QAnon, Capitalism, and the Crisis of Meaning diagnoses a particular social challenge facing Americans in the 21st century: the rise and spread of dangerous conspiracy theories across the internet.Rather than dismiss such theories as the product of delusions, this book argues that the true conspiracy these theorists are trying to uncover is really located in a critique of neoliberal capitalism, austerity, and economic precarity. The authors...

The Spectacle of Online Life offers a groundbreaking exploration of the digital age's most pressing paradoxes: connection and isolation, democratization and control, authenticity and performance.Edited by Danielle Antoinette Hidalgo, Christopher T. Conner, and Matthew N. Hannah, this volume assembles a diverse array of scholars to critically examine how online technologies shape, reflect, and amplify the complexities of modern society.Chapters in t...

Conspiracy Theories and Extremism in New Times outlines a cadre of alt-right groups, conspiracy theories, and other forms of stigmatized knowledge threatening our society. In an era dominated by the pervasive influence of social media, the scholarly gaze has often overlooked the ways far-right factions leverage these platforms to propagate anti-democratic ideologies. From the denial of the moon landing to the enigmatic labyrinth of QAnon, and a myriad of other alt-right groups in ...

Electronic Dance Music: From Deviant Subculture to Culture Industry explores the subculture’s emergence as a deviant subculture. This text analyzes how industry professionals, fans, and public officials helped usher in a new age of EDM, arguing that while the defining features of the subculture made it attractive, they also laid the foundations for outsiders to commodify the movement as a culture industry. Conner and Dickens explore the concept of “commodified resistance” as the m...

The Gayborhood: From Sexual Liberation to Cosmopolitan Spectacle explores the lived experiences of LGBT+ persons in an era of heightened visibility. Gay urban enclaves, known colloquially as gayborhoods, illustrate the evolution of LGBT+ political capacity building. Since their emergence after World War II, gayborhoods have homogenized at the expense of women, transgender, and nonwhite persons due to neoliberal policies promoted by urban planners. Thus, their popularization and economic vi...

This edited volume highlights the work of ten forgotten and neglected social theorists in the hope of reinvigorating interest in their work and their potential contributions to the analysis of contemporary social issues. Each chapter includes a brief biographical sketch, an overview of the selected theorist’s work and significance, and the relevance of their work to one or more contemporary social issues. While other similar texts tend to focus primarily on intellectual biography, our emph...

Subcultures have long captured the imagination of sociologists and the public alike. Making an important contribution to sociology, Subcultures is delightful reading for those who are interested in groups at the fringes of society such as Dead heads, members of the LGBTQ culture, gamers, and even subcultural elements of some alt-right groups.Illustrating the diverse application of the 'subculture' concept within sociology, this edited collection showcases insights ranging ...

An investigation of the role of educational privatization and technology in the crises of truth and agency.Today, conspiracy theories run rampant, attacks on facts have become commonplace, and systemic inequities are on the rise as individual and collective agency unravels. The Alienation of Fact explains the educational, technological, and ideological preconditions for these contemporary crises of truth and agency and explores the contradictions and compe...

How to understand a media environment in crisis, and how to make things better by approaching information ecologically.Our media environment is in crisis. Polarization is rampant. Polluted information floods social media. Even our best efforts to help clean up can backfire, sending toxins roaring across the landscape. In You Are Here, Whitney Phillips and Ryan Milner offer strategies for navigating increasingly treacherous information flows. Using ecologic...

Named a Best Nonfiction Book of 2022 by EsquireA sociological study of reality TV that explores its rise as a culture-dominating medium—and what the genre reveals about our attitudes toward race, gender, class, and sexualityWhat do we see when we watch reality television?In True Story: What Reality TV Says About Us, the sociologist and TV-lover Danielle J. Lindemann takes a long, hard look in the “funhouse mirror” ...

Paradoxes of Media and Information Literacy contributes to ongoing conversations about control of knowledge and different ways of knowing. It does so by analysing why media and information literacy (MIL) is proposed as a solution for addressing the current information crisis.Questioning why MIL is commonly believed to wield such power, the book throws into sharp relief several paradoxes that are built into common understandings of such literacies. Haider and Sundin take th...

What should a metropolis for working women look like? A city of friendships beyond Sex and the City. A transit system that accommodates mothers with strollers on the school run. A public space with enough toilets. A place where women can walk without harassment.Through history, personal experience and popular culture Leslie Kern exposes what is hidden in plain sight: the social inequalities are built into our cities, homes, and neighbourhoods. She maps the city from new vantage poi...