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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.
Is our understanding of social capital consistent with development interventions and the digital world? This book delves into the intricacies of social capital and its digital dimensions, examining its historical evolution, contemporary contestation and practical applications. Introducing a refurbished conceptualization of social capital, Mudit Kumar Singh introduces case studies from both the Global North and the Global South, including the USA, the UK, Europe, India, Latin America and Africa to build a sound understanding of social capital and its evolution in the age of social media and online community.
This book offers perspectives on how "education as we know it" is being challenged by the complexity of "nextness" that no longer allows for taking deeply grounded assumptions on the meaning of education as granted. This book interrogates ontological, ethical, and political challenges that immigrant children face. With the global situation in which more and more children are displaced, direct intergenerational transmission is broken, suspended, or complicated and made incoherent, and "things of concern" may be radically different for policymakers, for teachers, students, or their parents. Even the concept of the child as one who needs to be educated before they start participating in adult life cannot be taken for granted in this context. What needs and what can be passed on -- and what is worth passing in this context? How do we conceptualize education to encounter newcomers in their realities of being both native and strange, inmate and neighbour or alien, temporal and spatial -- and how do we address them all as worth of address?
From the shaping of new homelands in the Cherokee Nation to the export of sand from Cambodia to shore up urban expansion in Singapore, The Social Lives of Land reveals the dynamics of contemporary social and political change. The editors of this volume bring together contributions from across multiple disciplines and geographic locations. The contributions showcase novel theoretical and empirical insights, analyzing how people are living on, with, and from their land. From Mozambique to India, Indonesia, Ecuador, and the colonial United States, the scholars in this collection uncover histories and retell stories with a focus on the lived experiences of rural and urban land dispossession and repossession.
This timely Research Handbook provides an in-depth exploration of the scholarly understanding of social influence. Expanding on classic characterisations and themes such as conformity, majority and minority persuasion, compliance and authority, this book examines how people exert and react to social influence in dynamic interpersonal and group settings. Bringing together a diverse team of global experts, the Research Handbook reviews how research in the field has historically developed, assesses current analyses that range from neurocognitive to cultural in existing social influence research and highlights key avenues for the advancement of this burgeoning area of study. Authors document the ubiquitous nature of social influence, address its effects on performance and action, and discuss how it shapes the self, relationships, groups and social reality. Finally, the Research Handbook reflects on the role of social influence in two specific settings, the digital world and legal processes, areas chosen for their unique relevance and research vibrancy.
Decolonizing Bodies offers novel theorizations of how racial capitalism, colonialism, and heteropatriarchal violence erode the bodily schema and experiences of racialized and colonized populations, profoundly constraining their being in the world. The book invigorates embodiment studies by centering the experiences and struggles of Black, Indigenous, colonized, disabled, queer, and racialized subjects, showing how they live these displacements and disintegrations. The volume powerfully demonstrates how racism and colonialism sediment in bodily and habitual registers that are active, ongoing, made and remade. Bodies, the contributors argue, powerfully register the impacts of colonial and racialized violence, but through practices of embodiment, they also digest, expel, and transform them.
Foregrounding children's agency and voices, Debating Childhood Masculinities brings together cutting-edge interdisciplinary scholarship to examine how childhood masculinities are constructed, experienced and regulated in different parts of the world. Adopting a gender-inclusive approach, authors in this edited collection embrace a variety of anti-racist, feminist, neomaterialist and queer frameworks to showcase an international and interdisciplinary body of scholarship that explores the way childhood masculinities in today's world are being negotiated and lived out in the context of wider social change across gender relations and masculine ideals. Grounded in the premise that childhood masculinities are not biologically determined, chapters outline how children's understanding and enactment of masculinity are culturally conditioned, historically contingent, social-material constructions that are produced at the intersection of generational and gendered relations.
The world is a tough place right now. Climate change, income inequality, racist violence, and the erosion of democracy have exposed the vulnerability of our individual and collective futures. But as the sociologists gathered here by Marika Lindholm and Elizabeth Wood show, no matter how helpless we might feel, it's vital that we discover new paths toward healing and change. The short, accessible, emotionally and intellectually powerful essays in Between Us offer a transformative new way to think about sociology and its ability to fuel personal and social change. These forty-five essays reflect a diverse range of experiences. Whether taking an adult son with autism grocery shopping or fighting fires in Barcelona, contending with sexism at the beach or facing racism at a fertility clinic, celebrating one's immigrant heritage, or acknowledging one's KKK ancestors, this book shows students that sociology is deeply rooted in everyday life and can be used to help us process and understand it. A perfect introduction to the discipline and why it matters, Between Us will resonate with students from all backgrounds as they embark on their academic journey.
Rethinking the Sociology of Ageing situates ageing firmly within the discipline of sociology. Adopting a global lens, the authors explore later life in relation to contemporary social theory as it relates to social institutions and the increasing role of forms of capital. Key topics covered include generation, households, lifestyle, 'cosmopolitanisation', health and risk. The book contends that the sociology of later life is a key element in the changing nature of a globalised, late, reflexive or second modernity. The social space of later life is a hitherto neglected prism through which to examine changes in contemporary society.
How did the experience of food and eating evolve throughout the twentieth century? In answering this query, this Element examines significant changes in the production, distribution, and consumption of food in cities worldwide. It takes a comprehensive view of foodways, encompassing the material, institutional, and sociocultural conditions that shaped food's journey from farm to table. The work delves into everyday practices like buying, selling, cooking, and eating, both at home and in public spaces. Central themes include local and global food governance and food access inequality as urban communities, markets, and governments navigated the complex landscape of abundance and scarcity. This Element highlights the unique dynamics of food supply and consumption over time.
This unique and innovative book explores the sociology of environmental morality. John Hannigan presents a unique framework by which we can understand the ongoing moralisation of environmental issues, re-interpreting the development of environmental sociology as a transition from moral learning to moral outrage. Responding to the challenges raised by Michael Bell (2020), Justin Farrell (2015), and Paul Stock (2020) to develop a 'sociology of environmental morality', Hannigan investigates how our understanding of environmental conflicts, issues and movements may be enriched by unearthing their underlying moral foundations. Chapters assess the cultural construction of moral narratives and the theory of moral economies, pairing this with case studies on gardens and gardening, the deep ocean, palm oil plantations, and lithium mining in the Andean highlands. Ultimately, the book argues for a revitalised environmental sociology constructed upon three central pillars: rigorous scientific grounding, deep moral commitment, and a theoretical orientation that integrates nature and society. Rethinking Environmental Sociology is a key resource for students and academics working in environmental sociology, environmental history, political ecology and development studies. Hannigan's proposed framework is also of interest to policymakers and practitioners specialising in climate change and development.
