How are intergenerational relationships playing out in the digital rhythms of the household? Through extensive fieldwork in Tokyo, Shanghai and Melbourne, this book ethnographically explores how households are being understood, articulated and defined by digital media practices. It explores the rise of self-tracking, quantified self and informal practices of care at distance as part of contempo…
Three decades of societal and cultural alignment of new media have yielded a host of innovations, trials, and problems, accompanied by versatile popular and academic discourse. New Media Studies crystallized internationally into an established academic discipline, and this begs the question: where do we stand now? Which new questions are emerging now that new media are being taken for granted, …
Diaspora and transnationalism are widely used concepts in academic as well as political discourses. Although originally referring to quite different phenomena, they increasingly overlap today. Such inflation of meanings goes hand in hand with a danger of essentialising collective identities. This book therefore analyses diaspora and transnationalism as research perspectives rather than as chara…
Historical demographers since Malthus have characterized the West-European and Chinese demographic regimes as systems under low and high pressure, respectively. This volume examines the operation of the positive check at the two ends of the Eurasian continent by taking the Netherlands and Taiwan as representatives of the West-European and Chinese mortality regimes. Are these cases as different …
As more and more aspects of everyday life are turned into machine-readable data, researchers are provided with rich resources for researching society. The novel methods and innovative tools to work with this data not only require new knowledge and skills, but also raise issues concerning the practices of investigation and publication. This book critically reflects on the role of data in academi…
The Data Journalism Handbook: Towards a Critical Data Practice provides a rich and panoramic introduction to data journalism, combining both critical reflection and practical insight. It offers a diverse collection of perspectives on how data journalism is done around the world and the broader consequences of datafication in the news, serving as both a textbook and a sourcebook for this emergin…
This scholarly study throws a new light on the Roman impact on religious structures in Republican Italy. In the last four centuries BC, Italy went through immense changes. The Apennine and Adriatic areas were originally inhabited by various 'Italic' tribes and characterised by a specific non-urban societal organisation, in which cult places had a pivotal function. From the fourth century BC onw…
For centuries, new sailors from European and North American countries have embraced often brutal hazing in an elaborate ceremony at sea called 'crossing the line' (British-American) and 'Neptunusfeest' (Dutch). Typically enacted upon crossing the equator, the beatings, dunks, sexual play, mock baptisms, mythological dramas, crude shavings and haircuts, and drinking and swallowing displays have …
New online technologies have brought with them a great promise of freedom. The computer and particularly the Internet have been represented as enabling technologies, turning consumers into users and users into producers. Furthermore, lay people and amateurs have been enthusiastically greeted as heroes of the digital era. This thoughtful study casts a fresh light on the shaping of user participa…
We’re in an era of ever increasing attention to animal rights, and activism around the issue is growing more widespread and prominent. In this volume, Kerstin Jacobsson and Jonas Lindblom use the animal rights movement in Sweden to offer the first analysis of social movements through the lens of Emile Durkheim’s sociology of morality. By positing social movements as essentially a moral phen…