Hearing, health, and technologies are entangled in multi-faceted ways. This edited volume addresses this complex relationship by arguing that modern hearing was and is increasingly linked to and mediated by technological innovations.By providing a set of original interdisciplinary investigations that shed new light on the history, theory, and practices of hearing techniques, it is able to explore the heterogeneous entanglements of sound, hearing practices, technologies, and health i...

Disrupting, questioning and altering the taken-for-granted ’cosmos’ of everyday life, the experiences of illness challenge the different ways in which social normalcy is remembered, maintained and expected. This book explores the manifold experiences of life threatening, infectious or non-curable illnesses that trouble the practices and relations of human and social life. Challenging a mere deficit-model of illness, it examines how the cosmopolitics of illness require and initiate an ethos...

New Technologies and Emerging Spaces of Care provides the latest practice-oriented qualitative research and innovative conceptual discussions of how health and health care systems are currently dealing with complex transformations and varied reforms. Exploring and analysing the social and cultural impact of new technologies, this book examines the societal relevance of new technologies of care and the manner in which technological innovations configure and reconfigure institutionalized spa...

This text is a critical and empirically-based introduction to disability studies. It offers a comprehensive, book-length analysis of disability through the lens of Science and Technology Studies (STS), and presents a practice-oriented discussion of how bodies, senses and things are linked in everyday life and configure "enabling" and "disabling" scenarios. Relevant to a broad spectrum of medical practitioners and practicing social service workers, the book will also be essential reading in...

The question of agency is a key issue in social theory and research. The discourse of human agency as an effect of social relations is deeply intertwined with the history of sociological thought. However, in most recent discussions the role of non-humans gains a substantial impact concerning agency. Agency without Actors? New Approaches to Collective Action asks: Are nonhumans active, do they have agency? And if so: how and in which different ways?Consequently, Agency ...

This book provides an exciting and diverse philosophical exploration of the role of practice and practices in human activity. It contains original essays and critiques of this philosophical and sociological attempt to move beyond current problematic ways of thinking in the humanities and social sciences. It will be useful across many disciplines, including philosophy, sociology, science, cultural theory, history and anthropology.

This book is made up of a selection of writings from an international team of scholars, highlighting the contribution made to the field of educational policy and educational policy research by Basil Bernstein's work on the sociology of pedagogy. These contributors explore, analyse and engage with contemporary political reforms of education, contemporary pedagogic debates and the changing nature of professional knowledge, relationships and structures. The subjects covered include:...

Building on Richard Sennetts recent work this books tries to clarify the ethical significance of craftsmanship. According to Sennett, `learning to work well is a deep source of personal meaning and of fruitful cooperation. Moreover provides the foundation of citizenship. Learning to master a craft is learning to be curious and patient, to focus on relationships and learn the skills of anticipation and revision, in a continual dialogue with material that resists `quick fixes and turns the c...

This study is about the principles for constructing polite speeches. The core of it first appeared in Questions and Politeness, edited by Esther N. Goody (now out of print). It is here reissued with a fresh introduction that surveys the considerable literature in linguistics, psychology and the social sciences that the original extended essay stimulated, and suggests distinct directions for research. The authors describe and account for some remarkable parallelisms in the linguistic constr...

Michel Foucault was a twentieth-century philosopher of extraordinary talent, a political activist, social theorist, cultural critic and creative historian. He shaped the ways we think today about such controversial issues as power, sexuality, madness and criminality. Johanna Oksala explores the conceptual tools that Foucault gave us for constructing new forms of thinking as well as for smashing old certainties. She offers a lucid account of him as a thinker whose persistent aim was to chal...

Most of our knowledge is acquired by discourse, and our ability to produce and understand discourse is impossible without the activation of massive amounts of knowledge of the world. Both 'discourse' and 'knowledge' are fundamental concepts of the humanities and social sciences, but they are often treated separately. Based on a theory of natural knowledge, the book deals with the cognitive processes, social distribution, cultural differences and the linguistic and discursive 'management' o...

Reassembling the Social is a fundamental challenge from one of the world's leading social theorists to how we understand society and the 'social'. Bruno Latour's contention is that the word 'social', as used by Social Scientists, has become laden with assumptions to the point where it has become misnomer. When the adjective is applied to a phenomenon, it is used to indicate a stablilized state of affairs, a bundle of ties that in due course may be used to account for another phenomenon. Bu...