Death in a consumer culture
Organised into five sections covering: The death industry; death rituals; death and consumption; death and the body; and alternate endings, The book explores topics from celebrity death tourism, pet and online memorialization; family history research, to alternatives to traditional corpse disposal methods and patient-assisted suicide. Work from scholars in history, religious studies, sociology, psychology, anthropology, and cultural studies sits alongside research in marketing and consumer culture.
Cultural representations of gender vulnerability and resistance : A Mediterranean approach to the Anglosphere
This book considers the cultural representation of gender violence, vulnerability and resistance with a focus on the transnational dimension of our contemporary visual and literary cultures in English. Contributors address concepts such as vulnerability, resilience, precarity and resistance in the Anglophone world through an analysis of memoirs, films, TV series, and crime and literary fiction across India, Ireland, Canada, Australia, the US, and the UK. Chapters explore literary and media displays of precarious conditions to examine whether these are exacerbated when intersecting with gender and ethnic identities, thus resulting in structural forms of vulnerability that generate and justify oppression, as well as forms of individual or collective resistance and/or resilience. Substantial insights are drawn from Animal Studies, Critical Race Studies, Human Rights Studies, Post-Humanism and Postcolonialism.
Contemporary Sociological Theory : An Integrated Multi-Level Approach
This book covers the major theoretical orientations that have been influential in American sociology since the mid-twentieth century. These include symbolic interaction, phenomenological sociology and ethnomethodology, social exchange and rational choice theories, sociology of emotions, functionalism and neofunctionalism, conflict and critical theory, selected feminist theories, structuration theory, systems theory, sociobiology, selected sociology of culture perspectives, and major themes from postmodern orientations.


