This book is primarily a research-informed textbook aimed at any reader with an interest in using film and literature in sociological and social science research.

Cinematic Sociology is a one-of-a-kind resource that helps students to view films sociologically while also providing much-needed pedagogy for teaching sociology through film. In this engaging text, the authors take readers beyond watching movies and help them "see" films sociologically while also developing critical thinking and analytical skills that will be useful in college coursework and beyond. The book's essays from expert scholars in sociology and cultural studies explore the ways social life is presented--distorted, magnified, or politicized--in popular film. Contributor to the SAGE Teaching Innovations and Professional Development Award

Essays by popular children's authors reveal the books that shaped their personal and literary lives, explaining how the stories they loved influenced them creatively, politically, and intellectually.

Sociology through the Projector takes issue with the question of how contemporary film can help answering the general, abstract but still urgent question: what is the social today? This book explains the performative relation to contemporary social theory in which cinema functions as a tool for social diagnosis. There is much to be learned about social theory through an encounter with films as films are part and parcel of the society they portray. Increasingly more lay knowledge about social problems and facts stems from cinema as it offers to large audiences a popular and pedagogical introduction to social knowledge. Social theory cannot avoid a critical engagement with cinema as cinema interprets, invents, displaces and distorts the object of sociological inquiry. This book will provide a deeper understanding of contemporary social theory as the chosen films will work as a pedagogical route into contemporary social theory. The films represent a mix of European and American blockbusters and more aesthetically orientated films. The authors question several dominant topics and concerns within social theory and film studies. Firstly, by cross-examining a series of concepts such as identity, representation, memory and surveillance (filming social behaviour) which are of concern to both film theory and social theory. Secondly, by trying to develop imaginative approaches to standard social concerns such as exclusion, gender roles and inequalities, power, infantilisation and commodification of the social and psychological bonds. This book will be a great resource for students and researchers of Sociology, Contemporary Social Theory, Film Studies and Cultural Studies.

Well-known critic Brian Stableford, a former professor at the University of Reading, contributes "a fascinating and valuable attempt to grapple with the questions of why SF authors write what they write, and why SF readers like what they like"-Interzone. Contents: Introduction; Approaches to the Sociology of Literature; The Analysis of Communicative Functions; The Evolution of Science Fiction as a Publishing Category; The Expectations of the Science Fiction Reader; Themes and Trends in Science Fiction; and Conclusion: The Communicative Functions of Science Fiction. Complete with Notes and References, Bibliography, and Index.

In this book, leading sociologists expand the scope of their discipline by revealing the sociological aspects of the works of great philosophers, scientists, and writers. Sociologists have long recognized that sociological insight can be gleaned from creative thinkers outside their formal discipline. Sociological Insights of Great Thinkers: Sociology through Literature, Philosophy, and Science captures and examines those insights in 32 essays that discuss scholars and writers not normally associated with any sociological school of thought. Following a tradition of enriching the sociological toolkit by finding influence in philosophy and literature, the volume's contributors—an international group of renowned scholars—eschew biography to focus solely on sociological interpretations that can be drawn from the work of many of history's preeminent thinkers. Among the book's subjects are philosophers such as Aristotle, Plato, Kant, and Cassirer; scientists such as Darwin and Galileo; and authors such as Kafka, Proust, and Shakespeare. The essays not only allow readers to see such thinkers in a new light, but underscore the fact that sociological questions have lain at the very heart of humanity throughout history.

Literary and filmic depictions of the disabled reinforce an "ableist" ideology that classifies bodies as normal or abnormal--positive or negative. Disabled characters are often represented as aberrant or evil and are isolated or incarcerated. This book examines language in film, fiction and other media that perpetuates the representation of the disabled as abnormal or problematic. The author looks at depictions of disability--both disparaging and amusing--and discusses disability theory as a framework for reconsidering "normal" and "abnormal" bodies.