Beauty embodiment and representations of beauty are crafted by legitimised hierarchies of power in popular culture, including across fashion, sports, media and social media outlets, and the arts. Informed and guided by an intersectional lens with a focus on underrepresented communities, this volume of Advances in Gender Research foregrounds gender and sexuality to engage with beauty as a site of knowledge creation.

Interrogating its very definition, chapters take a revolutionary, intersectional approach to explore beauty as an avenue to create alternative knowledge as well as a conduit to engage in critical conversations on race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, illness, and fitness. Emphasizing that beauty definitions and standards in any given society closely reflect the distribution of power within it, contributors think critically about the role of institutions such as the hair industry, workplaces, the visual arts, and classical dance in how beauty is socially construed and conceptualized.

Grounded in a more open-ended conception that goes beyond aesthetics, Embodiment and Representations of Beauty celebrates beauty's capacity as a source of liberation, agency, social justice, decolonization, and survival for marginalized communities, as well as an emancipatory path to feminist liberation.

We find ourselves in a period of human history in which five generations coexist simultaneously. Not surprisingly, the success of any enterprise in any area of society is determined by the ability of individuals from different generations to collaborate productively. At the same time, intergenerational disharmony poses a range of risks including social conflict, educational imbalance, political discord, family fragmentation, religious decline and corporate inefficiency. While the composition of multiple generations within a team is a distinct asset, its potential is diminished by the absence of harmony between members of different generations.

In Intergenerational Harmony: Unleashing the Strategic Power of Generational Synergy, author Arpan S. Yagnik delves into the concept of multigenerational coexistence, highlighting its impact on various sectors where multiple generations are navigating an evolving landscape. Across work, education, religion, government and family, the harmony between generations becomes a pivotal factor for long-term success. Addressing concerns such as resource and talent loss, Yagnik presents the concept of Intergenerational Harmony (IH), wherein generational stakeholders collaborate synergistically to harness their collective strengths. This practical guide offers insightful instances and examples of IH implementation, emphasizing empathy, respect, trust and honesty as its core values. By fostering IH, institutions can thrive in this era of multigenerational coexistence, countering challenges and paving the way for a harmonious future.

Looking beyond generational labels and stereotypes to envision a harmonious, empathetic society, Yagnik pivots how we think about age and intergenerational relationships in every area and at every stage of our lives.

In this updated version of a contemporary classic of discourse research, Reiner Keller develops the theoretical and methodological foundations of the Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse (SKAD). Translated from the original German into English for the first time, this book brings together two previously unconnected domains of knowledge analysis in social science: the rich traditions of sociology of knowledge and symbolic interactionism on one hand and the works of discourse studies, especially in relation to Michel Foucault, on the other. It presents a critical discussion of key developments in sociology of knowledge, symbolic interactionist, and related interpretive approaches, explains the communicational turn of recent work in the field, and examines how traditions within sociology of knowledge shifted focus or converged over time. Following this, the book discusses the development of discourse theory and discourse analysis since the 1960s, including critical discourse analysis, hegemony analysis, or cultural studies approaches. Embarking from a profound reconstruction of Michel Foucault's work, the book then sets its own distinctive course by integrating major elements of Foucault's perspective with the sociology of knowledge. Along this path, Reiner Keller establishes the heuristics and methodology for a sociology of knowledge approach to discourse, providing a comprehensive research programme for the study of social relations of knowledge and politics of knowledge. Since its first publication in 2005, SKAD has informed a multitude of studies worldwide and across several academic disciplines. Today it can be considered as one of the major perspectives in discourse research in social science and beyond.

The ebook edition of this title is Open Access and freely available to read online.

Though organizational scholarship traces its intellectual lineage from a diversity of sources, there is little doubt that in recent years a key divide has emerged amongst organization scholars and sociologists. For many, if not most, it has become unclear what role sociology is supposed to play in organization studies. Against this backdrop, the editors of Sociological Thinking in Contemporary Organizational Scholarship ask: what is "organizational sociology" today?

This pathbreaking volume explores the new boundaries of organizational sociology to identify, discuss and challenge sociology's genuine contribution to organization studies. Mapping a community of scholars that transcends disciplinary limitations, chapters follow one simple epistemic logic: society happens in, between, across and around organizations.

Breathing fresh life into a once lively dialogue on the social nature, characteristics and consequences of the field, this is a valuable resource for navigating of the varied sociological scholarship we witness amongst today's organization scholars.

In this groundbreaking expose, essential for understanding the rising authoritarian mindset, award-winning civil rights lawyer Alec Karakatsanis introduces the concept of "Copaganda." He defines Copaganda as a special kind of propaganda employed by police, prosecutors, and news media that stokes fear of police-recorded crime and distorts society's responses to it. Every day, mass media manipulates our perception of what keeps us safe and contributes to a culture fearful of poor people, strangers, immigrants, unhoused people, and people of color. The result is more and more authoritarian state repression, more inequality, and huge profits for the massive public and private punishment bureaucracy.

For readers of Naomi Klein and Noam Chomsky, Copaganda documents how modern news coverage fuels insecurity against these groups and shifts our focus away from the policies that would help us improve people's lives-things like affordable housing, adequate healthcare, early childhood education, and climate-friendly city planning.

These false narratives in turn fuel surveillance, punishment, inequality, injustice, and mass incarceration. Copaganda is often hidden in plain sight, such as:

• When your local TV station obsessively focuses on shoplifting by poor people while ignoring crimes of wage theft, tax evasion, and environmental pollution
• When you hear on your daily podcast that there is a "shortage" of prison guards rather than too many people in prison
• When your newspaper quotes an "expert" saying that more money for police and prisons is the answer to violence despite scientific evidence to the contrary

Recognized by Teen Vogue as "one of the most prominent voices" on the criminal legal system, Karakatsanis brings his sharp legal expertise, trenchant political analysis, and humorous storytelling to drastically alter the way we consume information, while offering a hopeful path forward. One towards a healed humanity-and media system-with a vested interest in public safety and equality.

Making human rights a reality requires that various types of domestic actors take measures, which is often demanding, all the more so in federal systems. This open access book, Engaging with Human Rights: How Subnational Actors use Human Rights Treaties in Policy Processes, shows that an important part is played at the subnational level, with repeated back-and-forth between and within levels of governance rather than a 'top-down' trajectory. The dynamics of implementation at national and sub-national level is an emerging area of study. This book explores how actors use human rights treaties in the policy process, sometimes leading to an engagement that increases human rights implementation, and at other times not. Treaties provide both opportunities and constraints.

Switzerland, as a highly decentralized federal state, offers a perfect setting to study the processes at work. Using legal, political, and sociological analyses, the authors draw on over 65 semi-structured interviews and focusses on two topical case studies: violence against women, including domestic violence, and the rights of persons with disabilities. This book provides a blueprint for other researchers and practitioners who wish to study the concrete implementation and impacts of human rights obligations.

This book is the first monograph to critically evaluate the work of the literary scholar Rene Girard from the perspectives of Law and Literature and Law and Film Studies, two of the most multidisciplinary branches of critical legal theory. The central thesis is that Girard's theory of the scapegoat mechanism provides a wholly new and original means of re-conceptualizing the nature of judicial modernity, which is the belief that modern Law constitutes an internally coherent and exclusively secular form of rationality.

The book argues that it is the archaic scapegoat mechanism - the reconciliation of the community through the direction of unified violence against a single victim - that actually works best in explaining all of the outstanding issues of Law and Literature in both of its sub-forms: law-as-literature (the analysis of legal language and practice exemplified by literacy texts) and law-in-literature (the exploration of issues in legaltheory through the fictitious form of the novel).

The book will provide readers with: (i) a useful introduction to the most important elements of the work of Rene Girard; (ii) a greater awareness of the 'hidden' nature of legal culture and reasoning within a post-secular age; and (iii) a new understanding of the 'subversive' (or 'enlightening') nature of some of the most iconic works on Law in both Literature and Cinema, media which by their nature allow for the expression of truths repressed by formal legal discourse.

The aesthetics of law deals with the relationship between law and beauty by searching for aesthetic values in the law itself (an internal perspective), by finding material related to law in art and culture (an external perspective), and, lastly, by demonstrating the impact of legal norms on what can be broadly understood as beauty (law as a tool of aestheticization). Regarding all these phenomena, the aesthetics of law ultimately allows us to see the law more clearly and more profoundly. What is more, the law does not function, nor has it ever functioned, separately from its means of expression, which are incontrovertibly subject to aesthetic interpretation.

If we think about law in this way, perceiving not only the message, but also the manner in which it is conveyed, the whole set of means and tools used, the perfection and beauty of the form, then we will see art in it. After all, the widely known and still applicable ancient maxim ius est ars boni et aequi equates law and art. This alone should be an argument for aesthetic reflection on the law, a field of endeavour that should never have been abandoned.

The book's twenty-three chapters, written by scholars from various countries and three continents, are thematically diverse. In them we present the manifestations of the aesthetics of law from an external perspective. If we accept a definition of the concept of law that is as broad as possible, not only as a synonym of a certain formalized normative system, but also including the process of its creation (legislation), its application and interpretation (jurisprudence), and even teaching on and research into it (doctrine), we can identify a wealth of aesthetic references in the law.

A broadly understood aesthetics of law, approached solely from an external perspective, covers such disciplines as law and literature, the aesthetics of legal rhetoric, the trial as performance, the aesthetics ofcourthouse architecture, law in the fine arts, law in film, law and music, pictorial law, symbols of the law and legal symbols, symbols of the state and power, legal archaeology etc. The field of research is, therefore, wide. In addition to topics traditionally and obviously associated with the aesthetics of law, such as law and literature, law in the fine arts, and court rhetoric, there are chapters on e.g. legal ethics and trademarks. All authors share the belief that beauty in law is important, even when it is hidden in a caricature. Further, they argue for restoring the aesthetics of law to its proper place in philosophical and legal discourse, as doing so would yield a host of benefits for the addressees of law.