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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.
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.
This book discusses and compares how social movements in Brazil, Chile, Greece and England are beacons of alternative politics. It focuses on the potential of these movements to radically transform higher education and society. It explores how social movements create new forms of resistance to the ubiquity of global capitalism and new forms of thinking, acting and being in the world that are not based on exploitation and profit. Rather, they are premised on respect for diversity, commitment to equality and inclusion, solidaristic structures and multiple and equally valued (pluriversal) epistemologies. The book draws on empirical material collected over 12 years in conversation with key participants in social movements including the Brazilian Movimiento de los Trabajadores Rurales Sin Tierra, Chilean and Greek Student movements, and the Black Lives Matter Movement in England. These movements confront the realist pedagogies in our lives, that is, the practices and structures that dominate the way society and education are organized.
Semiotics provides key analytical tools to understand the creation and reproduction of meaning in social life. Although some fields have productively incorporated semiotic models, sociology still needs to engage with semiotic mediation. Written by a diverse group of authors in interpretive sociology, this ambitious volume asks what the relationship between meaning systems and action is, how we can describe culture and which roles we assign to language, social processes and cognition in a sociological context. Contributors offer empirical research that not only outlines the conceptual issues at stake, but also demonstrates 'how to do things' with semiotics through case studies.
A pioneering sociological exploration of boredom as a culturally- and socially-dependent emotion Does boredom have a history? What can hunter-gatherers teach us about boredom? Is boredom experienced differently by those in different socio-economic classes? Is boredom a disease that is now globalized in a world of inequalities and marginalization? Does boredom contribute to political movements, wars, terrorism, or cultural revolutions? What does boredom have to do with power? How do high expectations contribute to being recurrently bored? In The Sociology of Boredom, Mariusz Finkielsztein provides a new approach to conceptualizing, interpreting, and perceiving one of the most widespread, yet neglected, human emotions.
Provides real-world insights into social and political conflict across disciplines The Handbook of Social and Political Conflict offers a comprehensive exploration of conflict from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, merging insights from fields including sociology, political science, psychology, communication, and conflict resolution. Bringing together original work by experts from around the world, this authoritative volume provides readers with a deep understanding of the mechanisms, causes, and consequences of conflict. Designed for those who wish to bridge academic disciplines, the Handbook both advances theoretical understanding and offers practical conflict resolution strategies that can be applied in a broad range of contexts, from interpersonal disputes to international tensions.
This handbook provides an in-depth analysis of the theoretical agendas, analytical tools, and substantive contributions offered by International Political Sociology. It explores the range of insights available to those who use sociological theory to engage various facets of world politics, from colonialism to globalization. Structured around three defining commitments - relationalism, intersubjectivity, and historicism - the book outlines what is distinct about IPS, where it came from, and where it can go next. Engaging a wide range of debates in International Relations and related fields of enquiry, the volume includes contributions on seminal concepts in the social sciences, including power, order, rule, resistance, and agency, alongside discussion of a range of important issue-areas, from climate change to revolutions.
