Beverley Skeggs – författare

With contributions from some of the most important current feminist thinkers, Transformations traces both the shifts in thinking that have allowed feminism to arrive at its present point, and the way that feminist agendas have progressed in line with wider social developments.

A thorough reassessment of feminism''s place in contemporary life, the authors engage in current debates as diverse as globalization, technoscience, embodiment and performativity, taking feminism in fresh directions, mapping new territory and suggesting alternative possibilities.

With contributions from some of the most important current feminist thinkers, Transformations traces both the shifts in thinking that have allowed feminism to arrive at its present point, and the way that feminist agendas have progressed in line with wider social developments.

A thorough reassessment of feminism''s place in contemporary life, the authors engage in current debates as diverse as globalization, technoscience, embodiment and performativity, taking feminism in fresh directions, mapping new territory and suggesting alternative possibilities.

Class, Self, Culture puts class back on the map in a novel way by taking a new look at how class is made and given value through culture. It shows how different classes become attributed with value, enabling culture to be deployed as a resource and as a form of property, which has both use-value to the person and exchange-value in systems of symbolic and economic exchange.The book shows how class has not disappeared, but is known and spoken in a myriad of different ways, always working through other categorisations of nation, race, gender and sexuality and across different sites: through popular culture, political rhetoric and academic theory. In particular attention is given to how new forms of personhood are being generated through mechanisms of giving value to culture, and how what we come to know and assume to be a ''self'' is always a classed formation. Analysing four processes: of inscription, institutionalisation, perspective-taking and exchange relationships, it challenges recent debates on reflexivity, risk, rational-action theory, individualisation and mobility, by showing how these are all reliant on fixing some people in place so that others can move.

Class, Self, Culture puts class back on the map in a novel way by taking a new look at how class is made and given value through culture. It shows how different classes become attributed with value, enabling culture to be deployed as a resource and as a form of property, which has both use-value to the person and exchange-value in systems of symbolic and economic exchange.The book shows how class has not disappeared, but is known and spoken in a myriad of different ways, always working through other categorisations of nation, race, gender and sexuality and across different sites: through popular culture, political rhetoric and academic theory. In particular attention is given to how new forms of personhood are being generated through mechanisms of giving value to culture, and how what we come to know and assume to be a ''self'' is always a classed formation. Analysing four processes: of inscription, institutionalisation, perspective-taking and exchange relationships, it challenges recent debates on reflexivity, risk, rational-action theory, individualisation and mobility, by showing how these are all reliant on fixing some people in place so that others can move.

Sexuality and the Politics of Violence offers a timely and critical exploration of issues of safety and security at the centre of responses to violence. Through a multi-disciplinary analysis, drawing on feminism, lesbian and gay studies, sociology, cultural geography, criminology and critical legal scholarship, the book offers to transform the way we understand and respond to the challenges raised by violence. It breaks new ground in its examination of the rhetoric and politics of violence, property, home, cosmopolitanism and stranger danger in the generation of safety and security. Using interviews, focus groups and surveys with lesbians and gay men, Sexuality and the Politics of Violence draws upon ''real life'' experiences of safety and security. It raises some fundamental challenges to the law and order politics of existing scholarship and activism on homophobic hate crime.

Sexuality and the Politics of Violence offers a timely and critical exploration of issues of safety and security at the centre of responses to violence. Through a multi-disciplinary analysis, drawing on feminism, lesbian and gay studies, sociology, cultural geography, criminology and critical legal scholarship, the book offers to transform the way we understand and respond to the challenges raised by violence. It breaks new ground in its examination of the rhetoric and politics of violence, property, home, cosmopolitanism and stranger danger in the generation of safety and security. Using interviews, focus groups and surveys with lesbians and gay men, Sexuality and the Politics of Violence draws upon ''real life'' experiences of safety and security. It raises some fundamental challenges to the law and order politics of existing scholarship and activism on homophobic hate crime.

The unremitting explosion of reality television across the schedules has become a sustainable global phenomenon generating considerable popular and political fervour.

The zeal with which television executives seize on the easily replicated formats is matched equally by the eagerness of audiences to offer themselves up as television participants for others to watch and criticise. But how do we react to so many people breaking down, fronting up, tearing apart, dominating, empathising, humiliating, and seemingly laying bare their raw emotion for our entertainment? Do we feel sad when others are sad? Or are we relieved by the knowledge that our circumstances might be better? As reality television extends into the experiences of the everyday, it makes dramatic and often shocking the mundane aspects of our intimate relations, inviting us as viewers into a volatile arena of mediated morality.

This book addresses the impact of this endless opening out of intimacy as an entertainment trend that erodes the traditional boundaries between spectator and performer demanding new tools for capturing television’s relationships with audiences. Rather than asking how the reality television genre is interpreted as ‘text’ or representation the authors investigate the politics of viewer encounters as interventions, evocations, and more generally mediated social relations.

The authors show how different reactions can involve viewers in tournaments of value, as women viewers empathise and struggle to validate their own lives. The authors use these detailed responses to challenge theories of the self, governmentality and ideology.

A must read for both students and researchers in audience studies, television studies and media and communication studies.

The unremitting explosion of reality television across the schedules has become a sustainable global phenomenon generating considerable popular and political fervour.

The zeal with which television executives seize on the easily replicated formats is matched equally by the eagerness of audiences to offer themselves up as television participants for others to watch and criticise. But how do we react to so many people breaking down, fronting up, tearing apart, dominating, empathising, humiliating, and seemingly laying bare their raw emotion for our entertainment? Do we feel sad when others are sad? Or are we relieved by the knowledge that our circumstances might be better? As reality television extends into the experiences of the everyday, it makes dramatic and often shocking the mundane aspects of our intimate relations, inviting us as viewers into a volatile arena of mediated morality.

This book addresses the impact of this endless opening out of intimacy as an entertainment trend that erodes the traditional boundaries between spectator and performer demanding new tools for capturing television’s relationships with audiences. Rather than asking how the reality television genre is interpreted as ‘text’ or representation the authors investigate the politics of viewer encounters as interventions, evocations, and more generally mediated social relations.

The authors show how different reactions can involve viewers in tournaments of value, as women viewers empathise and struggle to validate their own lives. The authors use these detailed responses to challenge theories of the self, governmentality and ideology.

A must read for both students and researchers in audience studies, television studies and media and communication studies.

The past decade has witnessed a resurgence of interest in Marxism both within and without the academy. Marxian frameworks, concepts and categories continue to be narratively relevant to the features and events of contemporary capitalism. Most crucially, an attention to shifting cultural conditions has lead contemporary researchers to re-confront some classical and essential Marxist concepts, as well as elaborating new critical frameworks for the analysis of capitalism today.

The SAGE Handbook of Marxism showcases this cutting-edge of today’s Marxism. It advances the debate with essays that rigorously map and renew the concepts that have provided the groundwork and main currents for Marxist theory, and showcases interventions that set the agenda for Marxist research in the 21st century.  A rigorous and challenging collection of scholarship, this book contains a stunning range of contributions from contemporary academics, writers and theorists from around the world and across disciplines, invaluable to scholars and graduate students alike. 

Part 1: Reworking the critique of political economy

Part 2: Forms of domination, subjects of struggle

Part 3: Political perspectives

Part 4: Philosophical dimensions

Part 5: Land and existence

Part 6: Domains

Part 7: Inquiries and debates