The challenges of teaching a successful introductory sociology course today demand materials very different from the norm. It is a question of making the practice of sociological thinking meaningful, rigorous, and relevant to today’s world of undergraduates.This comparatively concise, highly visual, and engaging book offers a refreshingly new way forward to reach students, using one of the most powerful tools in a sociologist’s teaching arsenal – the familiar stuf...

North Americans love eating meat. Despite the increased awareness of the meat industry's harms–violence against animals, health problems, and associations with environmental degradation–the rate of meat eating hasn't changed significantly in recent years. Instead, what has emerged is an uncomfortable paradox: a need to square one's values with the behaviors that contradict those values.Using a large-scale, multidimensional, and original dataset, Happy Meat explores the tho...

This important cultural analysis tells two stories about food. The first depicts good food as democratic. Foodies frequent ‘hole in the wall’ ethnic eateries, appreciate the pie found in working-class truck stops, and reject the snobbery of fancy French restaurants with formal table service. The second story describes how food operates as a source of status and distinction for economic and cultural elites, indirectly maintaining and reproducing social inequality. While the first storyline ...

The intersections of aging, media, and culture are under-explored given trends in population aging, rapid increases in the mediation of everyday life, and the growing cultural significance of media consumption at the global level. This book brings together an international collection of critical scholars, both well-established and up-and-coming, from the various academic disciplines that share a common interest in the future study of aging and media. This anthology of original articles int...