
Book review: Lohmann’s “Haunted Pacific”
It’s the end of the summer so I have a variety of updates to make to keep up with all the things I’ve been publishing. First up is…
It’s the end of the summer so I have a variety of updates to make to keep up with all the things I’ve been publishing. First up is…
In Expanded Visions: A New Anthropology of the Moving Image, Arnd Schneider explores the generative potential of experimental film as and through anthropology. Highlighting the significance of meaning…
In the search to close the digital divide, which has been even more exposed since the COVID-19 pandemic, the insights about technological use within schools given in Matthew…
In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic the optimism of the early days of the world wide web appears to have completely abated. The pandemic has proven justification…
In The Public and their Platforms: Public Sociology in an Era of Social Media, Mark Carrigan and Lambros Fatsis explore the discipline of sociology at a time when public…
Ethnographic fieldwork resembles a dance on the wire between distance and closeness, seesawing between participant immersion and analytical retreat that turns the anthropologist into a tool of data…
In The Creative Underclass: Youth, Race and the Gentrifying City, Tyler Denmead reflects on his role in founding New Urban Arts, an arts and humanities programme primarily for young people…
Dying to Eat: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Food, Death, and the Afterlife (2018), edited by Candi K. Cann, is an interdisciplinary study that cuts across various approaches, including the…
In How Ten Global Cities Take On Homelessness: Innovations That Work, Linda Gibbs, Jay Bainbridge, Muzzy Rosenblatt and Tamiru Mammo explore some of the key challenges faced by urban…
In Michael Young, Social Science and the British Left, 1945-1970, Lise Butler explores the relationship between social science and public policy in left-wing politics through the figure of social…
By Alissa Whitmore, Book Reviews Editor Ah, summer. There are few things better than relaxing with a good book in the park, on the beach, or inside under…
In What Do We Know and What Should We Do About Social Mobility? Lee Elliott Major and Stephen Machin give an account of the long experience of social mobility in the…
In Me, Not You, Alison Phipps uses the #MeToo Movement as a backdrop to her work to illustrate how privileged white women using mainstream feminism as a conduit,…
In 2017, my colleague Philipp Zehmisch and I had to cancel a panel on love and family relationships in ethnographic fieldwork, due to a lack of participants. Fabienne…
In The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing, Sonia Faleiro investigates the shocking deaths of two teenage girls in the North Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, allowing the reader to…
In Mekong Dreaming: Life and Death Along a Changing River, Andrew Alan Johnson offers a new anthropological study that explores how infrastructural projects – in this case, hydropower dams…
Terraformed by Joy White aims at making sense and contextualising the vulnerability and inequality experienced by the Afrodiasporic population of the UK. The author describes her effort as…
In this feature essay, Phil Sutton takes readers inside the writing of the ninth edition of Polity’s flagship sociology textbook, Sociology, co-authored with Anthony Giddens. He discusses the…
In The Tenacity of the Couple-Norm: Intimate Citizenship Regimes in a Changing Europe, Sasha Roseneil, Isabel Crowhurst, Tone Hellesund, Ana Cristina Santos and Mariya Stoilova explore the durability …
During the Second World War, the British government, with the invaluable assistance of Alan Turing, deciphered Enigma (the Nazi code war machine) and thus gained access to key…
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to ravage many places in the world, it is hard to imagine a book that is more timely or prescient than Andrea Kitta’s…
In Beyond Tears and Laughter: Gender, Migration, and the Service Sector in China, Yang Shen examines the life experiences of men and women who have migrated from rural China to…
In “Suicidal – why we kill ourselves” Jesse Bering asks what drives some of us to die by a self-directed fatal act. According to him, “there are no…
In The Coloniality of Asylum: Mobility, Autonomy and Solidarity in the Wake of Europe’s Refugee Crisis, Fiorenza Picozza offers a new ethnographic study of autonomous border struggles in Hamburg, Germ…