All museums are sex museums. In "Sex Museums", Jennifer Tyburczy takes a hard look at the formation of Western sexuality – particularly how categories of sexual normalcy and perversity are formed – and asks what role museums have played in using disp...

It has been close to six decades since Watson and Crick discovered the structure of DNA and more than ten years since the human genome was decoded. Today, through the collection and analysis of a small blood sample, every baby born in the United Stat...

In "Abductive Analysis", Iddo Tavory and Stefan Timmermans provide a new navigational map for theorizing qualitative research. They outline a way to think about observations, methods, and theories that nurtures theory formation without locking it int...

In recent years, social scientists have engaged in a deep debate over the methods appropriate to their research. Their long reliance on passive observational collection of information has been challenged by proponents of experimental methods designed...

European and American scholars from the eighteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries thought that all societies passed through the same developmental stages, from primitive to advanced. Implicit in this developmental paradigm – one that has affecte...

The election of America's first black president has led many to believe that race is no longer a real obstacle to success and that remaining racial inequality stems largely from the failure of minority groups to take personal responsibility for seeki...

"Beauty and the Beast" begins with the question: Is beauty destined to end in tragedy? Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Colombia, Michael Taussig scrutinizes the anxious, audacious, and sometimes destructive attempts people make to transform their b...

In this book leading experts in the field of addictions report on key aspects of addictive disorders. They focus particularly on relapse, the long-term course of addiction to drugs or alcohol, and interventions to prevent relapse and promote recovery...

In the late 1990s "Angels in America", Tony Kushner's epic play about homosexuality and AIDS in the Reagan era, toured the country, inspiring protests in a handful of cities while others received it warmly. Why do people fight over some works of art...

Gabriel Tarde ranks as one of the most outstanding sociologists of nineteenth-century France, though not as well known by English readers as his peers Comte and Durkheim. This book makes available Tarde's most important work and demonstrates his cont...