This guide provides information for resources on Sociology, ranging from books and journals to electronic databases and audio-visual material. It supports the study of Politics and Sociology, Sociology of Childhood, Sociology of Education, and more.
In this guide you will find information about searching and making the most of library resources and how to access further training on offer at UCL. Please use the menu to see how the library can support your learning and research in Sociology.
You may also find these subject guides useful to you:
A large number of contemporary resources on sociology can be found online, as e-books or e-journals. Print collections which hold sociology can be found in the IOE, SSEES and Main Libraries, but you can use Click and Collect to pick them up from any other UCL library.
UCL Library Services has many subject-specific databases that will help you find useful resources. Two key databases for Sociology are below.
Offering over 1000 titles with the majority full-text. This database covers core disciplines across the social sciences including sociology, social work, anthropology, politics and features journals from over 50 countries.
Covering the international literature of sociology and social work this collection provides full-text coverage of many core titles indexed in Sociological Abstracts and Social Services Abstracts. Includes hundreds of full text scholarly journals and over 500 recent full-text doctoral dissertations on sociology.
In our increasingly interconnected world, misinformation spreads faster than ever, influencing public opinion, political outcomes, and personal beliefs. In Misinformation and Society, Yotam Ophir takes an interdisciplinary approach to unravel the complexities of misinformation in its various forms. Offering invaluable insights into the history, psychology, and social impact of misinformation, this timely book provides you with the tools to critically analyze misinformation's origins, effects, and solutions.
An updated edition of the bestselling text broadens the conception of mindfulness, and shows how mindful inquirers can maximize positive outcomes for participants, organizations, communities, and themselves. The first five chapters describe the application of mindful inquiry, and the following nine introduce cultures of inquiry and research traditions, theories, methods, and techniques.
Just starting out with social research? With contributions from experts across the social sciences, this book equips you with the tools for successfully investigating society and culture. It shows you how to prepare for research, generate and analyse data, and present your findings. Balancing theory with practice, it covers foundational concepts in methods and methodology alongside contemporary developments.
Joel Best and Brian Monahan offer a fresh approach to the social problems course. The book focuses on how and why particular conditions come to be constructed as social problems. Each chapter explores a different stage of the construction process, ending with a rich case study that applies the concepts to a contemporary issue. In this way, the authors equip students with the tools needed to analyze any social problem they encounter in the media.
Creativity and Sociology: Doing Social Research with and on Artistic Sources explores the relationship between artistic and sociological narratives, considering the ways in which artistic narratives in their different forms can be both subjects of sociological observation and tools for the sociological analysis of reality. Thematically divided into sections that focus on "doing sociology on art" ' and "doing sociology with art", it observes the major forms of art - including literature, music, theatre, painting, photography, cinematography, and interactive arts such as videogames - examining each as objects and instruments of sociological analysis: as narratives that can offer new perspectives on the world.
Family and Disability Activism reveals how families and disabled people who identify as BIPOC and/or LGBTQIA2S+ understand issues of rights versus justice. Contributions by Deaf and disabled activists emphasize the frequent need for either care or independence. Other chapters show how members of the disabled community and their families must navigate systemic issues of segregation, institutionalization, and access to special education services differently depending on their ethnic and racial identities. Expanding the conversation about disability, kinship, biological and chosen families, and activism, this volume amplifies important voices in the fight for disability rights.
This Handbook celebrates and contributes to the recent revitalisation of the sociology of knowledge. A diverse group of leading experts from the global North and South provide a state of the art overview of a field, which is developing rapidly with the growth of poststructuralist, postcolonial, and feminist approaches. Fran Collyer and contributing authors explore the theoretical frameworks underpinning the sociology of knowledge and demonstrate how these can address new issues, problems and circumstances. They shed light on how the sociology of knowledge is applied to and impacts contemporary challenges including racial and gender inequality, climate change, and the growth of neoliberalism. They also offer insights into the association between theories of knowledge and other conceptual and theoretical developments such as the sociology of science, constructivism, pragmatism, postmodernism, poststructuralism, and postcolonialism.
The last twenty years have witnessed a 'social turn' in analytic philosophy. Social epistemology has been crucial to it. Social epistemology starts by repudiating the kind of individualistic epistemology, which, since Descartes' Meditations and through Kant's maxim 'Think for yourself', has dominated philosophy. It is a sign of the deep erasure of Wittgenstein's ideas from many debates in analytic philosophy that neither his views against fundamental tenets of individualistic epistemology, nor his positive contribution to key themes in social epistemology are considered. This Element on Wittgenstein and Social Epistemology is the first comprehensive study of the implications of the later Wittgenstein's ideas for key issues at the core of present-day social epistemology, such as the nature of common sense and its relations to common knowledge; testimony and trust; deep disagreements in connection with genealogical challenges; and the meaning of 'woman' and the role of self-identification in the determination of gender.
Social work is a human service profession that continues to work for human wellbeing and achieving a just and equal society. However, the gross inequality in the form of wealth, economy, concentration of resources and power, as well as gender, race, and social and political access challenge the ability of a social worker in addressing the social problems experienced by most marginalized people in the world. Social Work in an Unequal World focuses on the social work profession and education and explores different dimensions of inequality around the globe.The book particularly addresses some of the pertinent questions: How does social work operate in an unequal and unfair world? As social work educators, how do we respond to this? How do we address these issues in our classrooms?
Taking a social informatics perspective, this edited volume investigates the interaction between society and digital technologies and includes research that examines individuals, groups, organizations, and nations, as well as their complex relationships with pervasive mobile and wearable devices, social media platforms, artificial intelligence, and big data. The readers of the book will understand theoretical frameworks of social informatics; gain insights into recent empirical studies of social informatics in specific areas such as big data and its effects on privacy, ethical issues related to digital technologies, and the implications of digital technologies for daily practices; and learn how the social informatics perspective informs research and practice.