University of Chicago Press: New Titles in Sociology: Individual, State and Society

Sorting Sexualities

Stefan Vogler — Mon, 17 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

In Sorting Sexualities, Stefan Vogler deftly unpacks the politics of the techno-legal classification of sexuality in the United States. His study focuses specifically on state classification practices around LGBTQ people seeking asylum in the United States and sexual offenders being evaluated for carceral placement—two situations where state actors must determine individuals’ sexualities. Though these legal settings are diametrically opposed—one a punitive assessment, the other a protective one—they present the same question: how do we know someone’s sexuality?

In this rich ethnographic study, Vogler reveals how different legal arenas take dramatically different approaches to classifying sexuality and use those classifications to legitimate different forms of social control. By delving into the histories behind these diverging classification practices and analyzing their contemporary reverberations, Vogler shows how the science of sexuality is far more central to state power than we realize.

Justice Is an Option

Robert Meister — Tue, 27 Apr 2021 05:00:00 GMT

More than ten years after the worst crisis since the Great Depression, the financial sector is thriving. But something is deeply wrong. Taxpayers bore the burden of bailing out “too big to fail” banks, but got nothing in return. Inequality has soared, and a populist backlash against elites has shaken the foundations of our political order. Meanwhile, financial capitalism seems more entrenched than ever. What is the left to do?

Justice Is an Option uses those problems—and the framework of finance that created them—to reimagine historical justice. Robert Meister returns to the spirit of Marx to diagnose our current age of finance. Instead of closing our eyes to the political and economic realities of our era, we need to grapple with them head-on. Meister does just that, asking whether the very tools of finance that have created our vastly unequal world could instead be made to serve justice and equality. Meister here formulates nothing less than a democratic financial theory for the twenty-first century—one that is equally conversant in political philosophy, Marxism, and contemporary politics. Justice Is an Option is a radical, invigorating first page of a new—and sorely needed—leftist playbook.

Developing a Sense of Place

Tamara Ashley; Alexis Weedon — Mon, 15 Mar 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Cultural planners, artists, and policy makers must work through the arts to create communities—and a place within them. Developing a Sense of Place brings together a series of case studies and success stories drawn from a different geographical or sociocultural contexts. Selected for their lasting effect in their local community, the case studies explore new models for opening up the relationship between universities and their surrounding regions, explicitly connecting creative, critical, and theoretical approaches to civic development. The studies cover various regions in the UK, and also areas in Brazil, Turkey, and Zimbabwe.

Developing a Sense of Place offers a range of viewpoints, including those of the arts strategist, the academic, the practice-researcher, and the artist. Through its innovative models, from performing arts to architectural design, the book serves diverse interests, such as the arts and cultural policy managers, master planners, and arts workers, as well as students of human geography, cultural planning, business and the creative industries, and arts administration, at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels.