Polity Press

Not so long ago, comedy and laughter were a shared experience of relief, as Freud famously argued. At their best, ribbing, roasting, piss-taking and insulting were the foundation of a kind of...

Not so long ago, comedy and laughter were a shared experience of relief, as Freud famously argued. At their best, ribbing, roasting, piss-taking and insulting were the foundation of a kind of...

In Post-Democracy (Polity, 2004) Colin Crouch argued that behind the fa?ade of strong institutions, democracy in many advanced societies was being hollowed out, its big events becoming empty rituals...

With the United States' superpower status rivalled by a rising China and emerging powers like India and Brazil playing a growing role in international affairs, the global balance of power is shifting...

The definition of power varies across disciplines. Social scientists tend to deal with social power, philosophers of technology with the relation between technology and society, and ecologists with...

The definition of power varies across disciplines. Social scientists tend to deal with social power, philosophers of technology with the relation between technology and society, and ecologists with...

Employment relations in advanced, post-industrial democracies have become increasingly insecure and uncertain as the risks associated with work are being shifted from employers and governments to...

Employment relations in advanced, post-industrial democracies have become increasingly insecure and uncertain as the risks associated with work are being shifted from employers and governments to...

Psychocinema reexamines the connection between psychoanalysis and film, arguing for a return to the universalist core of both cinema and subjectivity. It traces the history of the influence of...

Psychocinema reexamines the connection between psychoanalysis and film, arguing for a return to the universalist core of both cinema and subjectivity. It traces the history of the influence of...

You are remarkable: You experience a vast range of thoughts and feelings, including falling in love, remembering last Tuesday, and contemplating the meaning of life. And you can carry all sorts of...

Societies around the world are struggling to think clearly about trans realities and understand trans identities. Real Gender is the first book to present a cis defence of what it means to be...

We are living in turbulent times, witnessing renewed international conflict, resurgent nationalism, declining multilateralism, and a torrent of hostile propaganda. How are we to understand these...

Faced with growing inequalities and new forms of domination and exploitation, can the movement of emancipation take on a new life today, or has it been arrested by the powers of repression and...

Faced with growing inequalities and new forms of domination and exploitation, can the movement of emancipation take on a new life today, or has it been arrested by the powers of repression and...

This slim volume contains four little-known texts by Pierre Bourdieu on the question of reflexivity, which was a key theme in his work. For Bourdieu, reflexivity was not an exercise in...

This slim volume contains four little-known texts by Pierre Bourdieu on the question of reflexivity, which was a key theme in his work. For Bourdieu, reflexivity was not an exercise in...

This book is the first in-depth account of the uprising in Iran that began on 16 September 2022, when a young woman, Mahsa Amini, was killed by the morality police. In the months that followed,...

Once there were princes and peasants and very few between. The extremes of wealth and poverty are still with us, but that shouldn't blind us to the fact our societies have been utterly transformed...

What is life like for workers in the gig economy? Is it a paradise of flexibility and individual freedom? Or is it a world of exploitation and conflict? Callum Cant took a job with one of the most...

In recent years culture has become the primary currency of politics - from the identity politics that characterized the 2016 American election to the pushback against Western universalism in much of...

Over the past century alone, Russia has lived through great achievements and deepest misery; mass heroism and mass crime; over-blown ambition and near-hopeless despair - always emerging with its...

Corruption on an immense scale and the unscrupulous use of law enforcement have left indelible marks on post-Soviet Russia. Federico Varese reveals the scars of these grim decades through an unusual...

On 24 February 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, giving rise to the deadliest conflict on European soil since the Second World War. How could this happen in twenty-first-century...

Beauty today is a paradox. The cult of beauty is ubiquitous but it has lost its transcendence and become little more than an aspect of consumerism, the aesthetic dimension of capitalism. The sublime...

All forms of recreational digital consumption - whether on smartphones, tablets, game consoles or TVs - have skyrocketed in the younger generations. From the age of 2, children in the West clock up...

We have entered the gateway to the apocalypse. This theological concept is the best metaphor to describe the world in which we are already living. Chaos is all around us: political folly, economical...

Developments in AI, robotics and big data are changing the nature of education. Yet the implications of these technologies for the teaching profession are uncertain. While most educators remain...

By 2100, the human population may exceed 11 billion. Having recently surpassed 7.5 billion, it has trebled since 1950. Are such numbers sustainable, given a deepening environmental crisis? Can so...

We live in a world of seemingly limitless consumer choice. Yet, as every shopper knows without thinking about it, many everyday goods - from beds to batteries to printer paper - are available in a...