommodate modernity within a sense of authentic Islamic identity and culture and assesses the future of secularism and democracy in the Middle East.

This volume brings together seminal work in an important intellectual tradition in sociology. Sections on Culture as Text and Code, The Production and Reception of Culture, and Culture in Action contain theoretical and empirical contributions addressing the key debates in cultural sociology.

A powerful critique of rational choice theory which offers a solution to an important historiographical puzzle. Erik Ringmar's original, non-rational theory of action demonstrates the fundamental role of identity in explaining a country's involvement in war.

Leading social theorist Alberto Melucci builds on his highly influential Nomads of the Present to consider collective action in the postmodern age of information. Challenging Codes shares the social psychological perspective of its companion volume The Playing Self.

This 2005 book investigates why and in what sort of circumstances evil desire arises, and how it is channeled, or exploited into collective evildoing. A philosophical approach combined with a sociological and psychological one is brought to bear on the Holocaust and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia.

Kenneth Tucker examines the evolving productivist discourse of the Confederation Generale du Travail at the turn of the century and offers a Habermasian twist to the recent linguistic turn in labour history. His study makes an eloquent case for using history as a cultural resource in confronting our own fin de siecle.

This book is a comparative study of the interaction between monasticism and society in Theravada Buddhism and Medieval Catholicism. It investigates the forces that shaped the ideological power of religious elites in the historical framework of the Great Traditions.

In this book, Ron Eyerman explores the formation of the African-American identity through the cultural trauma of slavery. He offers insights into the intellectual and generational conflicts of identity-formation which have a truly universal significance, as well as providing a compelling account of the birth of African-American identity.

A major comparative analysis of fundamentalist movements in historical and cultural context, spanning revolutionary France, America and Japan, with an emphasis on the contemporary scene. The central theme is the Jacobin nature of modern fundamentalist movements, with their ambivalence towards tradition and the surprisingly progressive role they sometimes play.

American patriotism is a civil religion organized around a sacred flag. Its citizens periodically sacrifice their children to unify the group. Using an anthropological approach, this groundbreaking study explains the rituals of American nationalism, and analyses the malaise pervading post-war American society.

A highly accessible account of the debates concerning human embryo research, tracing the origins of the controversy to debates in the 1960s about abortion and moral reform and examining reactions in the 1990s to sex selection and the use of eggs from human embryos for research.

Darnell M. Hunt explores how race shapes the construction of news and viewers' understandings of it, by examining televised coverage of the Los Angeles 'riots' and viewers' responses to it. A major contribution to the debates about the power of television and our power to resist it.

Suzanne Kirschner traces psychoanalytic theories of the self back to biblical and neoplatonic roots to show that religious themes and values still influence how modern psychologists make sense of the human condition.

Colonial Fantasies, first published in 1998, examines the Western fascination with the veiled women of the Orient. It challenges dualistic conceptions of identity and difference, West and East, and questions the traditional masculinist assumptions of Orientalism and feminist discourses which seek to 'liberate' the veiled woman.

Chandra Mukerji challenges the association of state power with socials structures alone in a fascinating cultural analysis of how Louis XIV used Versailles to equate lawlike land control with the order of nature, showcasing distinctively French skills and design in a formal paralleling of military feats of engineering.

What are the experiences and symbols which define nationhood? Nation and Commemoration focuses on the major centennial and bicentennial celebrations to examine how two similar sets of people, Australians and Americans, have created and recreated their different national identities.

This book challenges the myth that individualism necessarily weakens commitments to the common good. Examining environmental and other activist groups in which individualism enhances political commitment, it invites us to rethink understandings of commitment, community, and individualism in a post-traditional world.

Social postmodernism offers a transformative political vision and addresses the live questions in identity politics. The postmodern focus on race, sexuality and gender is sharpened by integrating the micro-social concerns of the new social movements and macro-institutional and cultural analysis.