This exciting collection of work from leading feminist scholars including Elspeth Probyn, Penelope Deutscher and Chantal Nadeau engages with and extends the growing feminist literature on lived and imagined embodiment and argues for consideration of the skin as a site where bodies take form - already written upon but open to endless re-inscription. Individual chapters consider such issues as the significance of piercing, tattooing and tanning, the assault of self harm upon the skin, the relation between body painting and the land among the indigenous people of Australia and the cultural economy of fur in Canada. Pierced, mutilated and marked, mortified and glorified, scarred by disease and stretched and enveloping the skin of another in pregnancy, skin is seen here as both a boundary and a point of connection - the place where one touches and is touched by others; both the most private of experiences and the most public marker of a raced, sexed and national history.

This exciting collection of work from leading feminist scholars including Elspeth Probyn, Penelope Deutscher and Chantal Nadeau engages with and extends the growing feminist literature on lived and imagined embodiment and argues for consideration of the skin as a site where bodies take form - already written upon but open to endless re-inscription. Individual chapters consider such issues as the significance of piercing, tattooing and tanning, the assault of self harm upon the skin, the relation between body painting and the land among the indigenous people of Australia and the cultural economy of fur in Canada. Pierced, mutilated and marked, mortified and glorified, scarred by disease and stretched and enveloping the skin of another in pregnancy, skin is seen here as both a boundary and a point of connection - the place where one touches and is touched by others; both the most private of experiences and the most public marker of a raced, sexed and national history.

Thinking Through brings together new and recent writing by Himani Bannerji. Through anti-racist, Marxist feminism, Bannerji questions the notion of distinct/separate oppressions which understands gender, race and class as separate issues. Incisive and important, Thinking Through offers a new strategy to theorizing gender, race, class and socialist revolution.

Bovine tuberculosis is seriously damaging the UK dairy and beef industry. Many farmers believe culling badgers must be part of the solution, but in 2013 a record 300,000 people signed a Downing Street petition asking the government to stop planned culls of badgers in Somerset and Gloucestershire, fuelling media controversy and signalling the beginning of a social conflict that was acted out in studios, streets, fields and village halls across England. The four-year trial culls, which began that year, aimed to establish that culling was a viable way of tackling the disease, but the widely divergent experiences and values of policy-makers, farming, conservation and animal welfare supporters means that decades of science on the disease in badgers and the effects of culling has not helped resolve the dispute. Reporting on original, UK research council-funded social science, this book takes on the challenge of understanding the contrasting views involved. Listening carefully to what the different protagonists have to say, the book unpicks the way science is interpreted to sustain differing conclusions, and considers how social science thinking could contribute. The book develops a critical perspective on the increasingly important literature influenced by new materialism, the social science response to the Science Wars, and explores the extent to which a social movement around opposition to the culls is emerging. In approachable prose, this access-all-areas account describes the struggle to develop understanding through the messy process of research and the difficulties of scientific analysis and philosophical thought. As such, it provides a valuable resource for both research practitioners and teachers within the social sciences, as well as an accessible way for biological scientists, conservationists and farmers to reflect on the issues around the management of disease in livestock and wildlife.

This book provides a richly rewarding vision of the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of somaesthetics. Composed of fourteen wide-ranging but finely integrated essays by Richard Shusterman, the originator of the field, Thinking through the Body explains the philosophical foundations of somaesthetics and applies its insights to central issues in ethics, education, cultural politics, consciousness studies, sexuality and the arts. Integrating Western philosophy, cognitive science and somatic methodologies with classical Asian theories of body, mind and action, these essays probe the nature of somatic existence and the role of body consciousness in knowledge, memory and behavior. Deploying somaesthetic perspectives to analyze key aesthetic concepts (such as style and the sublime), he offers detailed studies of embodiment in drama, dance, architecture and photography. The volume also includes somaesthetic exercises for the classroom and explores the ars erotica as an art of living.

What is the archaeology of the body and how can it change the way we experience the past? This book, one of the first to appear on the subject, records and evaluates the emergence of this new direction of cross-disciplinary research, and examines the potential of incorporating some of its insights into archaeology. It will be of interest to students, researchers, and teachers in archaeology, as well as in cognate disciplines such as anthropology and history.

Contemporary debates on God's emotionality are divided between two extremes. Impassibilists deny God's emotionality on the basis of God's omniscience, omnipotence and incorporeality. Passibilists seem to break with tradition by affirming divine emotionality, often focusing on the idea that God suffers with us. Contemporary philosophy of emotion reflects this divide. Some philosophers argue that emotions are voluntary and intelligent mental events, making them potentially compatible with omniscience and omnipotence. Others claim that emotions are involuntary and basically physiological, rendering them inconsistent with traditional divine attributes. Thinking Through Feeling: God, Emotion and Passibility creates a three-way conversation between the debate in theology, contemporary philosophy of emotion, and pre-modern (particularly Augustinian and Thomist) conceptions of human affective experience. It also provides an exploration of the intelligence and value of the emotions of compassion, anger and jealousy.

This groundbreaking piece of work establishes a “position of embodiment” as an ethically salient epistemological and empirical strategy for understanding, representing, and experiencing gendered embodiment and marked flesh. Developing an embodied, feminist critique of the sociology of the body, the author integrates this position with some of the most recent developments in qualitative methodologies and creative research practices in order to engage with, and represent, women’s experiences of body-marking. As such, the specific body practices which are addressed, “body modification” and “self-injury,” are refigured in the context of a feminist, embodied position. This position of embodiment not only establishes a holistic, non-dualistic orientation from which to experience and explore gendered embodiment and body-marking practices, but in doing so, also highlights the limitations of normative dualistic, disembodied theories and methods which objectify and distance the very experiences they purport to explain. Overall, this exploration is a provoking, moving and often uncomfortable journey into the imperatives of gendered embodiment, abject corporeality, blood and pain, and the practices which mark the body and evoke and transform the gendered, embodied self. This is a courageous, beautifully written, evocative, and thought provoking book that takes the reader on an intimate journey into the misunderstood world of body marking practices. As part of the journey, Inckle provides a range of insights into the fluid, ambiguous, and complex forms of embodiment experienced by women over time. The reflexive stance she adopts throughout enables the reader to chart her emerging awareness of methodological dilemmas and the inherent tensions she experiences in trying to resolve them in relation to feminist ethical positions. As part of this process, she challenges the norms of knowledge production and dissolves the disciplinary boundaries that frame much of the current debate on embodiment and body marking practices. Inckle 's findings offer a powerful critique of dominant research perspectives that focus on the body and she makes a strong case for the development of a feminist-embodied-sociology in the future. As such, this book will be of immense interest to sociologists and psychologists with an interest in the body and the dynamics of embodiment as well as to scholars seeking to develop their understanding of key methodological issues. Professor Andrew C. Sparkes PhD Exeter University This book is based on one of the best methodological approaches I have come across. Supported by materials from a wide variety of disciplines, it is reflexively argued, and Dr Inckle charts new grounds in her trajectory from feminist methodologies to creative sociology, searching for new ways of producing knowledge and radically broadening the sociological research agenda to include ‘stories that come out of the body’. I particularly like the way Dr Inckle develops feminist research methodologies, critiquing participatory approaches as often difficult to implement, and the fearless, yet highly problematic, positioning of the ‘researching I’ at the centre of the research process. Dr Ronit Lentin, Department of Sociology Trinity College Dublin

Thinking through Poetry: Field Reports on Romantic Lyric pursues two goals. The title signals the contribution to debates about reading. Do we think 'through' - 'by means of', 'with'- poems, sympathetically elaborating their surfaces? Is this compatible with a second meaning: 'thinking through' poems to their end-solving a problem, getting to its root, its deep truth? Third, can we square these surface and depth readings with a speculative, philosophical criticism to which the poem carries us, where 'through' denotes a 'going beyond?' All three meanings of 'through' are in play throughout. The subtitle applies 'field' first to Romantic studies since the 1980s, a field that this project reflects upon from beginning to end. Examples are drawn especially from Wordsworth, but also from Coleridge and, in assessing Romanticism's afterlife, from Stevens. 'Field' also characterizes the shift from a unitary to a field-concept of form during that time-span, a shift pursued through prolonged engagement with Spinoza. 'Field' thus underscores the synthesis of form and history, the importance of analytic scale to that synthesis, and the displacement of entity (text) by 'relation' as the object of investigation. While the book historically connects early nineteenth-century intellectual trends to twentieth- and twenty-first-century scientific revolutions, its focuses on introducing new models to literary criticism. Unlike accounts of the influence of science on literature, or various 'literature + X' approaches (literature and ecology, literature and cognitive science), it constructs its object of inquiry in a way cognate with work in non-humanities disciplines, thus highlighting a certain unity to human knowledge. The claim is that specialists in literature should think the way distinguished scientists think, and vice versa.

Learning how to think through fashion is both exciting and challenging, being dependent on one s ability to critically engage with an array of theories and concepts. This is the first book designed to accompany readers through the process of thinking through fashion. It aims to help them grasp both the relevance of social and cultural theory to fashion, dress, and material culture and, conversely, the relevance of those fields to social and cultural theory. It does so by offering a guide through the work of selected major thinkers, introducing their concepts and ideas. Each chapter is written by an expert contributor and is devoted to a key thinker, capturing the significance of their thought to the understanding of the field of fashion, while also assessing the importance of this field for a critical engagement with these thinkers ideas. This is a guide and reference for students and scholars in the fields of fashion, dress and material culture, the creative industries, sociology, cultural history, design and cultural studies."