A room in a pub. Some musicians facing each other. They play well-known traditional Irish tunes on flutes, tin whistles, and fiddles. Every musician plays the melodic line adding her own variations and grace notes. Some musicians are just listening; others are cracking jokes.

In this Very Short Introduction, Barry Stephenson approaches ritual from theoretical and historical perspectives, detailing the efforts to understand the nature and function of ritual, and developing a narrative of ritual's place in social and cultural life.

Published ten years after the first edition, this new handbook offers topical, and comprehensive information on the welfare systems of all twenty-eight EU member states and their recent reforms, giving the reader an invaluable introduction and basis for comparative welfare research.

This Handbook gives a comprehensive overview of the theory and practice of grounded theory, taking into account the many attempts to revise and refine Glaser and Strauss' original formulation.

Sexual/Liberation addresses the past and future of Irish LGBT politics in the wake of marriage equality and analyses the depiction of gay men (such as Leo Varadkar) in contemporary Irish media and culture.

The dark heart of race science... and why it's nonsense.

In a groundbreaking debut, farmer and social scientist Chris Smaje argues that organising society around small-scale farming offers the soundest, sanest and most reasonable response to climate change and other crises of civilisation-and will yield humanity's best chance at survival.