YouTube hosts one billion visitors monthly and sees more than 400 hours of video uploaded every minute. In “Thanks for Watching,” Patricia Lange offers an anthropological perspective on this heavily mediated social environment, demonstrating how core concepts from anthropology—participant-observation, reciprocity, and community—apply to sociality on YouTube and how to reconceptualize an…
In Toward a Pragmatist Sociology, Robert Dunn explores the relationship between the ideas and principles of philosopher and educator John Dewey and sociologist C. Wright Mills to provide a philosophical and theoretical foundation for the development of a critical and public sociology. Dunn recovers an intellectual and conceptual framework for transforming sociology into a more substantive, comp…
Asexual Erotics: Intimate Readings of Compulsory Sexuality attends to the silence around asexuality in queer, feminist, and lesbian thinking from the late 1960s to the present. Drawing on the knowledge generated by asexual community, activism, and scholarship, Ela Przybylo gives us the first queer and feminist monograph on asexuality
The Calvin year 2009 began on October 31, 2008 with a conference organized by the Institute for Reformation Research (Apeldoorn) on the topic »Calvin: Saint or Sinner?« A number of scholars dealt with the question of whether and how Calvin brought a renewal to theology, the church and society. This volume contains the papers held at this conference, which demonstrate the detailed and growing …
The studies comprising this volume, most of them appearing for the first time in English, deal with some of the main topics in Maimonides' philosophy and that of his followers in Provence. At the heart of these topics lies the issue of whether they adopted a completely naturalistic picture of the workings of the world order, or left room for the volitional activity of God in history. These topi…
Most importantly, the book shows how literature constitutes an alternative public sphere for Black people. In a society largely controlled by white supremacist actors and institutions, Black authors have conjured fiction into a space where hard questions can be asked and answered and where the work of combatting collective, racist suppression can occur without replicating oppressive hierarchies…
The question 'what is a human being?' remains one of the most vexing intellectual tasks. Debating Humanity reconstructs how contemporary sociologists and philosophers – among others, Arendt, Taylor, Archer and Boltanski – understand the key anthropological skills that define our shared membership to the human species.
Religions of foreign origin have shaped Chinese cultural history much stronger than generally assumed and continue to have impact on Chinese society in varying regional degrees. The essays collected in the present volume put a special emphasis on these “foreign” and less familiar aspects of Chinese religion. Apart from an introductory article on Daoism (the prototypical autochthonous religi…
Jewish Religion After Theology ponders one of the most intriguing shifts in modern Jewish thought: from a metaphysical and theological standpoint toward a new manner of philosophizing based primarily on practice. Different chapters study this great shift and its various manifestations. The central figure of this new examination is Isaiah Leibowitz, whose thoughts encapsulate more than any other…
The volume entails a collection of contributions by leading scholars (Raymond Bryant, Michael K. Goodman, Benjamin Huybrechts, Andrew E.G. Jonas, Roger Lee, Peter North, and Katinka Weber) concerned with alternative modes of economic and social exchange. The cases addressed in these contributions – including credit unions, alternative currencies, sustainable consumption, and social enter…