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Matters of Culture
American sociology is in the midst of a cultural turn. Where sociologists once spurned culture, today they embrace and explore it, seeking to understand the construction of social forms and the way culture matters. Problems of meaning, discourse, aesthetics, value, textuality, form and narrativity, topics traditionally within the humanists' purview, have come to the fore as sociologists increasingly emphasize the role of meanings, symbols, cultural frames and cognitive schema in their theorizations of social process and institution. Matters of Culture, first published in 2004, is an introduction to some of the best theorizing in cultural sociology, focusing in particular on questions of power, the sacred and cultural production. With a major theoretical introduction that lays out the internal structure of the field and its relation to cultural studies and contributions from leading academics Matters of Culture offers students and professors alike a representative range of the types of cultural sociological analysis available.
Beyond the Family
Reproduction is the most vital process in the regeneration of our species and our society. Nevertheless, its influence on the shape of the modern world has been consistently overlooked by social scientists who have emphasized the erosion of the family in industrialized societies. In A. F. Robertson's view families persist. And the goal of reproduction plays an essential role in everything from the organization of political parties to the growth of banks and factories. Robertson inverts the traditional wisdom that reproduction responds passively to the powerful transformative force of technology. Reproduction, he asserts, requires such extensive cooperation on the state and community level, a...
Lives in the Law
The essays look at the consequences that legal practice has on the lives of its practitioners as well as on the individual legal subject and on the shape of shared identities. These essays challenge liberal and communitarian notions of what it means to live the law. In the first of the essays, Pnina Lahav presents a study of the Chicago Seven Trial to paint a picture of the law's power to serve as a site for the definition of a collective group identity. In contrast, Sarah Gordon focuses on the experience of an individual legal subject, namely, the defendant in the Hester Vaughn trial, a notorious nineteenth-century case of infanticide. Frank Munger looks at how law constructs the identity o...
Commuter Spouses
What can we learn from looking at married partners who live apart? In Commuter Spouses, Danielle Lindemann explores how couples cope when they live apart to meet the demands of their dual professional careers. Based on the personal stories of almost one-hundred commuter spouses, Lindemann shows how these atypical relationships embody (and sometimes disrupt!) gendered constructions of marriage in the United States. These narratives of couples who physically separate to maintain their professional lives reveal the ways in which traditional dynamics within a marriage are highlighted even as they are turned on their heads. Commuter Spouses follows the journeys of these couples as they adapt to c...
Bourdieu in Question: New Directions in French Sociology of Art
In Bourdieu in Question: New Directions in French Sociology of Art, Jeffrey A. Halley and Daglind E. Sonolet offer to English-speaking audiences an account of the very lively Francophone debates over Pierre Bourdieu’s work in the domain of the arts and culture, and present other directions and perspectives taken by major French researchers who extend or differ from his point of view, and who were marginalized by the Bourdieusian moment. Three generations of research are presented: contemporaries of Bourdieu, the next generation, and recent research. Themes include the art market and value, cultural politics, the reception of artworks, theory and the concept of the artwork, autonomy in art, ethnography and culture, and the critique of Bourdieu on literature. Contributors are: Howard S. Becker, Martine Burgos, Marie Buscatto, Jean-Louis Fabiani, Laurent Fleury, Florent Gaudez, Jeffrey A. Halley, Nathalie Heinich, Yvon Lamy, Jacques Leenhardt, Cécile Léonardi, Clara Lévy, Pierre-Michel Menger, Raymonde Moulin, Jean-Claude Passeron, Emmanuel Pedler, Bruno Péquignot, Alain Quemin, Cherry Schrecker, Daglind E. Sonolet.
The Photoromance
A fascinating feminist reading of an often scorned medium: the storytelling, cross-platform success, and female fandom of the photoromance. Born in Italy and successfully exported to the rest of the world, photoromances had a readership of millions in the postwar years. By the early 1960s, more than ten million Italians read a photoromance each week. Despite its popularity, the photoromance—a form of graphic storytelling that uses photographs instead of drawings—was widely scorned as a medium, and its largely female audience derided as naive, pathetic, and uneducated. In this provocative book, Paola Bonifazio offers another perspective, making a case for the relevance of the photoromance...
Shaping the Future of African American Film
In Hollywood, we hear, it’s all about the money. It’s a ready explanation for why so few black films get made—no crossover appeal, no promise of a big payoff. But what if the money itself is color-coded? What if the economics that governs film production is so skewed that no film by, about, or for people of color will ever look like a worthy investment unless it follows specific racial or gender patterns? This, Monica Ndounou shows us, is precisely the case. In a work as revealing about the culture of filmmaking as it is about the distorted economics of African American film, Ndounou clearly traces the insidious connections between history, content, and cash in black films. How does hi...
The Global Turn
Deploying interdisciplinary theoretical perspectives that speak to interconnected global dimensions is critical if one’s work is to remain relevant and applicable to the emerging global-scale issues of our time. The Global Turn is a guide for students and scholars across all areas of the social sciences and humanities who wish to embark upon global-studies research projects. The authors demonstrate how the global can be studied from a local perspective and vice versa. Global processes manifest at multiple transnational, regional, national, and local levels—interconnected dimensions that are mutually constitutive. This book walks the reader through the steps of thinking like a global scholar in theoretical, methodological, and practical terms, explaining the implications of global perspectives for research design.
Scripted Affects, Branded Selves
In Scripted Affects, Branded Selves, Gabriella Lukács analyzes the development of a new primetime serial called “trendy drama” as the Japanese television industry’s ingenious response to market fragmentation. Much like the HBO hit Sex and the City, trendy dramas feature well-heeled young sophisticates enjoying consumer-oriented lifestyles while managing their unruly love lives. Integrating a political-economic analysis of television production with reception research, Lukács suggests that the trendy drama marked a shift in the Japanese television industry from offering story-driven entertainment to producing lifestyle-oriented programming. She interprets the new televisual preoccupat...
Feminism and Antiracism
This interdisciplinary anthology bridges gaps between feminist and antiracist theories and practices by providing original empirical studies of feminist antiracist organizing in Australia, Canada, India, Italy, France, Japan, South Africa, the United States, Yemen, and Zimbabwe. International scholars and activists examine how the local and national context shapes the ways that feminists engage in antiracist practices, how women in various regions counter the perception that feminism is a "Western" ideology, and how globalization creates new opportunities for organizing.
