Comprehensive, critical and accessible, Criminology: A Sociological Introduction offers an authoritative overview of the study of criminology, from early theoretical perspectives to pressing contemporary issues such as the globalisation of crime, crimes against the environment, terrorism and cybercrime. Authored by an internationally renowned and experienced group of authors in the Department of Sociology at the University of Essex, this is a truly international criminology text that delves i...

This fully updated fifth edition of An Introduction to African Politics is an ideal textbook for those new to the study of this fascinating continent. Charting trends in government over six decades of the post-colonial era, the book tackles key questions such as: How have African states made sense of their colonial inheritance? How relevant are ethnic and religious identities? Why have some states collapsed and others prospered? Why did the one-party state fail? Why is contemporary Africa now...

Abolish Criminology presents critical scholarship on Criminology and Criminal Justice ideologies and practices, alongside emerging freedom-driven discourses that encourage a vision and practice of new world formations.

From the new celebrity culture that has emerged from reality television and the Internet, to the paparazzi-filled endgame of Princess Diana and the bizarre trials and tribulations of Michael Jackson, The Celebrity Culture Reader documents the significant role that celebrities occupy in contemporary culture. Combining classic essays and contemporary writings, The Celebrity Culture Reader investigates the cultural implications of this complex contemporary phenomenon.

Anthropology of Religion: The Basics is an accessible and engaging introductory text organized around key issues that all anthropologists of religion face. This book uses a wide range of historical and ethnographic examples to address not only what is studied by anthropologists of religion, but how such studies are approached. It addresses questions such as:

How do human agents interact with gods and spirits?

What is the nature of doing religious ethnography?

Can the immaterial be embodied i...

‘Criminal Careers’ follows the lives and criminal behaviours of 2,397 people in Poland, who as juveniles committed a crime and received a form of punishment from the juvenile court between the late 1980s and the year 2000.

With growing economic inequality and threats to the sustainability of human societies, Koh argues that cooperatives can play an important role in promoting decent work and reducing economic inequality in the 21st century, and thus urges policy makers to reignite policy discussions on cooperatives.

City provides an accessible yet critical introduction to one of the key ideas in human geography. While most of the world’s population now lives in cities, the definition and theoretical specification of the city nonetheless remains elusive. In this extensively updated second edition, Phil Hubbard considers the different ways that the lived and messy realities of urban life have been approached by geographers, past and present.

Situating these in the context of ongoing debates concerning gl...

The Social Dynamics of Family Violence explores family violence throughout the life course, from child abuse and neglect to intimate partner violence and elder abuse.

While the subject of migration has received enormous attention in academic journals and books across the social sciences, introductory texts on the matter are few and far between. Even fewer books have explored migration through a critical and explicit engagement with spatial concepts. Now in its second edition, Migration remains the only text in more than a decade that emphasizes how geographical or spatial concepts can be used critically to understand migration.

The multi-disciplinary text ...