The book explores the issue of non-humans and their role and position within contemporary social sciences. Inspired by current trends of bridging the dichotomy of nature and culture, the authors use the “non-human“ as a prism that offers a different perspective of the world, society, culture, and last but not least, being(s). To start paying attention to non-humans has the potential to hybridize social sciences and in turn enrich them as well as to offer social scientists novel perspectives and tools to approach social phenomena. Such an attitude might in turn lead to a reassessment of understanding of the relationship between the world and being, and of the categories of being and subject. Hence the potential of non-humans to stimulate an ontological shift within social sciences. The view of the “human” and “non-human” as oppositional categories is a remnant of essentially modernist thinking. This book represents a response in terms of an attempt to think about humans and non-humans outside of the binary division. The authors thus want to contribute to the hybridization of social sciences and throughout the book they deal with ontological, epistemological and thematical shifts stemming from the hybridization. If the non-human does not exist as a negation, the boundary between the two becomes unclear and overlapping. It is with this hybridization, the blurring of the boundaries, that we are able to come closer to those who inhabit the world: non-humans and humans alike.

Ideas of dead, inert space, non-living, machinelike reflexive controlled bodies and passive, meaningless things are very modern. At the very heart of the program of modernity, resource exploitation and consumption is the idea that non-humans have no agency – they are simply resources to be manipulated and exploited at our will. Mostly leaving aside the more and more evident ethical concerns of this worldview and this setting of the human – non-human boundary, this volume attempts to explore what social sciences have to say about the relationship between the human and non-human. The intention of this book is to offer a non-human perspective. We realize that it is sometimes difficult to say whether the outcome of such a perspective would be just a shallow tendency to anthropomorphize, or whether we could reach some of the previously unseen properties of non-humans. Being aware of the dangers, this volume puts together different case studies that are more or less inspired by this non-human perspective. The aim is to explore what has been for a long time put aside and to provide new insights, new revelations that can lead social science to undiscovered or hidden realms. The outcome of this thrilling adventure can in the end be a discovery that the role of natural and social sciences, or even more, the character of the nature-culture dichotomy would have to be re-evaluated.

The robots are coming! So too is the ‘age of automation’, the march of ‘invasive’ species, more intense natural disasters, and a potential cataclysm of other unprecedented events and phenomena of which we do not yet know, and cannot predict. This book is concerned with how to account for these non-humans and their effects within theories of social practice. In particular, this provocative collection tackles contemporary debates about the roles, relations and agencies of constantly changing, disruptive, intelligent or otherwise 'dynamic' non-humans, such as weather, animals and automated devices. In doing so contributors challenge and take forward existing understandings of dynamic non-humans in theories of social practice by reconsidering their potential roles in everyday life. The book will benefit sociology, geography, science and technology studies, and human- (and animal-) computer interaction design scholars seeking to make sense of the complex entanglement of non-human phenomena and things in the performance of social practices.

Animals and Sociology challenges traditional assumptions about the nature of sociology. Sociology often centres on humans; however, other animals are everywhere in society. Kay Peggs explores the significant contribution that sociology can make to our understanding of human relations with other animals.

In Infrahumanisms Megan H. Glick considers how conversations surrounding nonhuman life have impacted a broad range of attitudes toward forms of human difference such as race, sexuality, and health. She examines the history of human and nonhuman subjectivity as told through twentieth-century scientific and cultural discourses that include pediatrics, primatology, eugenics, exobiology, and obesity research. Outlining how the category of the human is continuously redefined in relation to the infrahuman—a liminal position of speciation existing between the human and the nonhuman—Glick reads a number of phenomena, from early twentieth-century efforts to define children and higher order primates as liminally human and the postwar cultural fascination with extraterrestrial life to anxieties over AIDS, SARS, and other cross-species diseases. In these cases the efforts to define a universal humanity create the means with which to reinforce notions of human difference and maintain human-nonhuman hierarchies. In foregrounding how evolving definitions of the human reflect shifting attitudes about social inequality, Glick shows how the consideration of nonhuman subjectivities demands a rethinking of long-held truths about biological meaning and difference.

In this book questions about definitions and demarcations of sport science are discussed. Not the least the many normative ideas of sport as good or as bad are problematized in relation to the academic field. These ideas permeate sport science in ways that are not seen in other academic fields like history, sociology or law. In addition, if and if so, in what ways sport science influence social science in general. Does sport science bring new questions in relation to issues like "what makes a society possible" or "what is a human being"? This book was published as a special issue of Sport in Society.

This timely book inspires researchers to deploy relevant, effective, innovative digital methods. It explores the relationship of such methods to 'mainstream' social science; interdisciplinarity; innovations in digital research tools; the opportunities (and challenges) of digital methods in researching social life; and digital research ethics.