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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.
Free time, one of life's most precious things, often feels unfulfilling. But why? And how did leisure activities transition from strolling in the park for hours to "doomscrolling" on social media for thirty minutes? Today, despite the promise of modern industrialization, many people experience both a scarcity of free time and a disappointment in it. Free Time offers a broad historical explanation of why our affluent society does not afford more time away from work and why that time is often unsatisfying. Gary S. Cross explores the cultural, social, economic, and political history, especially of the past 250 years to understand the roots of our conceptions of free time and its use.
This edited volume shares contributors' first-person narrations of some of the hard-fought learnings and challenges of breaking from the traditions of their disciplinary fields and finding new and reclaimed ways to think about race.
Social justice has returned to the heart of political debate in present-day Europe. But what does it mean in different national histories and political regimes, and how has this changed over time? This book provides the first historical account of the evolution of notions of social justice across Europe since the late nineteenth century. Written by an international team of leading historians, the book analyses the often-divergent ways in which political movements, state institutions, intellectual groups, and social organisations have understood and sought to achieve social justice. Conceived as an emphatically European analysis covering both the eastern and western halves of the continent, Social Justice in Twentieth-Century Europe demonstrates that no political movement ever held exclusive ownership of the meaning of social justice.
Is the future about to close in, or is it open to new horizons? For anthropologist Tim Ingold, the root of our difficulty in facing up to the future lies in the way we think about generations. We imagine them as layers, succeeding one another like sheets in a stack. This view figures as a largely unquestioned backdrop to discussions of evolution, life and death, longevity, extinction, sustainability, education, climate change and other matters of contemporary concern. What if we were to think of generations, instead, as wrapping around one another along their length, more like fibres in a rope than stacked sheets? In this compelling new book, Ingold argues that a return to the idea that life is forged in the collaboration of overlapping generations might not only assuage some of our anxieties, but also offer a lasting foundation for future coexistence.
The dynamically developing relational movement in social and cultural sciences is fueled by various classical and contemporary theoretical inspirations. Relational approaches propose various models of relational analyses, such as field analysis, social space analysis, network analysis, or the critical realist relational heuristic. The aim of this book is to reflect on various relational approaches and models of relational analysis and to answer two basic questions: Are there foundations for a methodological unity of relational sociology, despite the diversity of approaches? And does relational sociology form a new paradigm?
In The Future Is Disabled, Leah Laksmi Piepzna-Samarasinha asks some provocative questions: What if, in the near future, the majority of people will be disabled - and what if that's not a bad thing? And what if disability justice and disabled wisdom are crucial to creating a future in which it's possible to survive fascism, climate change, and pandemics and to bring about liberation? Piepzna-Samarasinha writes about disability justice at the end of the world, documenting the many ways disabled people kept and are keeping each other - and the rest of the world - alive during Trump, fascism and the COVID-19 pandemic. Other subjects include crip interdependence, care and mutual aid in real life, disabled community building, and disabled art practice as survival and joy.
Beyond hegemonic thoughts, the Post-Western sociology enables a new dialogue between East Asia (China, Japan, Korea) and Europe on common and local knowledge to consider theoretical continuities and discontinuities, to develop transnational methodological spaces, and co-produce creolized concepts. With this new paradigm in social sciences we introduce the multiplication of epistemic autonomies vis-à-vis Western hegemony and new theoretical assemblages between East-Asia and European sociologies. From this ecology of knowledge this groundbreaking contribution is to coproduce a post-Western space in a cross-pollination process where "Western" and "non-Western" knowledge do interact, articulated through cosmovisions, as well as to coproduce transnational fieldwork practices.
This book introduces readers to basic concepts of gender equality, equity and equal opportunities, then discusses measuring these phenomena, the methods of constructing indicators, and reviews the main indicators that have been proposed at the international level to measure gender equality. It then sets the theoretical discussions against the findings from a project financed by the EU to highlight the importance of a regional analysis of gender equality. The results make it clear that it is necessary to move from the purely national perspective hitherto used in gender equality analyses to a regional one because differences can be highly pronounced even within the same country.
Reshaping Youth Participation reframes discussions around youth political, social, civic, and cultural participation. Drawing upon insights on democracy and citizenship, self-organising and protest movements, and arts activism as engaged social activism, the chapters consider the youth participation spaces in which young people find voice and action-spaces that are part of existing forms of participation, and newly emergent spaces that challenge existing systems. Exploring the participation of young people in 'adult spaces', of young people who are pursuing a new politics and ideological change, of marginalised young people, and of young people utilising the creative arts as a 'lived politics', the authors argue that youth participation provides a vital addition to sustaining and developing political, social, and democratic life in cities.
The 1960s saw pioneering changes in the realms of international politics, science, culture and art. Turning this historical lens onto the study of sociology, The Sociological Inheritance of the 1960sreveals both the continuities and the departures the field has seen in its core principles and approaches over the past several decades. Beginning with an overview of society in the '60s, Jiří Šubrt provides an important reflection on a period worthy of contemporary reflection. Inspiring an enriched understanding of a legacy still deeply relevant to current issues and concerns across the field,The Sociological Inheritance of the 1960s proves that, despite the half a century that has since passed, we still have much to learn from this rich period of sociological development.
