Sage Benchmarks in Culture and Society – serie

There is now almost 100 years of rich literature relating to youth culture. This major work brings together the best of this literature, from ′benchmark′ essays to contemporary developments, in order to critically evaluate and assess the body of academic work. The perspective is truly global, with the selected articles addressing cultures in Europe, North America, South America, Africa, Asia, Australasia and the Middle East. The articles are organised into four thematic volumes: Volume 1: Histories of Youth CultureVolume 2: Subcultures and StyleVolume 3: Youth, Music and Media Volume 4: Global Youth CultureThis is a highly valuable reference collection for researchers in all fields of youth culture including sociology, media and cultural studies and social anthropology.

Popular culture is as debated as it is pervasive. It is pervasive in that the symbolic worlds in which we live and out of which we construct sense are, in many different ways, understood as and within popular culture. It is debated in that it has often been polarized as a negative or positive counterpart to other dimensions of cultural activity. Volume One establishes the historical dimension necessary for the study of popular culture, showing how popular culture has developed over the past two centuries in the West, and how it has operated as a site of aesthetic debate and contestation as well as of communal pleasure and social interaction. The second and third volumes are devoted to the different theoretical perspectives and analytical approaches to popular culture. These have mainly developed since the late-nineteenth century, though pioneering discussion from this time has recently become sidelined. Along with some examples of such early discussion, the volumes feature contributions from the ′culture and civilization′ tradition, the Frankfurt school, Chicago sociology, western Marxism, early cultural studies (rejecting the term ′culturalism′), structuralist and poststructuralist approaches, folkloristics, feminism and men′s studies, postmodernism and postcolonial studies.The final volume concentrates on the questions and issues involved in the aesthetics and ethics of popular culture and their relation to the quality of public life. Volume Four specifically includes articles that deal with issues in popular culture studies that remain ongoing and in dynamic movement, or are in various ways contentious and unresolved. Volume One: Historical Perspectives on Popular CultureVolume Two: Theoretical Approaches Volume Three: Theoretical ParadigmsVolume Four: Aesthetics, Ethics and Cultural Politics

The last forty years have seen a remarkable and sustained exploration of questions surrounding about gender and gender relations. Departments of women′s studies, feminist studies, gender studies exist throughout the global north with considerable overlap between their curriculum but all exploring, in different ways, the difference that feminist politics, a politics of the public space, have made.At its heart, this major work examines the central idea that feminism, as a politics of the public space, is an essential aspect of democratic society. The four volumes are organised to reflect and emphasise the repetition of themes within feminism and the cross-over between locations (whether geographical or intellectual) where feminism is discussed. Volume One: The Imagination Feminism Volume Two: Making Feminism Volume Three: Locations of Feminism Volume Four: Feminist Futures

These four volumes present a series of thematic explorations of key developments and debates on the topic of cities and city life in a post-modern context. Arranged thematically, the volumes draw together articles exploring: the relationship between the dynamics of contemporary globalisation, post-modernity, and urban development; the ways in which many contemporary cities are increasingly defined as centres of consumption rather than production; the multiple modernities defining contemporary city life around the world; and recent attempts to rethink our understandings of the materiality and complexity of cities. This collection has been built on the premise that cities need to be understood as interdisciplinary objects of study, and the contents have been drawn from a wide variety of sources with roots in areas such as urban anthropology, development studies, economics, history, geography and sociology. The result is a unique and valuable resource for scholars based in a variety of social science and humanities disciplines.

This four-volume Major Work brings together key literatures which offer perspectives on the emergence of the modern city and its connection with the project of modernity. The volumes explore the historical rise of the modern city and theorisations of the dynamics of city-based economic development; the nature of modernist city planning, governance and design; the role that the modern city has played in the rise of societies based on mass consumption; and the intertwining of expression, art and experience in the modern city.This collection has been built on the premise that cities need to be understood as interdisciplinary objects of study, and the contents have been drawn from a wide variety of sources with roots in areas such as urban anthropology, development studies, economics, history, geography and sociology. The result is a unique and valuable resource for scholars based in a variety of social science and humanities disciplines. Volume I: The Modern city: Evolution and DevelopmentVolume II: Planning, Governing and Designing the Modern CityVolume III: Consumption, Politics and Popular culture in the Modern CityVolume IV: Modernity, Representation and the City

Cities are sites of great wealth and poverty, of hope and despair, of social and economic dynamism, as well as tradition and established power. Social scientists and humanities scholars have over the past three decades generated an impressive range of perspectives for making sense of the vast complexities of cities. These perspectives tell both of the economic, social and political dynamism cities generate, and point to possible lines of future development. This 8-volume benchmark collection brings together a hugely diverse collection of the most influential and important papers on this topic. The first four volumes, The City: Modernity, focus on the emergence of the modern city and its connection with the project of modernity. The final four volumes, The City: Post-Modernity, will focus more exclusively on the contemporary city, looking at the subject through the lenses of globalization and post-colonialism, amongst others.

This four volume collection brings together papers from a range of different journals from different fields, sub-disciplines and disciplines that address the central problem of the relation between culture and society. In doing so, it frames understandings of experience, text, meaning, power, stratification, identity, representation, practice, discourse, materiality, image, technology, and the many other concepts and categories in the context of this fundamental interrelationship.Although the themes of culture and society provide the broad parameters of these four volumes, Cultural Theory makes visible some of the different objects of theoretical discourse that different schools of thought and theoretical paradigms have thrown before us. The four volumes traverse the disciplines of, amongst others, sociology, cultural studies, anthropology, literary theory, media and communication studies, and science and technology studies, to provide a sense of the development and extension of cultural theory from initial and longstanding questions about power and agency, ordinary and popular cultural practice, and representation to ones about the body, sensory experience and identity to the changing natural and built environment and questions about global humanity and justice to developments in the global cultural economy concerning information, technology and value.Throughout this collection, the editor offers a coherent, complex, and multiply inflected narrative which is both grounded in the substantive histories of the field and oriented to some of its most exciting and forward looking ideas and prospects.