Dale Spencer - Böcker

The sociology of emotions has recently undergone a renaissance, raising new questions for the social sciences: How should we define and study emotions? How are emotions related to perennial sociological debates about structure, power, and agency? Emotions Matter brings together leading international scholars to build on and extend sociological understandings of emotions.Moving beyond reductionist approaches that frame emotions as idiosyncratic states of mind, the scholars in this collection conceptualize emotions as the experience of social relations. Empirical and theoretical chapters demonstrate how emotions relate to sociological theories of interaction, the body, gender, and communication. Pushing the boundaries of sociology and stimulating debate for related fields, Emotions Matter offers diverse relational approaches that illustrate the crucial importance of emotions to the sociological imagination.

Rather than asking whether digital technologies are simply good or bad for youth, Enmeshed Realities examines how young people actively inhabit, traverse, and negotiate digital ecologies: the interconnected, enmeshed online and offline worlds that shape everyday life. Responding to dominant moral panics and risk-focused narratives that frame youth as vulnerable or “up to no good” online, the book shifts attention away from fear-based discourses towards young people’s own perspectives and experiences. The book adopts a youth-centered, mixed-methods approach, grounded in surveys, focus groups, and interviews with fifteen-to-seventeen-year-old young people living in and around Ottawa, Canada. Exploring four key thematic areas, it specifically examines how digital ecologies shape young people’s experiences of identity and belonging, loneliness and the fear of missing out, relationships and dating, and family life. Across these domains, young people describe digital ecologies as spaces of both pleasure and difficulty, as well as connection and tension. Child and youth studies researchers Daniella Bendo and Dale Spencer conclude that understanding young people’s digital lives requires moving beyond simplistic narratives of harm towards nuanced, good-faith engagement with their lived realities.

Since the 1960s, the field of victimology has developed into a variegated discipline with its own theoretical and methodological traditions. In the early 1990s two texts were published—Towards a Critical Victimology (Fattah, 1992) and Critical Victimology (Mawby and Walklate, 1994)—that concretized critical victimology as a paradigm within victimology. Since then, the field has remained conceptually stale and with few a few exceptions there has not been a considerable lacuna of works from a critical perspective. Reconceptualizing Critical Victimology: Interventions and Possibilities provides a rejoinder to the two aforementioned texts and demonstrate how critical victimology can be reconceptualized, where interventions can be made in this victimological paradigm, and possibilities for future theorizing and research in this provocative field. Reconceptualizing Critical Victimology includes eleven papers on the forms of victimization and issues pertinent to victims written by leading and emerging international scholars in the field of critical victimology. It is interdisciplinary in scope and contains contributions from leading and emergent international scholars on victims and victimization. Reconceptualizing Critical Victimology serves as a crucible to demonstrate the complexities of and the multitude of factors that interact to complicate victim status, the vagaries of victim response, and the phenomenology of violence and victimization.

Policing Sex Crimes offers an overview of the affordances and difficulties of investigating and responding to sex crimes in contemporary digital society. The simplest to most complex sex crimes investigations can (and often do) have a digital component. Such a digital society creates a number of inter- and intra-organizational challenges in terms of investigation of sex offenses and response to victims of sex crimes. In the proposed text, the authors elucidate laws defining sex crimes across international contexts and examine the different ways nation states have responded to digital sex crimes and related digital communication technologies via laws, policies, and practices. They draw on 70 interviews with sex crime investigators to document the effects of digital sex crimes on the policing profession and the broader police organizations that sex crime investigators work. Lastly, they explore how victims are interpreted by police officers and the challenges they face achieving justice in the wake of sexual victimization.