Bøger i Cultural Sociology serien

This book offers a detailed and innovative study of the Dutch case of politics of citizenship and nationalism by focusing on public and political controversies in the crucial period of 1973¿2015. By foregrounding the crucial role of performance and narration in public and political debates, this book shows how discourses of citizenship and nationhood are deeply shaped by established repertoires and long-lasting lines of disagreement about difference and belonging in the Netherlands. While change did occur within the Dutch context during this period, this book reveals that these transformations were not primarily driven by purportedly permissive and accommodating responses to immigration and cultural diversity. Instead, it unveils a Dutch landscape deeply marked by challenges related to race, democracy, and liberal exceptionalism. In doing so, the book contributes to ongoing debates in the study of citizenship, nationalism, and intellectual history around the merits and limitations of liberal politics of inclusion. It critically extends concepts and arguments in cultural pragmatics and problematizes the common hope that public debate may progressively resolve antagonisms over difference. With a focus on empirical research, the book meticulously reconstructs the emergence of national identity debates in recent decades and vividly portrays the dynamics and tensions of these public performances while dissecting their role in shaping the nation's identity and its boundaries. The book covers a crucial period of the European politics of citizenship and nationhood in which anti-immigrant politics, new modes of racism, and the bordering of Europe took shape. It locates the Dutch case within these developments and insists on the importance of historical continuity and narrative performance. This book demonstrates that the Netherlands, and Europe more broadly, has not overcome the profound consequences of its past.

From its quiet inception in 1988, to a hailstorm of statewide and national controversy over thirty years later, this book follows the development of public discourse regarding a clergy sexual abuse scandal in a small Catholic Diocese in Central Pennsylvania. Weaving together the evolving local and national narratives, it offers a striking account of how stakeholder rhetoric has influenced public perception of the Catholic abuse crisis in America, and driven public actions. While the book enriches our local knowledge of the tragic--and ongoing--cultural trauma triggered by the revelation of clergy perpetrated abuse in a small Catholic Diocese, it also makes a critical theoretical contribution to our understanding of the role of rhetoric in publicizing private pain, and galvanizing collectives to take it on as their own. The process of cultural trauma, Niebauer contends, unfolds through rhetorical forms that provide individuals with a constraining and enabling set of rhetorical choices. Highlighting the recurrent rhetorical forms of narration, kategoria, apologia, and topoi, The Diocese's Darkest Chapter brings a new vocabulary and explanatory force to the study of cultural trauma, and the Catholic abuse crisis in America.

Sociology as a Human Science is a set of foundational, wide-ranging and updated essays from Isaac Ariail Reed. Gathered together for the first time with a new introduction, they articulate a distinct perspective on concept and method in social science. Reed writes about realism and positivism, postmodernism and empiricism, mechanisms and causality, and power and history, developing thereby an understanding of the key debates out of which 21st-century sociology has developed. Carefully considering all manner of arguments in metatheory and epistemology and moving towards a program of interpretive explanation focused on culture and power, Reed places sociology at the center of debates about knowledge production across the humanities and social sciences. His reconstructive approach, positioned ¿after the posts¿ (poststructuralism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism) provides a way for interpretive sociology to provide analytically sound, theoretically extensive, and empirically rich understandings of social life.

Identifying scientism as religion¿s secular counterpart, this collection studies contemporary contestations of the authority of science. These controversies suggest that what we are witnessing today is not an increase in the authority of science at the cost of religion, but a dual decline in the authorities of religion and science alike. This entails an erosion of the legitimacy of universally binding truth claims, be they religiously or scientifically informed. Approaching the issue from a cultural-sociological perspective and building on theories from the sociology of religion, the volume unearths the cultural mechanisms that account for the headwind faced by contemporary science. The empirical contributions highlight how the field of academic science has lost much of its former authority vis-à-vis competing social realms; how political and religious worldviews define particular research findings as favorites while dismissing others; and how much of today¿s distrust of science is directed against scientific institutions and academic scientists rather than against science per se.

This volume is first consistent effort to systematically analyze the features and consequences of colonial repatriation in comparative terms, examining the trajectories of returnees in six former colonial countries (Belgium, France, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, and Portugal).

Identifying scientism as religion's secular counterpart, this collection studies contemporary contestations of the authority of science. These controversies suggest that what we are witnessing today is not an increase in the authority of science at the cost of religion, but a dual decline in the authorities of religion and science alike.

A resource for those interested in the triggers and safeguards of democracy and civil society, and for scholars and practitioners alike, this volume offers empirical case studies from the US, Europe, Australia, and Latin America of cross-group solidarity efforts.

Applying a cultural sociology of performance, this book interrogates how the meaning of sport intersects with gender. Broch points out uncertainties in the causal arguments made by key figures in the cultural studies tradition, instead advancing a meaning-centered study of sports as involving both a social and an athletic performance.

This original analysis of modern Greece's political culture attempts to present a "total social fact"-a coherent and complex representation of Greek socio-political culture-to identify the cultural causes of Greece's recent disastrous economic crisis.

This volume brings together Ron Eyerman's most important interventions in the field of cultural trauma and offers an accessible entry point into the origins and development of this theory and a framework of an analysis that has now achieved the status of a research paradigm.

Increasingly, such debates take place online, by organizations in the immigrant rights and the immigration control movements, who engage in symbolic work that includes blurring, crossing, maintaining, solidifying, and shifting the boundaries of belonging.

This book challenges the idea that Western media systems are becoming more American in the digital age, arguing that journalistic cultures are not only significantly different from each other still but also variably open and resistant to change.

A resource for those interested in the triggers and safeguards of democracy and civil society, and for scholars and practitioners alike, this volume offers empirical case studies from the US, Europe, Australia, and Latin America of cross-group solidarity efforts.

This book explores the lived experiences of boxers in a French banlieue, largely populated by people from working-class and immigrant backgrounds. Jerome Beauchez, who joined in the men's daily workouts for many years, analyzes the act of boxing as a high-stakes confrontation that extends well beyond the walls of the gym. Exploring the physical and existential realities of combat, the author provides a multifaceted "e;thick description"e; of this world and shows that the violence faced by the gym's members is not so much to be found in the ring as in the adversity of everyday racism and social exclusion. Boxing can therefore be understood as an act of resistance that is about more than simply fighting an opponent and that reflects all the existential struggles facing these men who are both stigmatized and socially dominated by race and class.

Throughout the book, Gill asks why the "four little girls" killed in the bombing became part of the nation's collective memory, while two black boys killed by whites on the same day were all but forgotten.

Why is it so hard to talk about sex and sexuality? In this crisp and compelling book, Amin Ghaziani provides a pithy introduction to the field of sexuality studies through a distinctively cultural lens.

This book is an original application of rhetoric and moral-emotions theory to the sociology of social movements.

Today, interest in networks is growing by leaps and bounds, in both scientific discourse and popular culture. Networks are thought to be everywhere from the architecture of our brains to global transportation systems.

Performing Punk is a rich exploration of subcultural contrasts and similarities among punks. By investigating how punk is made, for whom, and in opposition to what, this book takes the reader on a journey through the lesser-known aspects of the punk subculture.

Global Injustice Symbols and Social Movements examines our collective moral and political maps, dotted with symbols shaped by political dynamics beyond their local or national origin and offers the first systematic sociological treatment of this important phenomenon.

The struggle to create and sustain meaning in our everyday lives is fought using cultural ingredients to spin the webs of meaning that keep us going.

Every day around the world there are dozens of protests both large and small. Most groups engage the local police, some get media attention, and a few are successful.

In Liberal Barbarism, Erik Ringmar sets out to explain the 1860 destruction of Yuanmingyuan - the Chinese imperial palace north-west of Beijing - at the hands of British and French armies.