Cultural practices
49. Understanding ‘the sacred’ and the secular in society
It’s the time of year in Britain to traditionally start talking about how Christmas has become taken over by capitalism and lost its spirituality, but it’s worth thinking about what we mean by spirituality. In Sociology, debates about ‘the sacred’ are often framed in terms of a binary opposition between […]
Win a copy of Food Waste by David Evans
Food Waste: Home consumption, material culture and everyday life In recent years, food waste has risen to the top of the political and public agenda, yet until now there has been no scholarly analysis applied to the topic as a complement and counter-balance to campaigning and activist approaches. Using ethnographic […]
Win a copy of Social Networks and Music Worlds
Social Networks and Music Worlds edited by Nick Crossley, Siobhan McAndrew and Paul Widdop Social networks are critical for the creation and consumption of music. This edited collection introduces students and scholars of music in society to the core concepts and tools of social network analysis. The collection showcases the use of […]
41. Material culture
The historical division of academic disciplines into the natural and social sciences meant that the focus of a discipline such as sociology was society and social relations, whilst the natural sciences were concerned with ‘nature’ and materials. With the ‘material turn’ in the social sciences, this disciplinary division has been […]
39. Photo methods
Photo methods are techniques for producing and working with photos to explore and understand self and society. Penny Tinkler has developed various ways of doing this to shed light on the past and present. Photo methods are integral to her research on how and why women started smoking in the […]
30. Sociology of consumption
The sociology of consumption emerged only recently. Prior to the 1980s, consumption was addressed indirectly in the context of other sociological concerns such as social deprivation, class and status, critiques of mass culture, and the consequences of (assumed) material abundance. In the 1990s, scholarly interest in consumption exploded – perhaps […]
Eating Out: social differentiation, consumption and pleasure
Alan Warde and Lydia Martens (2000) Eating out is now one of the most popular of all recreational activities. Until the 1980s it was not something that most ordinary people did, except when they had no alternative while travelling or because they worked too far away from home to return […]
Win a copy of ‘A Cosmopolitan Journey?’ by Helene Snee
This new book, by Helene Snee, is an innovative sociological exploration of gap year travel. Gap years are increasingly common for young people in the UK. But what do ‘gappers’ get out of these journeys? A wide range of official sources acknowledge gap years as a way of becoming a […]
25. Digital cultures
Contemporary computer gaming could not have been forced into being simply by the physical presence of computer game programs. Cultural work had to be done in order that people could recognize them as games and the machines that hosted them as objects to be played with. Computer games had to […]
22. Sociology of food
Food is a basic human necessity but it is intimately connected to many other dimensions of social life. For example, the food that we eat needs to be understood in relation to the political and economic organisation of food production. This invites a focus on agriculture and land use, environment […]