Jennifer Smith Maguire – författare

This title was a prize winner at the OIV (International Organisation of Vine and Wine) Awards 2023.

The link between culture and wine reaches back into the earliest history of humanity. The Routledge Handbook of Wine and Culture brings together a newly comprehensive, interdisciplinary overview of contemporary research and thinking on how wine fits into the cultural frameworks of production, intermediation and consumption.

Bringing together many leading researchers engaged in studying these phenomena, it explores the different ways in which wine is constructed as a social artefact and how its representation and use acquire symbolic meaning. Wine can be analysed in different ways by varying disciplines involved in exploring wine and culture (anthropology, economics and business, geography, history and sociology, and as text). The Handbook uses these as lenses to consider how producers, intermediaries and consumers use and create cultural significance. Specifically, the work addresses the following: how wine relates to place, belief systems and accompanying rituals; how it may be used as a marker of the identity and mechanisms of civilising processes (often in conjunction with food and the arts); how its framing intersects with science and nature; the ideologies and power relations which arise around all these activities; and the relation of this to wine markets and public institutions.

This is essential reading for researchers and students in education for the wine industry and in the humanities and social sciences engaged in understanding patterns of human ingenuity and interaction, such as sociology, anthropology, economics, health, geography, business, tourism, cultural studies, food studies and history.

This title was a prize winner at the OIV (International Organisation of Vine and Wine) Awards 2023.

The link between culture and wine reaches back into the earliest history of humanity. The Routledge Handbook of Wine and Culture brings together a newly comprehensive, interdisciplinary overview of contemporary research and thinking on how wine fits into the cultural frameworks of production, intermediation and consumption.

Bringing together many leading researchers engaged in studying these phenomena, it explores the different ways in which wine is constructed as a social artefact and how its representation and use acquire symbolic meaning. Wine can be analysed in different ways by varying disciplines involved in exploring wine and culture (anthropology, economics and business, geography, history and sociology, and as text). The Handbook uses these as lenses to consider how producers, intermediaries and consumers use and create cultural significance. Specifically, the work addresses the following: how wine relates to place, belief systems and accompanying rituals; how it may be used as a marker of the identity and mechanisms of civilising processes (often in conjunction with food and the arts); how its framing intersects with science and nature; the ideologies and power relations which arise around all these activities; and the relation of this to wine markets and public institutions.

This is essential reading for researchers and students in education for the wine industry and in the humanities and social sciences engaged in understanding patterns of human ingenuity and interaction, such as sociology, anthropology, economics, health, geography, business, tourism, cultural studies, food studies and history.

This is the first text to offer a comprehensive socio-cultural and historical analysis of the current fitness culture.

Fitness today is not simply about health clubs and exercise classes, or measures of body mass index and cardiovascular endurance. Fit for Consumption conceptualizes fitness as a field within which individuals and institutions may negotiate - if not altogether reconcile - the competing and often conflicting social demands made on the individual body that characterize our current era.

Intended for researchers and senior undergraduate and postgraduate students of sport, leisure, cultural studies and the body, this book utilizes the US fitness field as a case study through which to explore the place of the body in contemporary consumer culture. Combining observations in health clubs, interviews with fitness producers and consumers, and a discourse analysis of a wide variety of fitness texts, this book provides an empirically grounded examination of one of the pressing theoretical questions of our time: how individuals learn to fit into consumer culture and the service economy and how our bodies and selves become ‘fit for consumption.''

This is the first text to offer a comprehensive socio-cultural and historical analysis of the current fitness culture.

Fitness today is not simply about health clubs and exercise classes, or measures of body mass index and cardiovascular endurance. Fit for Consumption conceptualizes fitness as a field within which individuals and institutions may negotiate - if not altogether reconcile - the competing and often conflicting social demands made on the individual body that characterize our current era.

Intended for researchers and senior undergraduate and postgraduate students of sport, leisure, cultural studies and the body, this book utilizes the US fitness field as a case study through which to explore the place of the body in contemporary consumer culture. Combining observations in health clubs, interviews with fitness producers and consumers, and a discourse analysis of a wide variety of fitness texts, this book provides an empirically grounded examination of one of the pressing theoretical questions of our time: how individuals learn to fit into consumer culture and the service economy and how our bodies and selves become ‘fit for consumption.''

Policy-related, academic and populist accounts of the relationship between food and class tend to reproduce a dichotomy that privileges either middle-class discerning taste or working-class necessity. Taking a markedly different approach, this collection explores the classed cultures of food practices across the spectrum of social stratification. Eschewing assumptions about the tastes (or lack thereof) of low-income consumers, the authors call attention to the diverse, complex forms of critical creativity and cultural capital employed by individuals, families and communities in their attempts to acquire and prepare food that is both healthy and desirable. The collection includes research carried out in the United States, Canada, Mexico and Denmark, and covers diverse contexts, from the intense insecurity of food deserts to the relative security of social democratic states. Through quantitative and qualitative cross-class comparisons, and ethnographic accounts of low-income experiences and practices, the authors examine the ways in which food practices and preferences are inflected by social class (alone, and in combination with gender, ethnicity and urban/rural location). The collection underlines the simultaneous need for the development of a more nuanced, dynamic account of the tastes and cultural competences of socially disadvantaged groups, and for structural critiques of the gross inequalities in the degrees of freedom with which different individuals and groups engage in food practices. This book was originally published as a special issue of Food, Culture & Society.

Policy-related, academic and populist accounts of the relationship between food and class tend to reproduce a dichotomy that privileges either middle-class discerning taste or working-class necessity. Taking a markedly different approach, this collection explores the classed cultures of food practices across the spectrum of social stratification. Eschewing assumptions about the tastes (or lack thereof) of low-income consumers, the authors call attention to the diverse, complex forms of critical creativity and cultural capital employed by individuals, families and communities in their attempts to acquire and prepare food that is both healthy and desirable. The collection includes research carried out in the United States, Canada, Mexico and Denmark, and covers diverse contexts, from the intense insecurity of food deserts to the relative security of social democratic states. Through quantitative and qualitative cross-class comparisons, and ethnographic accounts of low-income experiences and practices, the authors examine the ways in which food practices and preferences are inflected by social class (alone, and in combination with gender, ethnicity and urban/rural location). The collection underlines the simultaneous need for the development of a more nuanced, dynamic account of the tastes and cultural competences of socially disadvantaged groups, and for structural critiques of the gross inequalities in the degrees of freedom with which different individuals and groups engage in food practices. This book was originally published as a special issue of Food, Culture & Society.

This edited volume serves as an overview and introduction to the conceptual apparatus of Norbert Elias for newcomers, while also outlining current research within the Eliasian school of sociology. An Eliasian or figurational approach foregrounds process, is sensitive to long-term historical development and changing power relations and is methodologically diverse. Elias’s work is now found across academic disciplines and this volume contains contributions by sociologists, anthropologists, business and management scholars, and those working at the interface of sociology and human geography. Instead of simply highlighting the distinctiveness of the school vis-à-vis other theoretical traditions, this volume outlines how Eliasian inspired work can contribute to important debates on the future of food across academic disciplines.