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Sociology

Welcome to the Sociology subject guide

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:

Subject Collections

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.

Latest titles added to the collection

Understanding Humans: How Social Science Can Help Solve Our Problems

Compiling the best episodes of SAGE's Social Science Bites podcast since its beginning in 2012, this pocket-sized volume is sure to inspire and provoke. It is structured into sections on identity, learning, human behaviour, social change, and the unexpected, with each chapter offering the perspective of one of the most dynamic thinkers in the social sciences.Taking a multidisciplinary approach, Edmonds' selection of interviews includes topics such as racial inequality, moral psychology, the pandemic, and the prison system.

Needlework, Affect and Social Transformation: The Everyday Textures of Feminist Action

Needlework, Affect and Social Transformation offers an original framework for moving beyond binary discourses that class practices of needlework as either feminist or reactionary. Using transnational, contemporary case studies - such as the Social Justice Sewing Academy, fictionalised Bangladeshi garment workers as well as the famous Pussyhat Project - Katja May suggests a new approach to the interpretation of textile crafts as an affective social practice, and draws on under-represented issues of race. May connects her study to broader material and social conditions of inequality, allowing for a nuanced and sensitive understanding of the role of needlework in feminist political activism.

Social Problems: Sociology in Action

Maxine P. Atkinson and Kathleen Odell Korgen provide concrete ways to make use of sociological training in the "real" world by considering sociological solutions to a range of social problems and issues facing society today.

Immigrant Lives: Intersectionality, Transnationality, and Global Perspectives

This volume focuses on processes, motivations, policies, and practices that influence international migration and the experiences of migrating and settling in a new country. With chapter contributions by international and interdisciplinary scholars, academics and researchers from Africa, Australia, Europe, Latin America, and North America, the book examines and interrogates some immigration policies, while capturing migration and transnational experiences from migratory hotspots in different parts of the world. To explore the multiple ways in which immigrants and refugees experience migration, the book is grounded in Kimberlé Crenshaw's intersectionality and Uri Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems model.

Unshrinking: How to Fight Fatphobia

Blending intimate stories with trenchant analysis, Manne shows why fatphobia matters, now more than ever. Over the last decades, bias has waned in every category except one: body size. Here she examines how anti-fatness operates – how it leads us to make devastating assumptions about a person's attractiveness, fortitude and intellect, and how it intersects with other systems of oppression. Fatphobia is responsible for wage gaps, medical neglect and poor educational outcomes. It is a straitjacket, restricting our freedom, our movement, our potential. Fatphobia is a social justice issue.

The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Africa

This Handbook provides contributions that locates African sociological thinking in historical context and takes a critical look at its current manifestations across the continent. The collection is premised upon the understanding that in order to understand the sociology of Africa as significant intervention, the participation and representation of African ways of knowing and doing is a critical starting point.

Socialization

Drawing on a wide variety of empirical examples, this book offers a lively, accessible account of primary and secondary socialization, and how they interconnect. By considering socialization as a process that continues throughout the life course, the book highlights the dynamic and enduring ways in which the social world is involved in shaping and reshaping individuals, shedding productive light on the effects of class, gender, and race, as well as on inequality and domination.

Love Troubles

Four decades of economic reform have made China one of the most unequal countries in the world. Love Troubles is the first book to examine the emotional cost of this inequality to the intimate and emotional lives of China's people. Examining the impact of economic and cultural inequality on private life, this book both embodies and facilitates an intimate turn in the study of China's social change, and presents a significant intellectual intervention into worldwide debates on inequality.

Body and Gender

This book investigates the body as an essential vector of inequality, shaped by institutions, interaction and culture. Drawing on classical sociological research about modernity and contemporary studies that emphasize intersectionality, the book looks at how the gendered body has been conceptualized with special attention to body politics, the power of appearance and the representation of embodied identity. It also considers the interplay between body, sex and sexuality and the way gendered bodies intersect with other dimensions of social inequality.

Race, Ethnicity and Social Theory

Study of race has become an established part of the curriculum - this book synthisizes leading research in the field Interest in Anglophone countries and across Europe - also across disciplines,