The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Africa presents to a broad readership an accessible, comprehensive, up to date, and topical comparative analysis of sociological thinking in Africa. Sociological discourse about African societies has been challenging and difficult, due to a lack of both comprehensive analyses and holistic sociological evidence that covers Africa from past to present times. This Handbook brings together latest analyses of sociological phenomena from the best scholars working on numerous thematic areas. It provides contributions that locates African sociological thinking in historical context and takes a critical look at its current manifestations across the continent. This collection builds upon an existing body of literature which has demonstrated that while the analysis of African societies has long been an item on the agenda of sociologists worldwide, advances of the decolonial critique made notably by African scholars in Africa enhances the scholarship of the sociology of Africa. Thus, the collection is premised upon the understanding that in order to understand the sociology of Africa as significant intervention, the participation and representation of African ways of knowing and doing is a critical starting point. This Handbook comprises a series of scholarly and interdisciplinary perspectives on current debates over how best to unpack sociological imaginations in African context. The scholarly contributions, therefore, are based on both perspectives illustrating the importance of specificity in sociological phenomenon. The Handbook is arranged in seven parts: Context and Perspectives; Race, Ethnicity, and Religion; Gender, Sexuality, and Intersectionality; Medical Sociology: Political Economy and Development; Crime and Violence; and The Family and Education. Premised on the importance of African ways of knowing and doing, these chapters offer sociologists, researchers, and students an invaluable starting point for a fuller understanding of African sociology.

The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Religion draws on the expertise of an international team of scholars providing both an entry point into the sociological study and understanding of religion and an in-depth survey into its changing forms and content in the contemporary world. The role and impact of religion and spirituality on the politics, culture, education and health in the modern world is rigorously discussed and debated. The study of the sociology of religion forges interdisciplinary links to explore aspects of continuity and change in the contemporary interface between society and religion. Using a combination of theoretical, methodological and content-led approaches, the fifty-seven contributors collectively emphasise the complex relationships between religion and aspects of life from scientific research to law, ecology to art, music to cognitive science, crime to institutional health care and more. The developing character of religion, irreligion and atheism and the impact of religious diversity on social cohesion are explored. An overview of current scholarship in the field is provided in each themed chapter with an emphasis on encouraging new thinking and reflection on familiar and emergent themes to stimulate further debate and scholarship. The resulting essay collection provides an invaluable resource for research and teaching in this diverse discipline.

The goal of The Oxford Handbook of African American Language is to provide readers with a wide range of analyses of both traditional and contemporary work on language use in African American communities in a broad collective. The Handbook offers a survey of language and its uses in African American communities from a wide range of contexts organized into seven sections: Origins and Historical Perspectives; Lects and Variation; Structure and Description; Child Language Acquisition and Development; Education; Language in Society; and Language and Identity. It is a handbook of research on African American Language (AAL) and, as such, provides a variety of scholarly perspectives that may not align with each other -- as is indicative of most scholarly research. The chapters in this book "interact" with one another as contributors frequently refer the reader to further elaboration on and references to related issues and connect their own research to related topics in other chapters within their own sections and the handbook more generally to create dialogue about AAL, thus affirming the need for collaborative thinking about the issues in AAL research. Though the Handbook does not and cannot include every area of research, it is meant to provide suggestions for future work on lesser-studied areas (e.g., variation/heterogeneity in regional, social, and ethnic communities) by highlighting a need for collaborative perspectives and innovative thinking while reasserting the need for better research and communication in areas thought to be resolved.

Ninety percent of the world's youth live in Africa, Latin America and the developing countries of Asia. Despite this, the field of Youth Studies, like many others, is dominated by the knowledge economy of the Global North. To address these geo-political inequalities of knowledge, The Oxford Handbook of Global South Youth Studies offers a contribution from Southern scholars to remake Youth Studies from its current state, that universalises Northern perspectives, into a truly Global Youth Studies. Contributors from across various regions of the Global South, including from the Diaspora, Indigenous and Aboriginal communities, locate and define "the Global South", articulate the necessity of studying Southern lives to enrich, re-interpret, legitimate and offer symmetry to Youth Studies, and utilize and innovate Southern theory to do so. Eleven concepts are re-imagined and re-presented throughout the Handbook--personhood, intersectionality, violences, de- and post-coloniality, consciousness, precarity, fluid modernities, ontological insecurity, navigational capacities, collective agency and emancipation. The outcome is a series of everyday practices such as hustling, navigating, fixing, waiting, being on standby, silence, and life-writing, that demonstrate how youth living in adversity experiment with and push back against routine and conformity, and how research may support them in these endeavors and, simultaneously, redefine the relationships between knowledge, practice and politics-what the volume editors term "epistepraxis". The Handbook concludes with a nascent charter for a Global Youth Studies of benefit to the world, that no longer excludes, assumes or elides but rather includes new possibilities for representing youth, researching amongst them, and devising policies and interventions to better serve them. This volume is a critical addition to the field of Youth Studies and one that should be of interest to scholars, researchers, and students working in this area in both the Global North and South.

The Oxford Handbook of Sociology for Social Justice presents an alternative approach to sociological research that begins with community engagement and political commitments focused on social justice. The collection includes international case studies of students and faculty partnered with labor unions, farmers and farmworkers, activists Of many stripes, and others who not only use their social science skills to support social justice work, but also recognize how these movements impact our understanding of sociology to begin with.

The wide-ranging work of W. E. B. Du Bois, critical to understanding the role that race has played in creating the modern world we find around us, mostly has been ignored or hidden from sociological researchers until after the civil rights movement in the U.S. As a result, one of the key goals of The Oxford Handbook of W. E. B. Du Bois is to reclaim Du Bois from those efforts to marginalize his thought. The chapters of this volume explore, in a comprehensive manner, all aspects of Du Boisian sociology. It is organized into ten thematic sections: Social Theory, Change and Agency; Sociology; Social Science, Humanities, Public Intellectual; Women and Gender Studies; Methodologies and Archival Resources; Black Interiority and Whiteness; Color Line, Empire, Marxism, and War; Talented Tenth, and Black Colleges and Universities; Black Community, Religion, Crime and Wealth; Internationalism, Pan-Africanism, and Anti-Colonialism.

This substantial volume of thirty-three original chapters covers the full range of issues in religious diversity. An indispensable guide for scholars and students, its essays make novel contributions and are crafted by recognized experts who represent a wide variety of religious and philosophical perspectives and backgrounds.

Although international development discourse considers the state as a crucial development actor, there remains a significant discrepancy between the official norms of the state and public services and the actual practices of political elites and civil servants. This text interrogates the variety of ways in which state policies and legal norms have been translated into the set of practical norms which make up real governance in sub-Saharan Africa. It argues that the concept of practical norms is an appropriate tool for an ethnographic investigation of public bureaucracies, interactions between civil servants and users, and the daily functioning of the state in Africa. It demonstrates that practical norms are usually different from official norms, complementing, bypassing and even contradicting them. In addition, it explores the positive and negative effects of different aspects of this ‘real governance’. This text will be of key interest to academics, students and researchers in the fields of development, political science, anthropology and development studies, African studies, international comparative studies, implementation studies, and public policy.

For a long time, economic research on Africa was not seen as a profitable venture intellectually or professionally-few researchers in top-ranked institutions around the world chose to become experts in the field. This was understandable: the reputation of Africa-centered economic research was not enhanced by the well-known limitations of economic data across the continent. Moreover, development economics itself was not always fashionable, and the broader discipline of economics has had its ups and downs, and has been undergoing a major identity crisis because it failed to predict the Great Recession. Times have changed: many leading researchers-including a few Nobel laureates-have taken the subject of Africa and economics seriously enough to devote their expertise and creativity to it. They have been amply rewarded: the richness, complexities, and subtleties of African societies, civilizations, rationalities, and ways of living, have helped renew the humanities and the social sciences-and economics in particular-to the point that the continent has become the next major intellectual frontier to researchers from around the world. In collecting some of the most authoritative statements about the science of economics and its concepts in the African context, this lhandbook (the first of two volumes) opens up the diverse acuity of commentary on exciting topics, and in the process challenges and stimulates the quest for knowledge. Wide-ranging in its scope, themes, language, and approaches, this volume explores, examines, and assesses economic thinking on Africa, and Africa's contribution to the discipline. The editors bring a set of powerful resources to this endeavor, most notably a team of internationally-renowned economists whose diverse viewpoints are complemented by the perspectives of philosophers, political scientists, and anthropologists.