Contemporary society

About: Contemporary society is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 3991 publications have been published within this topic receiving 91755 citations.

The Cultural Politics of Lifestyle Sports

Abstract: This important new study examines the changing place and meaning of lifestyle sports – parkour, surfing, skateboarding, kite-surfing and others – and asks whether they continue to pose a challenge to the dominant meanings and experience of ‘sport’ and physical culture. Drawing on a series of in-depth, empirical case-studies, the book offers a re-evaluation of theoretical frameworks with which lifestyle sports have been understood, and focuses on aspects of their cultural politics that have received little attention, particularly the racialization of lifestyle sporting spaces. Centrally, it re-assess the political potential of lifestyle sports, considering if lifestyle sports cultures present alternative identities and spaces that challenge the dominant ideologies of sport, and the broader politics of identity, in the 21st century. It explores a range of key contemporary themes in lifestyle sport, including: identity and the politics of difference commercialization and globalization sportscapes, media discourse and lived reality risk and responsibility governance and regulation the racialization of lifestyle sports spaces lifestyle sports outside of the Global North the use of lifestyle sport to engage non-privileged youth Casting new light on the significance of sport and sporting subcultures within contemporary society, this book is essential reading for students or researcher working in the sociology of sport, leisure studies or cultural studies.

Citizenship between De- and Re-Ethnicization

Abstract: Citizenship is one of the most ambivalent though busily utilized and expanded entries in the contemporary social science lexicon. Its ambivalence consists of its dual, and most often overlapping, function as analytical-normative concept to order multiple realities and empirical object of study itself, with a certain tendency of the first to eclipse the second. If a recent Handbook of Citizenship Studies (Isin and Turner, 2002) identified a good number of hyphenated citizenships, from “cultural,” “sexual,” and “ecological” to “cosmopolitan,” such “citizenship” is less a distinct and clearly demarcated object of study than a conceptual metaphor for a bewildering variety of rights-based claims in contemporary societies, particularly if raised by marginal groups.

“Sustainability? Never heard of it!”

Abstract: Presents the results of an Internet survey of all the humanities faculties in Germany, Switzerland, The Netherlands and the UK and of a review of the international debate both on sustainability in general and education for sustainability in particular Argues for a complex, transdisciplinary and broad approach to education for sustainability (EfS) Such an approach has to acknowledge the relative relevance of education within contemporary society, along with other “educators” such as the media, the economy and the shadow curriculum of institutional practice It has to be fully aware of the reasons and the extent of the unsustainability of our current situation, but it also has to sketch out what a sustainable society might mean Only on this basis can we then develop effective and sensible proposals for EfS Ends with ten practical strategies to further EfS in higher education institutions

Campzenship: reimagining the camp as a social and political space

Abstract: This article engages with current debates on the sociology of camps and camp-like institutions in contemporary society. Drawing on ethnographic material collected in Italy in ‘nomad camps’ where forcibly displaced Roma from former Yugoslavia were sheltered in the 1990s and 2000s, it argues that Agamben's conceptualisation of the camp as a space of exception, by constructing the camp as other to an idealised notion of citizenship and the rule of law, offers limited purchase for a sociological investigation of the complexity and ambivalence of social relations in and around camps as well as residents' everyday practices and experiences of political membership. Focusing on the resources, entitlements and ‘rights’ of camp residents and their interactions with state, regional and local authorities and non-governmental actors, this article invites to de-exceptionalise the camp and the experiences of its residents, and proposes the concept of ‘campzenship’ to capture the specific and situated form of political m...

Breaking the bowls : degendering and feminist change

Abstract: Lorber argues that it is time to rebel against gender as a social institution-to challenge its basic processes and practices. Feminists have tried to restructure and change the dynamics of interaction between women and men, but they have not pushed their agenda to the point of calling for the abolition of gender boundaries and categories. Breaking the Bowls explores why undoing gender must be the ultimate feminist goal and how that goal can be reached. Breaking the Bowls is part of the Contemporary Societies series.