Social Sciences: The Big Issues - Softcover

Social Sciences: The Big Issues second edition offers an introduction to the big debates within the social sciences and to what the social sciences can provide as a means of explaining the changing world. The social sciences focus upon people as individuals and as members of wider communities and networks, and look at all aspects of human relationships from the personal and intimate to the public and political. The book covers contemporary concerns with identities, citizenship, migration, diversity, new technologies, and the changing and often uncertain impact of globalization. The second edition has been extensively updated with new illustrations and examples, and additional discussion of the responses of the social sciences to the mobilities of contemporary life, such as migration, living in multiethnic and often rapidly changing communities, new forms of citizenship, the impact of the material world, the perception that we live in a more insecure and dangerous world and the role of the media in presenting ideas about the changes that might be taking place.

Kath Woodward is Professor of Sociology at the Open University. Recent publications include, Boxing, Masculinity and Identity (2007), Embodied Sporting Practices (2009) and Why Feminism Matters (2009). She chaired the Open University, level 1, Introduction to the Social Sciences and currently chairs This Sporting Planet, a level 1 course on sport and the social sciences. She works on gendered, racialised identities, at CRESC and on Sport Across Diasporas at the BBC World Service for the AHRC Diasporas, Migration, Identities programme.